Björn Brembs
@brembs@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago

This should have been big news!

Ten funding agencies from eight European countries have pledged to support a public infrastructure that is poised to replace academic journals:
FWF 🇦🇹
RCN 🇳🇴
Forte 🇸🇪
ARIS 🇸🇮
SRC 🇸🇪
FCT 🇵🇹
CSIC 🇪🇸
DFG 🇩🇪
Formas 🇸🇪
ANR 🇫🇷
Only two of them issued press releases in English:
fwf.ac.at/en/news/detail/joint
fccn.pt/en/atualidade/fct-assi
and one more, NWO from 🇳🇱 considers joining:
nwo.nl/en/news/nwo-endorses-jo
Why is this BIG? 1/4
Rosanna Cantavella
@cantavest@hcommons.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 days ago
@brembs Hi, Björn! This is excellent news, at least in theory, as one cannot expect to build a reliable infrastructure of good peer reviewers for all fields of knowledge at once. I'm the editor of OJS diamond journal Magnificat CLM, centred on medieval cultures, esp medieval texts in a minorized language such as Catalan (https://turia.uv.es/index.php/MCLM). We, as many other consolidated journals, strive to find first-rate reviewers, even though we're well known and respected.
This new ORE structure has a long long road ahead if they want to publish high-quality papers on minority areas, especially on Humanities. Are they fully aware of this?
Björn Brembs
@brembs@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 days ago
@cantavest

Probably not!
My guess is that they are mainly geared towards replacing the big, expensive science journals.

In my personal opinion, the money potentially to be saved from these fields by something like ORE is so huge, that we could, hypothetically, take 10% of that saved money and give it to all the minority fields like yours and more than double their budgets.

At least this bis how it roughly pans out in the library of our institution where I adviocate such an approach.
Björn Brembs
@brembs@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 days ago
@cantavest

Ideally, the big, expensive sciences would focus on developments like ORE to eventually form an infrastructure as outlined here:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230206

In my ideal, hypothetical scenario, the minority fields can then each decide if they find such an infrastructure attractive and join, or if they'd rather receive increased financial support to keep their current operations funded.
Matteo Capucci
@mc@mathstodon.xyz replied  ·  activity timestamp 5 days ago
@brembs this is great! I'm just confused by an aspect: once I submit an article, it says it can no longer be sent to other journals. however, this is before peer review happens, so iirc you might risk to submit an article, have it rejected but still on ORE, and thus barred from submitting it anywhere else 😬 this is a serious issue if true...
also, they should have aimed for something more decentralised, perhaps an umbrella platform for community-run journals...
Björn Brembs
@brembs@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 5 days ago
@mc

Yes, I'm not sure what would happen if the reviewers reject the article and you refuse to change it, it would still be available with the review comments. I can understand why one may want to then publish it elsewhere. There should be a resolution option in place for such cases.
Maybe withdraw the article?
I think further decentralization is being planned or at least considered.
crazyeddie
@crazyeddie@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 5 days ago
@brembs OK.

It looks to me like most of the infrastructure behind this is going to be in ORCID (Open Research Contributor ID) and DOI (Digital Object Identifier).

DOI I've been aware of for a while. Not sure how long ORCID has existed.

ORE looks like it is adding peer review and maybe some community stuff? Hosting of the resource pointed to by the DOI?
Björn Brembs
@brembs@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 5 days ago
@crazyeddie

Close. The main infrastructure right now is run by F1000 (now owned by Taylor & Francis):
https://www.f1000.com/about/
They are working on migrating it to OJS:
https://openjournalsystems.com/

Yes, Crossref is currently providing DOIs for the articles, IIUC, but any such provider could do that.

