Once in a while someone online complains about the cost of open access publication fees, the so called article processing charge (APC). Looking at this simplistically, it does seem ridiculous that a journal might ask the authors $5-10k USD to publish a paper when all the work is apparently done by scientists that write and review the articles. Of course, this APC cost is a lot more complicated than this and there is an historical context and background knowledge that is needed to discuss these. In reality, a lot of the cost goes into sustaining the editorial salaries of journals with high rejection rates. I covered this in detail in a previous blog post discussing the costs from EMBO Press. In addition to the editorial salary costs for journals with high rejection rates, we also don't have a free market since we don't pick journals based on price and service quality but on how publishing in certain journals will be perceived by others.
So, for many reasons, the major costs of scientific publishing are not the act of peer review and making knowledge public. If I had to guess, the actual costs publishing a peer-review article with near 0% rejection rate would be below $500USD per paper if done in high volume. The main costs of publishing are primarily the costs linked to the system of filtering scientific publications into tiers of perceived "impact". It was, for a long time, nearly impossible to evolve scientific publishing and I have argued for almost 20 years that we needed to split the publishing process into modular bits that would allow for much more innovation. With the rise of preprints, social media and dedicated peer-review services, I think we now could work towards getting rid of scientific journals. Or at least, we now have a clear direction of focus on what is missing in this potential alternative system - a new reward infrastructure.
The reward infrastructure in science
So why do we still publish in scientific journals ? The reality is that people still want to chase high impact journals. Pretending that we don't is not going to change anything. Despite having tenure and secure funding for my group, I feel that I cannot stop trying to publish in some journals because of what it means for the career of my lab members; for how my peers perceive and evaluate our work; for establishing new collaborations and applying for additional funding. So how are we going to change this and what could the consequences be ?
Unfortunately, there is no incentive for any single individual to change the reward system. At least as of now, this would require a large number of labs within a sub-field to jointly commit to a change in practice, perhaps assisted by some external entity. We could assume that social media, conferences and recommendation engines (Google Scholar) are enough to spread knowledge and that within a specific sub-field it is possible to evaluate each other without the need for journal proxies. I am not sure this is really true but if we accepted this, then a number of labs in a field could commit to no longer publishing in scientific journals. This could be assisted by, at the same time, creating an overlay journal of their field where academic editors would select a subset of peer-reviewed preprints that represent some particularly strong advance in the field.
Unfortunately, this idea is unlikely to work because it relies on collective action by a majority of groups within a field. I don't have better ideas but this is for me the last barrier remaining. We still need to work out how we would pay for the peer-review service but ideas that would help change the reward system in a way that do not require collective action are now what is needed.
What could go wrong if it happened
Despite all that we complain about in our current system of tiered journals, they do aim to improve science. They might not work as intended but they aim to filter science by accuracy and perceived value to others. If we managed to get rid of these things, we could have an even worse problem with the sheer number and quality of scientific outputs. As an almost anecdotal evidence, our group has become at lot worst at working through the revisions of our papers in a timely fashion. If our manuscripts were not out as preprints I think we would be much more in a hurry to do the revisions.
The other important caveat around this is that time and attention is always limiting. There will always be a need to filter and evaluate science by proxies. If we didn't have science journals we might be complaining about how attention in social media is being used a bad proxy for the value of research.
I am truly curious to know how scientific interactions would change without scientific journals. Would people still want to apply to our group, want to collaborate on projects, invite us to conferences if our outputs were essentially peer-reviewed preprints? For my lab members that might read this - don't worry, this is not a declaration of intention.