2024-08-30 COSN Challenges with academic publishing and for-profit publishers

Taxpayers pay our salaries and fund universities and grants to allow us researchers to conduct and review important research addressing urgent global challenges. Yet, once research projects are completed what we end up doing is handing over our work to journals run by for-profit companies that take that research and put it behind a paywall charging everyone money to access the research they already funded. Ironically, researchers can only access their own research through a solution by which university libraries, funded by taxpayers, pay the publishers billions every year. The APC fee open-access policy was suggested as a solution yet is no better, often worse, charging authors unreasonable fees to make research publicly available. Both resulted in the for-profit publishing industry reporting some of the highest profit margins across all industries.

We cannot escape the sad truth: this model makes no sense. We have created and keep feeding and promoting a profit hungry monster. We have much better and free solutions, yet we do not use them. For-profit journals nowadays offer little to no added value other than the reputation that we have over the years bestowed upon them. Researchers are unable to break away from this vicious cycle given that hiring, promotion, and funding decisions commonly depend on researcher’s work being accepted to high reputation journals.
This is just one of the critical challenges we face with the current publication system, there are many others.

I will discuss the growing challenges with the current science publication system, yet will also review proven tested solutions. I will introduce Peer Community In, Peer Community Journal, and Peer Community in Registered Reports and the hope that they represent, and share our CORE team experience with PCIRR, with concrete examples showing how this new model is beneficial to both authors, universities, the academic community, and the general public.

纳税人承担了我们的薪资，并资助大学和科研资助，以使我们研究人员能够开展和审查针对紧迫全球挑战的重要研究。然而，一旦研究项目完成，我们所做的往往是将我们的研究成果交付给由盈利性公司运营的期刊，这些公司将研究成果置于付费墙后，向所有人收取费用以获取他们已经资助的研究成果。讽刺的是，研究人员只能通过由纳税人资助的大学图书馆支付出版商数十亿美元的解决方案来获取他们自己的研究成果。开放获取政策的APC费用被认为是一种解决方案，然而它并未改善，往往更糟，因为它向作者收取了使研究成果公开可得的不合理费用。这两者都导致了盈利性出版行业报告了所有行业中一些最高的利润率。我们无法逃避这一令人悲哀的事实：这种模式毫无意义。我们创造并持续喂养和推动了一个贪婪的怪物。我们拥有许多更好且免费的解决方案，却未加以利用。如今，盈利性期刊提供的附加价值微乎其微，除了我们多年来赋予它们的声誉之外。鉴于雇佣、晋升和资金决策通常取决于研究人员的工作是否被接受到高声誉期刊，研究人员无法摆脱这一恶性循环。这仅仅是当前出版系统中我们面临的众多关键挑战之一。我将讨论当前科学出版系统日益增长的问题，同时也会回顾经过验证和测试的解决方案。我将介绍Peer Community In、Peer Community Journal以及Peer Community in Registered Reports，并希望它们所代表的意义，分享我们CORE团队在PCIRR方面的经验，并通过具体实例展示这一新模型如何对作者、大学、学术界和公众都有益。