I don’t want to go into the specifics of PlanS at all but I
see clearly the perspective of the founders and wider society of wanting to
have open access and even reducing the costs of publishing. The publishers have
been given quite a lot of time to adapt and maybe some amount of disruption is
now needed. One potential outcome of fully flipping the paying model might be
that we simply lose the smaller publishers and consequently lose also their
community activities if they can’t find alternative ways to fund them. There
are enough journals in scientific publishing that, to be honest, I think the
disruption will not be large.
Less publishers means less innovation in publishing
What I fear we will lose with the reduction in the number of
publishers is the potential to generate new ideas in scientific publishing.
Publishers like EMBO press, eLife and others have been a great engine for
positive change. Examples include more transparent peer review, protection from
scooping, cross-commenting among peer-reviewers, checks on image manipulation,
and surfacing the data underlying the figures (see SourceData). While this innovation tends to spread across all publishers it is not rewarded by the market. Scientific publishing does not
work within a well-functioning economic market. We submit to the journals that
have the highest perceived “impact” and such perceived impact is then
self-sustaining. It would take an extraordinary amount of innovation to disrupt
leaders in the market. For me, this is a core problem of publishing, the fact
that the market is not sensitive to innovation.
To resolve this problem we would have to continue the work to
reduce the evaluation of scientists by the journals they publish in. Ideas
around alt-metrics have not really moved the needle much. Without any data to
support this, my intuition is that the culture has changed somewhat due to
people discussing the issue but the change is very slow. I still feel that
working on article recommendation engines would be a key part of reducing the
“power” of journal brands (see previous post). Surprisingly, preprints and
twitter are already working for me in terms of getting reasonable
recommendations but peer-review is still a critically important aspect of
science.
Potential solutions for small publishers
Going back to the small publishers, one thing that has been
on my mind is how they can survive the coming change in revenue model. Several
years ago I think the recommendation could have been to just grow and find a
way to capture more articles across a scale of perceived impact (previous post).
However, there might not be space for other PLOS One clones. An alternative to
growing in scale would be to merge with other like-minded publishers. This is
probably not achievable in practice but some cooperation is being tested, as
for example in the Life Science Alliance journal. Another thought I had was
then to try to get the market to appreciate the costs around some of the added
value of publishing. This is essentially the often discussed idea of unbundling
the services provided by publishers (the Ryanair model?).
Maybe the most concrete example of unbundling of a valuable
service could be the checks on non-ethical behavior such as image manipulation
or plagiarism. These checks are extremely valuable but right now their costs are
not really considered as part of the cost of publishing. Publishers could
consider developing a package of such checks, that they use internally, as a service
that could be sold to institutions that would like to have their outgoing
publications checked. Going forward, some journals could start demanding some
certification of ethical checks or funding agencies could also demand such
checks to be made on articles resulting from their funded research. Other services could be considered for unbundling in the same way (e.g. peer review) but these checks on non-ethical practices seem the most promising.
(disclosures: I currently serve on the editorial board of Life Science Alliance the Publications Advisory Board for EMBO Press)