This is version 0.1 of this article. Future changes and improvements are likely.

First things first, I’m not going to argue why we need to fix academic publishing in this article. See previous thoughts on that here and any of my articles on this blog.

To fix academic publishing, we need to have some idea of where we’re going (but nothing too prescriptive), and have a strategy that takes into account organisations and people as they are, not as we’d like them to be in an ideal world. I’ll start by talking about some of the elements of where we’d like to go first, and then talk about how to get there. What will become clear is that the difficult part is not building the technology, which basically all exists already in slightly disconnected form, but building up organisations and social structures that can displace the problematic ones we have now.

What do we want to achieve?

It’s important to have some ideas of the sorts of things we want to achieve, but not be too prescriptive about them.

Why not be prescriptive? Firstly, we’re unlikely to achieve exactly what we want because none of us has unilateral power to impose our vision on others (thankfully). This means we should have a range of possibilities in mind and an analysis of what is more or less important. Secondly, different people, communities and institutions are likely to value different things. What is ideal for one person or community won’t work for everyone. Culture changes over time too, and we don’t want too rigid a solution that makes change more difficult. Thirdly, if we have too singular a vision it makes it harder for different groups with overlapping visions to work together. This is such a hard problem, with so much entrenched power and momentum that we need to make things as easy as possible and work together as much as we can.

With that in mind, I think we can identify some common elements. Not everyone will agree with all of them, we don’t have to do all of them at once, and that’s OK.

Right off, there are some absolute prerequisites. Any system that replaces the current one needs to be reliable and archival. This is important both in itself so that we don’t lose parts of the scientific record, but also strategically. Academics aren’t going to want to contribute work to a system that they think might disappear overnight. This might seem obvious but it’s astonishing how many projects that aim to reform publishing don’t have a solution to this issue and so fail before they even start. We’ll come back to this in the next section on strategy.

There are some uncontroversial good things - low hanging fruit if you will. We’d like a system that isn’t wasteful. This seems obvious, but it’s extraordinary just how wasteful a system we put up with right now. We want a system where millions of hours per year aren’t wasted reformatting papers, where public money isn’t being poured into supporting super high profit margins. We want a system where work is made available quickly. Work should be free for everyone to access, and for everyone to make it available. Now at this point it’s worth saying that some people might argue that this is impossible and that private involvement is necessary for innovation, and so not everything can be free. I don’t actually agree with this and the absolute failure of the private academic publishing industry to innovate in this completely undermines this argument for me, but you don’t have to agree with me on that. This is just a list of things that would be uncontroversially good in themselves, all else being equal. Very likely we’ll need to compromise on some of these things, at least at first.

We’d like it to be low friction at all levels. It should be easy to write a paper, easy to review and easy to read. Again this seems obvious but it’s easier said than done and has some pretty significant ramifications if you follow the logic through. For a start, it means abandoning the PDF as the file format of choice. Static placement of figures, fixed page layout that is terrible for reading on smaller screens, etc. But there’s no satisfactory replacement that one can have confidence in. I’d also argue that the low friction requirement implies a free and open system, because any time content is paywalled it introduces unnecessary friction in maintaining the walls, and limits possibilities for innovation by third parties (e.g. coming up with a new way to read papers).

That brings me on to the next point, which starts to get less uncontroversial but I think is pretty important. We want a replacement system to be flexible and to enable innovation. The traditional paper format made sense in the days of physical printing, but it doesn’t make sense any more and we don’t know what exactly will replace it. So we want a system that isn’t prescriptive about sticking to an outdated format. Some people will want to experiment with interactive papers that mix code and text. Others might want to publish only a video. There are nanopublications, extremely short texts with just one idea, sometimes clustered and linked together like in Octopus. This seems unfamiliar and nonsensical to many, but John Nash’s paper “Equilibrium points in n-person games” is just 350 words and has over 11,000 citations. Taking it even further, I had someone email me to ask whether or not they could cite one of my tweets that had inspired part of their paper (they eventually cited a related preprint). Not every paper has to have a lengthy and static introduction, methods, results and discussion section with a rigid style. We should have a way to recognise very different sorts of contributions. Requiring that everything should be published in an established journal in a single format stops us from experimenting with different ways of doing science.

The last feature I want to discuss is that the replacement should be - in some sense to be determined - democratic. It should be designed for academics, to do what they want it to do, and the organisations that run these systems should be answerable to them. And, maybe more controversially, they should have ownership structures that guarantees this. For me, this again rules out a for-profit system, but again different people may have different views on this.

Along these lines, we can also think bigger beyond just publishing. Perhaps what we really want is to build, support and sustain communities?

How do we get there?

Let’s start with the constraints.

We have an existing system that is tightly weaved into the social fabric of academia. Critically, who gets jobs, grants and promotions depends to a large extent on what you publish and in which journal. From this, I argue that any solution that requires people to publish in an unproven system that doesn’t give them career credits, or that needs to be well established before it gives career credit, is a non-starter. A few well established academics publishing alone might put some of their work on such a system, but it will never be able to achieve momentum to become a replacement. Almost every scheme I’ve seen to replace or reform publishing runs up against this issue, unfortunately.

But isn’t this the end of the story? How can we change anything if what I’ve just said is true?

Not necessarily. There are various routes, but none of them is easy. One route is institutional policies that could change this. If major funders declared that work they fund cannot be published in journals that are not free to read and publish in, it would drive a huge wave of innovation in alternatives. I wish they would. The EU is currently the best bet, but given how previous efforts have been watered down at the last minute, it’s hard to have confidence in this route. Worse, it leaves us powerless, hoping that benevolent rulers will fix our problems for us. Not ideal.

