Scientific journals as an overlay
by Thomas Arildsen
There is an update on this post in Episciences.org update…
In many of my posts since I started this blog, I have been writing about open peer review. Another topic related to open science that interests me is open access (to scientific papers). Part of open access in practice is about authors posting their papers, perhaps submitted to traditional journals, to preprint servers such as arXiv. This is used a lot, particularly in physics and mathematics.
An idea that builds on top of this is to build journals on top of such preprint servers. I think I first came across this idea when I read about the Episciences project on Timothy Gowers’ blog. Their idea is to base journals (so-called epijournals) on papers submitted to preprint servers such as arXiv. Authors then submit their papers by notifying the epijournal about its location on the preprint server and requests a review of it. Upon successful completion of the review, the paper is included by listing in the journal (but located on the preprint server). This way the journal offers a sort of “stamp of approval” layer on top of the preprint servers.
I have been keeping an eye on the Episciences project and its associated project Episciences-Math, hoping that they would launch soon, but so far nothing is happening. I had not thought about it for a while when I recently discovered the initiative The Open Journal. They seem to describe the same idea as the Episciences project, just with different people behind it. The people behind The Open Journal have some prototype code for the platform but unfortunately seem to have difficulties finding the time to finish the project.
Maybe it could help realise these two projects if they joined forces? I am going to try to find out if they are even aware of each other…
By the way, both of the above projects want to focus on traditional closed review where I think it would be a great opportunity to incorporate open review. That could perhaps be combined with the overlay journal idea through the Selected Papers Network that I also mentioned previously. This project tries to gather comments and reviews from social media on papers in the arXiv. So far they support Google+.
Thanks for taking the time to get these groups to communicate. It seems bizarre to me that everyone is talking about overlay journals, and they seem obviously good, but they haven’t really worked yet. Another example of a hard collective action problem, or are we just too impatient?
I think the problem may lie in the (lack of) time invested in such projects. In the traditional publishing industry there is money to pay for editorial and publishing staff (just look at how much money Elsevier make) so they can afford to set up journals and hire people to see the project through.
Alternative journals such as the ones mentioned above do not fit into the money making models of the traditional publishers and so, they are typically started by people who are busy with their (primary) research careers (that put food on their tables) and can probably find it difficult to devote the necessary time (and money) to take it all the way.
Very good post, I have the same opinions and reactions as the ones described here. I bet that’s true for many other researchers.
There is something which looks like it’s neglected though. There are several technical proposals, but in fact the problem seems to be psychological. One has to find ways to motivate people not only to submit articles, but also to review them. Solutions which respond to that exist, but not for mathematics, for example. One such a solution is PeerJ. I insist on this example because it has all we need (for example open, perpetual, technical peer review) and moreover it works well. I support green OA, and PeerJ has a slight shade of gold, but after some thinking I arrived to the conclusion that their pricing policy is the main reason which makes their system to work well. You pay from $99 for one article per year, to $299 for unlimited number of articles and time. But you need to have a reviewing activity in order to keep these publishing plans privileges: one has to submit a review at least once per year (a review can even be a comment to an article). That’s a very clever mechanism which takes into account the human nature, it’s called hyperbolic discounting.
Very good point. To make these emerging “open” publishing platforms work, we need to find the right incentive structures to get reviewers to contribute. I have also commented a bit on it here: http://wp.me/p3Mxbj-4e.
I was aware of PeerJ, but I have not mentioned it a lot because it does not address my research area (electronic engineering – signal processing). I think they are a great example, though, and seem quite successful. I was actually not aware of the mechanism you mention of having to review to keep your publishing “right”.
Another aspect that I think might work is a “reputation economy” which seems to work very well for Q&A on for example the Stackexchange network. This belongs to what I consider gamification, but more about this later. Actually, I recently found that you have written a series of blog posts on this and I am planning a post on that.
Thank you! Yes, the last post about the Game of Research and Review is this one. Now, I just discovered Ingress and I wonder if it can be used for the Game đŸ™‚
[…] mentioned the Episciences project the other day in Scientific journals as an overlay. In the meantime I have tried to contact the people behind this project and The Open Journal, […]