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

Academic Publishing is Evolving… “Hail double knob, children of Mars” This American Life, 9/28/2012 Galileo Kepler I. Glass

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 349 years pass by…

Academic Publishing is Evolving… slowly

Academic Publishing is Evolving…

Academic Publishing is Evolving… How Have We Arrived at Open Access? The ‘serials crisis’ The inability of individuals to access the literature The fact that taxpayers paid for it

Academic Publishing is Evolving… How Have We Arrived at Open 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

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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 & Björk (BMC Medicine, Oct 2012)

Predicted ‘Disruption Timeframe’ of OA vs Subscription model Source: “The Inevitability of Open Access”, David Lewis (College and Research Libraries, Sep 2012

Academic Publishing is Evolving… What is the Future?

Academic Publishing is Evolving… Evolution? Or Revolution?

Academic Publishing is Evolving…

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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’

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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’

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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’

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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’

Academic Publishing is Evolving…

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…

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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’

Academic Publishing is Evolving… PLOS ALMs

Academic Publishing is Evolving… Altmetric Donuts

Academic Publishing is Evolving… PeerJ Article Level Metrics

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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’

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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’ How’s that working out?

Academic Publishing is Evolving… What’s missing?

Academic Publishing is Evolving… Brand? Reputation?

Academic Publishing is Evolving… Trust? Evaluation?

Academic Publishing is Evolving… We Need ‘Trust and Evaluation’ NOT ‘Brand and Reputation’

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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’

Academic Publishing is Evolving… “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…

Academic Publishing is Evolving… YearPubsNotes 20071, ,800Largest OA journal 20094,4003 rd largest journal in world 20106,750Largest journal in world ,800~1.4% of PubMed output in that year ,500~2.4% of PubMed output in that year 2013~31,000>3% of the relevant literature? PLOS ONE Quarterly Output PLOS ONE

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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 for Impact / Advance etc

Academic Publishing is Evolving… PLOS ONE -~4% of the literature in 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 for Impact / Advance etc

Journals Practicing an ‘objective’ editorial model

Academic Publishing is Evolving… An OA future containing ‘Impact Neutral’ Journals PLOS ONE SAGE Open PeerJ ALL OTHER OA JOURNALS etc. Trust? Evaluation?

So what about the Trust issue?

Academic Publishing is Evolving…

Open Peer Review would have solved this ‘Trust’ problem

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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

Academic Publishing is Evolving… ‘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

Academic Publishing is Evolving… ~40% of PeerJ Reviewers name themselves. ~80% of PeerJ Authors reproduce their peer review history

Academic Publishing is Evolving…

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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?

Academic Publishing is Evolving… PLOS ALMs

Academic Publishing is Evolving… Altmetric Donuts

Academic Publishing is Evolving… PeerJ Article Level Metrics

Academic Publishing is Evolving… Human Curated Lists

Explicitly Subjective Evaluation

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

Academic Publishing is Evolving… PeerJ - Interesting Features PeerJ -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

Academic Publishing is Evolving…

Feedback / Q&A Evaluation / ALMs Formal (but ‘open’) Peer -Review Contribution Points / Profile Pages

Academic Publishing is Evolving…

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

Academic Publishing is Evolving… 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

Academic Publishing is Evolving… Thank You Pete Binfield Co-Founder