Academic Publishing is Evolving… 349 Years of Journal Publishing What’s Coming in the Next Ten? Evolution or Revolution? Pete Binfield Co-Founder & Publisher

Academic Publishing is Evolving…

349 Years of Journal PublishingWhat’s Coming in the Next Ten?

Evolution or Revolution?

Pete Binfield Co-Founder & Publisher PeerJ

Wisconsin Maddison

10/30/2014

@ThePeerJwww.PeerJ.com

@[email protected]


“Hail double knob, children of Mars”

This American Life, 9/28/2012

Galileo Kepler

I. Glass


• An enabling technology (the printing press)• A realization that the new technology is not just more efficient,

but is transformative in certain ways• A new conceptual leap (openness benefits all)

Oldenberg


349 years pass by…

http://www.s10forum.com/forum/f125/dragging-pics-284562/#post3879643


slowly

http://www.s10forum.com/forum/f125/dragging-pics-284562/#post3879643


http://home.web.cern.ch/images/2013/12/tim-berners-lee-cern


How Have We Arrived atOpen Access?

• The ‘serials crisis’ • The inability of individuals to access the

literature• The fact that taxpayers paid for it


How Have We Arrived atOpen Access?

• An enabling technology (the internet)• A realization that the new technology is not

just more efficient, but is transformative in certain ways

• A new conceptual leap (openness benefits all)

^ Really


Open Access

• The Bethesda Definition of Open Access (2003)

– Free, immediate access – Deposition in a digital public archive – Unrestricted reuse

Annual Article Output of all OA

Source: “Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure”, Laakso & Björkhttp://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/124 (BMC Medicine, Oct 2012)

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/124

Predicted ‘Disruption Timeframe’ of OA vs Subscription model

Source: “The Inevitability of Open Access”, David Lewishttp://crl.acrl.org/content/73/5/493.full.pdf+html (College and Research Libraries, Sep 2012

http://crl.acrl.org/content/73/5/493.full.pdf+html


What is the Future?


Evolution?Or Revolution?


2004

2012


The deconstructing author:

• Drafts paper and shares with colleagues• Cleans up the paper / improves the language• Solicits critical feedback (pre- & post- publication)• ‘Publishes’ the article• Benefits from aggregation and discovery via Google• Can show impact & reach via various article level

metrics• Obtains credit for being a ‘good citizen’














Also: annotatr, Arxiliv, Axios Review, Epistimio, Episciences, F1000 Prime, Haldane’s Sieve, OpenPub, Openreview.net, PaperCritic, PaperRater.org, Peer Evaluation, Peerage of Science, PubPeer, PubUp, Rubriq, Sympoze, SciOR, The Third Reviewer, TiNYARM, Publons, Journal Lab…






PLOS ALMs

Academic Publishing is Evolving…http://www.altmetric.com/details.php?doi=10.7717/peerj.182

Altmetric Donuts

http://www.altmetric.com/details.php?doi=10.7717/peerj.182


PeerJ Article Level Metrics









How’s that working out?


What’s missing?


Brand? Reputation?


Trust? Evaluation?


We Need ‘Trust and Evaluation’

NOT ‘Brand and Reputation’


Attributes

1. Editorial criteria which judges articles only on scientific soundness;

2. A very broad subject scope;3. An open access model employing a payment

model in which each article pays its own costs

Aside…

PLOS ONE’s Big Leap

They separated the ‘decision to publish’from the evaluation of ‘quality’ / ‘impact’


“rejected from at least six journals (including Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Methods, Science) and took a year to publish before going on to be my most cited research paper (150 last time I looked)” – Cameron Neylon

Academic Publishing is Evolving…http://grigoriefflab.janelia.org/rejections


Q2 13

Q4 12

Q2 12

Q4 11

Q2 11

Q4 10

Q2 10

Q4 09

Q2 09

Q4 08

Q2 08

Q4 07

Q2 07

Q4 06

0

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

7000

8000

Year Pubs Notes2007

1,200

2008

2,800 Largest OA journal

2009

4,400 3rd largest journal in world

2010

6,750 Largest journal in world

2011

13,800 ~1.4% of PubMed output in that year

2012

23,500 ~2.4% of PubMed output in that year

2013

~31,000

>3% of the relevant literature?