The other option is to run a parallel system that allows you to experiment with a new way of doing things but still allows you to submit papers to traditional journals and get your career credits this way. It’s not ideal, but it’s only supposed to be transitional. A way to smooth the path from here to there and avoid asking people to make a leap of faith with huge personal risk. A great example of this approach is preprint servers. They let people make their work available via a parallel, open and free system, but don’t stop them from submitting to traditional journals. Indeed, they sometimes even facilitate it.

Preprints have been the only unarguable success story in publishing reform, and I think the reason why is very simple. They don’t stop you publishing your paper and getting career credit, indeed they facilitate it, and they require very little effort to use. If we want a bottom up solution driven by academics actual needs, it better have these qualities.

But are preprint servers enough? I’m not sure they are if they are only considered as an open resting place for work that is intended to be submitted into the traditional system. What we need is a system that can simultaneously function as a preprint server but also a fully funtional replacement system. To some extent we have that already, with overlay journals that provide review on top of a preprint server, and this might be good enough, but unless those preprint servers are enabling innovation and democratic organisation of the type I discussed above, I don’t think they can take us all the way.

So I think we need a preprint-like system that is much more flexible in terms of what content can be posted, and allows for other features that we want from a scholarly publishing system, like peer review, so that it is capable of functioning independently of the existing journal system.

At first, this system needs to primarily focus on the existing structure of papers for two very simple reasons. That’s what people are familiar with, and it allows them to submit their work into the existing system for career credit. For this reason, I suspect that the really innovative formats like nanopublications and notebook-based systems are a step too far to make a significant difference, for the moment. Their time will come.

The next major constraint we need to talk about is the risk of legal and financial attack from the publishing industry. This is a huge industry with revenues in the tens to hundreds of bilions of dollars every year, and staggering profits. They will not accept any change lightly, and they are active in subverting attempts at reform using any means possible. One of those means is buying up independent efforts and either integrating them into their own systems or running them into the ground (Mendeley for example). For this reason, we need new organisations with rigorous legal and financial structures that ward off this possibility. For profit organisations cannot be relied on because they can be bought. ResearchEquals has an interesting take on this with their poison pill legal structure, but I’m not enough of a lawyer to comment in detail.

I think the minimum that is required to defend against the incumbent publishing industry is a model of distributed ownership across different institutions and countries that are not subject to a single legal authority. This could naturally be organised in a way compatible with some form of democracy.

A good first stage for any reform would be the formation of a coalition of research organisations who - in principle - would serve as its joint owners. Libraries of research active universities would seem like a natural starting place given their existing expertise in so many relevant aspects of these problems, and their direct interest in replacing the current system which drains resources from them and wastes their talent and expertise. They would also be ideally placed to ensure that the content is stored reliably and archivally.

So at this point, I feel like there’s a strong case that to achieve a successful reform, we need a flexible preprint-like system backed by distributed ownership by a multinational, multi-organisation coalition of research institutions. Would that be enough? I suspect the answer is no. There also needs to be a really compelling reason for people to use such a system.

Part of that reason is shared with preprints. It allows you to share your work earlier, make it more widely available. This is enough for many people, especially when combined with the fact that work that was made available as a preprint before publication is cited much more than non-preprinted work. But that’s not enough - why would people engage with the extra elements like peer reviewing within the system, and innovation in approaches to peer review, article types, etc.?

My feeling is that the only way we can achieve this is to make the alternative so much better an experience than the traditional system, that with time people treat the newer, optional system as the de facto scientific record, with the traditional system as an afterthought to make sure you tick the boxes that employers and funding bodies require. Eventually, if a large enough body of researchers primarily engage with the alternative, it will become viable not to submit papers into the old system (since the people deciding who gets the jobs and grants are ultimately just us).

How can we do this? Well, at a technical level, ideally we would get a giant pile of money from a progressive benefactor enabling us to build open source software that was delightful to use and made it easier, faster and more efficient to write and publish. Failing this, the software could be built as an open source community, perhaps with funding from a coalition like the one described above.

Snazzy software isn’t enough though - how could we get people to actually engage with this system, providing reviews, building new tools and communities around it, etc.? I think that has to start with making the reading experience better, for example automatically pulling in related content from referenced papers, backlinks from papers citing the one you’re reading, perhaps enhanced with user- or AI-enhanced links that point to specific sections of papers. A good reading experience brings people in, and if that experience highlights (in a low-friction way) reviews and commentary, that gives an incentive to provide those reviews and commentaries. Preprint servers like arXiv and bioRiv are already experimenting with automatic HTML conversion that would be a great starting point for this.

The Scholar Nexus bet

For the past couple of years, a group of colleagues initially at Neuromatch but now a wider group, have been building an organisation called Scholar Nexus that is attempting the strategy outlined above.

More specifically, our strategy is a ‘foundation and pillar’ model. The foundation is the coalition of research institutions described above, that provide ownership of a distributed database, and development and management of reference code and APIs to access the content. The pillars are user-facing websites that use this content to provide a coherent experience for reading, writing, submitting and reviewing work. Each pillar can have a different philosophy, with our initial plan to build two pillars ourselves with two singular visions. One focused on freedom to publish exactly how you like without constraints, another focused around building an alternative incentive structure and eliminating biases via anonymous submission and review. A key aspect of the foundation/pillar model is that since all content is stored in the same shared database, work that is published in one would automatically appear on the other, so you don’t have to commit to one system. Check out our white papers for more detail.

Conclusion

I think change is possible. It’s not inevitable that we have to live with the system we have now. But, change will be hard and I see so many great projects fail for one of the reasons above. We need to work together on this, and design new approaches that are not mutually exclusive.

Feedback

I would love to hear feedback on these ideas, and make contact with other aligned projects and research institutions that could form part of the coalition, or with potential funders. Contact details on my webpage. The only way we can make this happen is together.