Apr
15
“10 reasons why the science research journal has passed its sell-by date “
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Two weeks ago, at this year‘s UKSG conference in Brighton, I took part in a debate, co-hosted by Toby Green, co-founder of coherent digital, Sarah Main, vice president of academic relations at Elsevier and myself. My proposal was roughly in line with the title of this blog. The debate was run twice , and on each occasion I promised the audience that I had 10 reasons behind my argument that it was time to change the science scholarly communication ecosystem .Of course, we never got round to discussing all of the reasons, but I promised that if there was any room left on the door of the church at Wittenberg then I would post my theses there in good Lutheran fashion . So here they now are!
1 Open access has plateaued and is beginning to decline. The system created to increase accessibility by lowering costs is being rejected on cost grounds. it’s volume based publishing model does not inspire trust.
2 The peer review system is broken and is losing the confidence of researchers , funders and consumers.
3 Users look in vain for a central retraction index and a transparent system to comprehensively log withdrawn articles
4 Publishing journals is still too slow for the purposes of the fastest moving sectors within science and technology
5 The cost of publishing in journals are too great to be sustained by the research community, and the benefits too little to encourage funders to meet the bill.
6 Many of the issues could be resolved if journal publishing offered the complete integrity– protection from papermills, bogus AI generated content et cetera – that users assume and expect
7 The need to standardise metadata,PIDs, and standard content coding (ISCC, C2 PA et cetera) maybe easier to accomplish in self publishing software than in existing publisher systems.
8 Giving recognition and validation to researchers and research institutions, whether for grant awards or job preferment, is better performed outside of journal branding and citation indexing systems which are too easily gamed and manipulated.
9 The research article/report/paper itself needs to change. Pre-registration of hypothesis and methodology prior to research commencement will be one factor. The need to associate articles with experimental data and other evidential material currently not handled by publishers is another. research findings also need to be associated with code, videos, images, audio material, blogs and other elements..
10. Researchers in many disciplines cannot afford the time to read papers in full. As a result, machine to machine communication becomes vital, and is not aided by current systems. The classic research article is a narrative form in a world with increasing the few human readers. Machines do not appreciate narrative: they perform better on world structured data clearly marked with metadata.
Conclusion: since the beginning of the digital age scholarly research publishing moved into a time lock, becoming outwardly digital while preserving the systems and structures of print in perpetuity. AI will change all of that, disintermediating redundant parts of the process and automating others.