One major point that scientists need to communicate more effectively is that we can never anticipate what the future benefits of knowledge will be. It therefore benefits us to learn as much as we can about as many things as we can.
So critical, applies to all disciplines, and also must be factored in to how we think about value, i.e. we need to think beyond the immediate as expressed by views/downloads.
We must vacate the here and now for a then and there,” that the way forward involves the “need to engage in a collective temporal distortion,” and that “We need to step out of the rigid conceptualization that is a straight present.”14 In this context, the challenges of the present offer an opportunity to step back from the pragmatism and satisficing that are the hallmarks of liberal movements in the ’90s and ’00s and return to much deeper sets of more radical ideas about striving for a more queer and liberated future.
This argument is very much in line with Jeff Pooley's wonderful piece about the power of utopian thinking: https://jeffpooley.com/pubs/pooley-before-progress-utopian-scholarly-publishing-2024.pdf
On the one hand, journals need to provide value to their customers—authors (through APCs—article processing charges), or readers (through library subscriptions)
I don't understand how APCs provide value to authors, and library subscriptions are a means to access the content, they aren't a source of value. Also, this formulation excludes Diamond OA publishing.
These examples could help shift the focus from rankings to a broader view of universities’ roles, including teaching, societal impact, and open science.
This would be so beneficially, globally.
Ludo’s vision was to turn preprint peer review into truly meaningful bidirectional conversations and move away from it being simply a bureaucratic exercise.
This would be wonderful!
multiple publishers
The infrastructure is shared across more than just publishers-there are also identifier/metadata registration agencies (Crossref, DataCite), preservation repositories, data repositories, institutional repositories, libraries with various discovery mechanisms.
We have found that these public preprint reviews and assessments are far more effective than binary accept or reject decisions ever could be at conveying the thinking of our reviewers and editors, and capturing the nuanced, multidimensional, and often ambiguous nature of peer review. eLife will now let them stand on their own by publishing every paper we review, along with our reviews and an assessment as a Reviewed Preprint, a new type of research output we hope will become the norm across science.
It would be interesting to know more this, particularly what is meant by "effective" and how this improvement was assessed.
The choice of business model and the level of involvement of academic publishers will affect the simplicity of workflows to track the status of a preprint throughout and after publication (Table 2, p.36
Again, no awareness of the role for library publishers.
Finally, we note the importance of distinguishing preprints from preprint servers.
Exploring what is lost and gained for a given community of thought/practice by using a general vs. discipline specific service is important. I would guess that the ability to encourage useful commenting/vetting is far greater with a discipline specific preprint server that's known as the place to find the latest thinking, than it would be with a general purpose location or an IR.
Clearly, the choice between a researcher- or publisher-centric approach will affect funding, too: in the former case, grants or pooled funds would likely form the bulk of funding for preprint servers, while in the latter these could be supported by publishers, provided they perceive
Interesting that institutionally supported preprint servers (e.g. via library publishers) are not mentioned here.
For Preprint Platforms
Does this refer to the preprint community managers or the preprint platform providers or both?
Assign a Spotter on the Host side. This is the human responsible for paying attention to the distributed folks and looking for visual cues they are ready to speak.
What a great idea!
Given this emphasis, it is not worth the effort for libraries to spend money or staff time to meticulously eliminate bot activity through their own local system.
Unless the metrics that we need to derive can only be done through our own log data. We have found this to be the case for eScholarship.
Repositories and linked data platforms have the potential to be our most potent leveler of access and privilege, if we choose to embrace our responsibility and respond with intention.
Why these specifically and not others?
How do the roles and services of consortia need to change to support changes in libraries and schol-arly communications?
What an interesting and important question!
ome specific research questions to address on the topic of infrastructure include
This is a great list. I have a few more questions to add:
Which problems or gaps are not addressed (or effectively addressed) by current infrastructure efforts?
Is there substantial, unproductive, overlap across our various infrastructures and related efforts?
How much of the infrastructure development agenda is shaped by the vision of funders? Is this a problem?
While the enthusiasm for retaining, preserving, and hosting content is to be commended, the relative value of institutional repositories versus domain repositories or even “preprint” servers is still to be determined.41 Standards for IRs are still emerging and may not be easy to implement for all institutions. Even larger-scale efforts and domain-specific repositories that may appear to be “success stories” struggle mightily to attract users and sustainable funding sources.42
Very important point. The value of IRs is not at all understood.
A randomly-selected node col-lates all the submitted transaction records and applies the COUNTER rules
So COUNTER compliance is pushed up the chain, and is no longer the responsibility or burden of the entity where the use occurs. This would require some institutions to revisit their privacy polices, as for some of us, those policies forbid passing along PII, including IP addresses.
One response has been to suggest “submission charges” in order that successful publications do not subsidise unsuccessful ones, a proposal which would further disadvantage early-career colleagues and those from less wealthy countries.
Just as APCs can be and are waived, so can submission charges.
n OA, there is no constraint on publication, which takes the form of a stream, where each platform maximises its revenue by maximising the number of papers it publishes.