Yes, ORCID is used to provide IDs for authors. Some see this as problematic, but, as of now, I don't necessarily fully endorse this view.
Björn Brembs
@brembs@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago
@jekely @ERC_Research

Yes, exactly, same here! It was the consequential move after the latest conclusions by the Council of the EU:

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2023/05/23/council-calls-for-transparent-equitable-and-open-access-to-scholarly-publications/

and the path they outline is very promising, I think.
Gaspar Jekely
@jekely@biologists.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 5 days ago
@brembs @ERC_Research
Yes, in brief:
- transparent, equitable, and open access to scholarly publications
- not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers (Diamond OA)
- encourage Member States to support the pilot programme Open Research Europe (to create a large-scale open access research publishing service)
- use of open-source software and standards

But moving beyond "encourage" will be important, ideally funders should move, not the EU (too top heavy).
a3nm
@a3nm@mamot.fr replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago
@brembs It's nice that this exists, but I don't understand why it is "poised to replace academic journals". I can imagine this turning into an arXiv-like website, with optional open reviews, with mandatory deposit for projects funded by these funders, and with a CC-BY license.

But I don't see how this will help researchers to move to another publication system together -- I worry that they'll continue paying APCs to publish in established venues (and do non-open reviews for these venues)
Björn Brembs
@brembs@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago
  1. This development essentially entails that all authors in the participating countries now have a venue where they can publish #openaccess without any fees.
    2. The vision is to develop Open Research Europe (ORE) "as a collective non-profit open access publishing service for the public good".
    https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/3603e219-6a65-11ef-a8ba-01aa75ed71a1/language-en

    2/4
marcelcosta
@marcelcosta@bcn.fedi.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago
@brembs @mike I’m not sure about that!

Although for me it has some sense: as they state, the ORE platform is there to make “ it easy for European Commission beneficiaries to comply with the open access terms of their funding”. So as infraestructure is not infinite, it might be understandable to prioritize those that fulfill the initial aim of the platform.

This should be compatible with the appearence of other public platforms with a more general scope.
Björn Brembs
@brembs@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago
  1. As we outline in our article, such a decentralized public infrastructure can be highly resilient against not only natural or political disasters, but also "against corporate capture and surveillance technologies":
    https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230206
    4. If/when funding agencies realize that maintaining funding for legacy journals directly counteracts the goals they signed onto with their support of ORE, the legacy journals stand to suffer massive drops in revenue.

    What can YOU do?

    3/4

    #academicchatter
crazyeddie
@crazyeddie@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 5 days ago
@neuralreckoning @brembs Kinda maybe. DOI and/or ORCID "tables" could be hosted at any domain it looks like. They can refer to each other sort of like web links. So a document with a DOI record at doi.derp.org could have a bibliography refering to a document pointed at by a DOI record hosted at doi.herp.org.

But this isn't really "networking" so it's not "decentralized". It's kinda like an ISBN for a book or whatever.
Björn Brembs
@brembs@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago

Here are two easy things YOU can do:

#1 Every academic supporting #openscience and #openaccess should consider ORE as their primary publishing venue and ask colleague/co-authors to do the same.

#2 Point your librarian, institutional leaders, funding agencies towards the documents linked above and ask them to support ORE, too.

#3 Make everyone and every institution aware that they now have a choice: support parasitic corporations or the public good. By their actions you shall know them!
Albert Cardona
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz replied  ·  activity timestamp 5 days ago
@brembs

The real blocker: ourselves.

Will be, as members of a grant panel or search committee, or grant reviewers, and as authors:

1. stop judging a paper by its publication venue;
2. stop providing subsidised labour to for-profit journals;
3. review only for non-profit journals;
4. send our manuscripts to journals aligned with our values of openness, data sharing, democratised access, diamond open access.

It’s really on us to stop this game of chicken.

#academia#ScientificPublishing
Frederik Elwert
@felwert@fedihum.org replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago
@brembs That’s all nice and sweet, but how can we make sure this abomination of “typesetting” employed on the platform does not become the new norm for how we publish and read all our scholarship? (I know that there are bigger concerns and that his should probably not be the decisive factor. But I also honestly believe that there is an aesthetic aspect driving scholar’s decisions about where to publish.)