A publication portal for open, global and perpetual access to science

I will start this post by apologizing for being silent those days. My real life is very demanding and I decided to stay away from the computer for a week to relax myself. I will try to restart posting regularly science articles in the next few days, although I know my agenda is so busy that I may just not be able to post a regularly as I would like to. We will see!

With this first post after the break, I decided to pick up a topic a dit unusual, but that is very important for me. I will not discuss any scientific topic per se, but I will discuss something that I have discovered last week. Scientific publications and their diffusion to the rest of the world in an open-access fashion.

I believe some of the ideas here may be interesting for the PEVO developers which is why I deliberately tag two of them, namely @pharesim and @chainreaction.

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SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS: THE PARTICLE PHYSICS EXAMPLE

I already discussed several times (also on Steemit) about how to share scientific articles with the world outside academia, and at a reasonable cost (knowing that the only reasonable cost is: free).

In particle physics, we have the chance that all the community works with the arxiv, an open-access platform where scientific publications are posted even before being submitting to the journals. A free version of any single article is hence always available, and there is no need to get any university credential to be allowed to download a paper.

Many of us additionally pay a special attention so that the articles on the arxiv always match the published versions. The journal are then only needed for the peer-review process, and for evaluation purposes (it is important to publish in renowned journals for being well evaluated).

Connected to the arxiv is the Inspire platform that allows us to search for articles, get citation records on a specific scientist, etc… This is very useful when selection committee business is in order.

And finally, we have the SCOAP3 initiative.

Usually, each university or research center pays the journals to be granted access rights to their publications. And we talk here about a huge amount of money. As a result, the members of this university/research center (and only them) get the desired access.

In the field of particle physics, the universities/research centers decided to pay instead a fee to the SCOAP3 project that then redistributes the money to the publishers, so that all particle physics articles are in exchange open access for the entire world.

We are indeed stronger together!

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WHAT IS THE NEXT STEP? THE SCIPOST OPTION?

_{[image credits: SciPost]}

Although the above (SCOAP3) system is not ideal, it was already better than what we had before. This makes the publications in particle physics published in the most common journals (but not the American ones who refused to participate!) available to the general audience.

We could however go further and argue that at the end of the day, we actually do not need journals anymore.

Cannot we work with the arxiv on top of it we would build a peer-review system? I was thinking that way for a bit more than a year, and discussed that with many. Many people in my field are however not ready to get rid of the journals, in particular because evaluation committees check in which journals everyone is publishing his research.

And then came the news I want to talk about.

I have heard for the first time last week about SciPost, a scientific publication portal managed by scientists and for scientists (and not by publishing companies that want to make money).

Everything in there is open access, including the referee reports and the related author answer.

This goes well beyond what I had initially in mind. Needless to say that I am really enthusiastic about it.

Browsing the SciPost website, one can find the following guidelines that summarize everything about this project.

• Two-way open access: both authors and readers do not have to pay anything.

• Non-profit: this contrasts with the traditional journals… ;)

• By professionals: scientists are responsible for all stages of the publishing process. All stages.

• Witnessed peer-review: that is the main and most exciting novelty to me. And I really like it! The refereeing process is totally open and can be scrutinized by anyone, both from our community and from the outside. Moreover, anyone is allowed to write a comment on any paper, and it is totally visible. And this not contradicts the fact that referee reports stay anonymous (which I think is important too).

• Accountable and credited refereeing: peer-review takes time. Getting credits for it is cool. No one should never work for nothing.

• Post-publication evaluation: the reviewing can be done anytime, even after publication.

This looks great, and I am actually looking forward for a more massive adoption of it.

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SUMMARY

In this post, I briefly discussed a new publication platform for physics that recently crossed my way. There are a bunch of very interesting ideas in there, like open access peer-review or like the fact that anyone can write a review and being credited for.

On top of that, the open access is global. Anyone can read the articles, the referee reports and the answers to the referee reports.

The only think I can wish is that this will become widely adopted, not only in physics but in the other fields of science too.

I am dreaming about what we could accomplish with all the money sent to the publishing companies being allocated elsewhere…