Constraints do exist, particularly in editorial and production capacity, which are very real limits on any journal's ability to function, whether online or not.
There is likely to be a demand management process for APC funding, with a consequent tendency toward the reinforcement of “normal” science.
Research agendas are already distorted by the intrusion of corporate funding and "private-public partnerships." Again, these are all deep problems in the academy that need to be surfaced and thought through.
We are moving from a system of global open access to publish to one of global open access to read, without paying attention to the new forms of exclusion that will entail for the production of knowledge.
I agree that there is risk here, but feel we need to dive into those areas to understand how to mitigate them.
The wider public is not, in fact, a major consumer of OA research, George Monbiot notwithstanding. OA may have benefits from the point of view of the consumption of knowledge, but it is less clear that it has equivalent benefits from the perspective of the production of knowledge and, more importantly, the ecology of that production (which includes publishers aligned with academic interests and our learned societies and associations).
It is far too soon in the transition to OA (which I believe is inevitable even if the business models are as yet unknown), to know what the many benefits will be. And, we in North America and Europe need to think more expansively and listen to researchers in other parts of the world (see, for instance, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/10/25/ask-the-community-and-chefs-how-can-we-achieve-equitable-participation-in-open-research-part-2/).
The incantation that the “public” should have access to what they fund through their taxes is a little hollow in the context that none of the private beneficiaries of publicly funded research are required to repay any of the investment from which that benefit derives (in contrast to the student beneficiaries of higher education in England who are now required to pay full fees).
I don't think it rings hollow at all. It surfaces another major problem that needs to be addressed (one felt keenly in the U.S.), which is that many corporations receive enormous benefits from the government and pay little in the way of taxes.
However, its dominant logic is that of commercialisation.
I disagree. The motivation is a public good one; the ability for that public good to be leveraged and/or distorted by market forces is something else.
FOAA asks for publishers to provide information about (1) indirect costs (a. journal support and submission system; b. Platform development and maintenance c. general management costs; d. profit); (2)direct costs(a. editorial assistance; b. copy-editing c. promotion d. indexing and archiving (DOI, CLOCKSS etc)); and (3) profit
This is really important.
we strongly recommend that any new infrastructure be public and open infrastructure,
Yes, new infrastructure must be open and optimally community controlled.
Provide incentives for editors to ‘flip’ existing subscription journals to Open Access
Yes, this is an excellent strategy.
he Funders will ensure jointly the establishment of robust criteria and requirements for the services that compliant high-quality Open Access journals and Open Access platforms must provide;
It worries me that it is funders, not researchers who are determining what constitutes high quality journals.
oice of CC-BY is the right on
I'm not convinced that CC-BY is the best license and would like to see more background on how the Plan S folks arrived at that decision.
The Funders will ensure jointly the establishment of robust criteria and requirements for the services that compliant high quality Open Access journals and Open Access platforms must provide;
Shouldn't researchers be prominently involved in determining what constitutes a high quality journal?
They may be paid fair value for the services they are providing, but no science should be locked behind paywalls
Determining "fair value" is exactly one of the sticking points right now. Who determines that? How can we push publishers to be truly transparent about their costs and profits?
Breaking down an APC and how it relates to submission numbers and acceptance rates suggests another way to cover publication costs: a submission fee of $350 and a publication fee of $850 would generate the same revenue as the current APCs at these journals. (This approach has been suggested before, see here, here, and here.)
This is very compelling.
APCs have the unfortunate feature that the authors pay for the assessment of all the other submissions that ended up being rejected.
Yes, this is unfair, especially since the rejection of a manuscript is still giving valuable feedback (sometimes quite a lot) to the author.
On the journal side, those with APCs above the cap must either accept more (i.e., lower quality) articles or cut expenses by doing less review and editing.
How about by cutting profits?
libraries would still buy subscriptions to allow scientists to catch up with the most recent developments, and the broader public would have access to all research without a paywall (but with a slight delay).
Libraries can't afford to keep paying these subscriptions.
As written, Plan S could create a “pay-to-play” system, where only the best-funded researchers and institutions will be able to publish in the mandated journals, thus creating automatic inequality in publishing opportunities based on one’s geographic location and the size of one’s research budget.
I think this is a real and valid concern.
it creates a baseline equality of opportunity for researchers: if they have performed sufficiently good research, they will have the possibility to disseminate it in venues with high esteem and high visibility within the community of researchers.
This is an orthogonal issue. OA has nothing to do with quality; it's about changing where the charges are collected in the scholarly communication ecosystem.
While the TA model creates some inequality of access for readers (the so-called ‘paywall’)
This grossly underestimates the negative impact on access.
Option A (self-archiving their published research)
Option A, self-archiving--doesn't change the journal production process.
The only true cost (and service) provided by peer-reviewed research journal publishers is the management and umpiring of peer review, and this costs an order of magnitude less than the publishers extortionate fees and profits today.
Other services are provided (copy-editing, layout, indexing, etc.) It's important to surface these tasks and related costs because they still need to be attended to, though not necessarily in the same way and at the same fee level.