PLOS ONE Quarterly Output

PLOS ONE


Attributes

1. Editorial criteria which judges articles only on scientific soundness;

2. Sometimes a very broad subject scope;3. An open access model employing a

payment model in which each article pays its own costs;

Journals Which Do Not Select forImpact / Advance etc


PLOS ONE- ~4% of the literature in 2014- And many others… PeerJ, Elementa, Cureus, BMJ Open,

SAGE Open, PeerJ, Springer Plus, Scientific Reports (from Nature), Q Science Connect, Elementa, Optics Express, G3 (from the Genetics Society of America), Biology Open (from the Company of Biologists) , IEEE Access, AIP Advances, The Cogent Series (T&F), The Scientific World Journal, Cureus, F1000 Research, FEBS Open Bio, Science Advances (from AAAS), Royal Society Open Science, unnamed UC Press journal, Science Open. The list goes on…

- BUT also the BMC-Series, the “Frontiers in...” Series, and the ISRN Series from Hindawi etc

Journals Which Do Not Select forImpact / Advance etc

Journals Practicing an ‘objective’ editorial model




An OA future containing‘Impact Neutral’ Journals

PLOSONE

SAGEOpen

PeerJ

ALL

OTHER

OA

JOURNALS

etc.etc.

Trust? Evaluation?

So what about the Trust issue?



Open Peer Review would havesolved this ‘Trust’ problem


What is Open Peer Review?

• Reviewers are named• Reviews can happen ‘in the open’• Publication can happen 1st, followed

by open peer-review• Peer-review history is made public


‘Optional Open Peer Review’ at PeerJ• Reviewers are invited (pre-

publication) by an expert Editor• Reviewers are encouraged to name

themselves to the authors• Authors are allowed to make their

peer-review history public


• ~40% of PeerJ Reviewers name themselves.• ~80% of PeerJ Authors reproduce their peer review

history

Academic Publishing is Evolving…http://blog.peerj.com/post/100580518238/whos-afraid-of-open-peer-review


• Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics - Reviewers comments published on pre-pub discussion site. Reviewer names optional.

• Biology Direct - Reviewer comments published, and reviewers named

• BMJ Open - All reviewers named, all reports public• eLife - Decision letter published with articles with author

approval. Reviewers anonymous, but editor named. • EMBO journal - Review process file published with articles.

Reviewers anonymous, editor named. • F1000Research - All reviewers named, all reports public. • Frontiers journals - Reviewers named, but reports not public• GigaScience - Pre-publication history published with articles,

and reviewers named. (encouraged, opt-out)• Medical journals in the BMC series - Pre-publication history

published with articles, and reviewers named (encouraged). • PeerJ - Peer review history published with articles with author

approval. Reviewers encouraged to sign report.

Journals Practicing Some Form of Open Peer-Review

And what about the filtering / evaluation issue?


PLOS ALMs

Academic Publishing is Evolving…http://www.altmetric.com/details.php?doi=10.7717/peerj.182

Altmetric Donuts

http://www.altmetric.com/details.php?doi=10.7717/peerj.182


PeerJ Article Level Metrics


Human Curated Lists

Explicitly Subjective Evaluation

Are ‘open peer review’ + ‘article-level evaluation tools’ the missing pieces?


PeerJ - Interesting FeaturesPeerJ- an entirely new Open Access business model- a broad based journal in the biological and medical sciences, judging

submissions based only on technical and scientific validity- fully peer reviewed, with rapid review process

handled by a (very) large editorial board- ‘Optional Open Peer Review’- Article-Level Metrics- Custom Collections- Q&A / Feedback / Contribution Points / Reputation system

PeerJ PrePrints- a preprint server for the biological and medical sciences- versioning- closely integrated with the journal- Q&A / Feedback- Article-Level Metrics



Feedback / Q&A

Evaluation /ALMs

Formal (but ‘open’)Peer -Review

ContributionPoints / ProfilePages



Where are we today?

• There is a culture in academia that seems to demand ‘prestige’

• Outdated thinking and insufficient metrics try to wrap ‘trust’ and ‘evaluation’ into the same thing

• As a result, published science is being judged on the wrong criteria

• Academics are increasingly aware that there are better alternatives, but often hold back from using them

• We have only recently gained a critical mass of OA content and the right ‘change is needed’ mindset to allow new developments to be tried


The journal landscape of 2024

• >95% of all articles are published open access• Pre-publication review still happens• But some form of open review is now the norm, not the exception• ‘Impact neutral’ (i.e. ‘objective’) review is now applied to >50% of all articles • New evaluation tools have become commonplace and are acceptable to quote on resumes• New aggregation tools (e.g. virtual journals or overlay journals) are now commonplace• Is this Evolution or Revolution?

everything evolves…even publishing


Thank You

Pete BinfieldCo-Founder and

Publisher

@[email protected]

@ThePeerJwww.peerj.com

Documents

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 349 Years of Journal Publishing What’s Coming in the Next Ten? Evolution or Revolution? Pete Binfield Co-Founder & Publisher