This post is a letter to The Economist, on behalf of the organization OpenScholar, in response to a special number on scientific publishing (March 25th, 2017).
Your articles on scientific publishing entitled “The findings of medical research are disseminated too slowly” (March 25th) describes realistically a main problem we face in science, but a second article in the same issue (“The shackles of scientific journals”) leaves aside the main stakeholders of the solution: scientists. Your description of the platforms launched by The Gates and Wellcome Trust foundations left out an important detail – that only scientists funded by these foundations can publish in these platforms. The European Commission also announced its intention to follow suit, but only for the scientists it funds. Access to transparent peer review just for members of a club is ominous, and sounds like a serious attempt to re-establish the status-quo.
Open science initiatives driven instead by scientists now advocate the productive use of pre-prints and open peer review. Indeed, in the life sciences ASAPbio was launched in response to a funding call designed to create a centralized pre-print repository that the Wellcome Trust has also supported (together with NIH and other important funders). All well and good? Not surprisingly, in the call documentation we read that, “The Central Service will NOT provide peer review,(…), which clearly demarcates its role from the important services of journals” – a statement at odds with the idealized view of these organizations.
There is clearly no real interest from institutions nor from funders to tackle this problem and this is why initiatives like OpenScholar are advocating change. One of our initiatives is a free, community-managed and independent peer-review platform called Self-Journals of Science1, where editors, authors and referees interact transparently to evolve, validate and evaluate open access articles2. As you said, we are convinced that only in this way can scientists be science’s ringmasters, and not journals’ servants3.
2 http://www.sjscience.org/article?id=580#
3 http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21719438-about-change-findings-medical-research-are-disseminated-too
Citrical 