Episciences.org update
by Thomas Arildsen
I 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, apparently without any luck.
I went and checked the Episciences website yesterday and it actually seems that they are moving forward. They changed the page design completely and there is now a button in the upper right corner to create an account and log in. I took the liberty of doing so to have a look around. I was able to create an account, but is just about it so far. The site still seems quite “beta” – I was not able to save changes to my profile and I cannot yet find anywhere to submit papers. It is nice to see some progress on the platform and I will be keeping an eager eye on it to find out when they will go operational.
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We do move ahead quickly indeed. Two journals are being set up and one is about to have its first issue online (keep an eye on http://jdmdh.episciences.org). We are presenting a paper at http://elpub2014.teithe.gr next week about the most recent aspects of the project (see http://hal.inria.fr/hal-01002815). Do contact us if you want to join the adventure.
Great, that sounds very promising indeed. Does this journal plan to employ open review as well or do you know if any coming epijournals do?
I would certainly like to join such an initiative, but my research is in the signal processing area and there does not seem to be plans for any epijournals relevant to my area (yet?).
Is there a general way to see the journals that are being started? Or does one need a link to the specific page as you have given?
There is still a cultural reluctance from scientists concerning open peer review, which I would personally like to overcome… From a technical point of view, it is just a matter of putting the reviews in a publication repository!
Yes, I suppose it is going to be difficult to change. I do think publishing in general could become more dynamic and allow more insight into the process and work behind the finished publications by introducing such transparency. Note that by open review, I do not automatically mean identified reviewers (signed reviews) – see also https://thomas.arildsen.org/2013/09/02/openness-and-anonymity-in-peer-review/. My guess is that particularly being identified by name scares some researchers from weighing in, but in a way I find this oddly paradoxical since we already do this as authors (where at lot is at stake too – probably more) so why not stand up for our opinions as reviewers too?
From a technical point of view, I find it a more elegant solution to integrate reviews with the platform presenting the paper itself. Simply posting reviews as independent publications in a repository makes them less easy to discover and connect to the original work.
[…] I have been following the Episciences project as you may have noticed in my previous post. It seems there has been some more progress recently: I have just noticed that another […]