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citation “Version 1, awaiting peer review”. The peer review status will always be visible in the article citation. There is no editorial decision to accept or reject the submission. All submissions that pass the checks are published in a few days. The moment it is published, expert
reviewers are invited for transparent peer review. The authors are given a list by the platform of appropriate peer reviewers generated algorithmically. Authors and reviewers have to declare conflict of interests. Authors can suggest additional reviewers, whose appropriateness is checked by the operator of the platform. Reviewers who respond to the
The recently announced Plan S is a major step to improve the way open access works, by mandating sensible rules by a coalition of funders.
The future: helping the authors Over the years, I have become convinced that while open access has a real chance to solve the important issue of access to research findings, it does not address the problems research journals bring to the process of reporting research findings, whether open access or not. These problems are the results of the essential aspects of the operation of a research journal – the selection of what to publish and what to reject. This process, which seemed natural in the early days of printed journals, now dominates and distorts the way research is published. This is due to the immense growth of research outputs, the growth of the publishing industry (about 30,000 research journals support an industry with profits of billions of dollars) and the intense competition between journals, where success is significantly dependant on the highly problematic measure of the Impact Factor. These problems include, among others:
• The delay in making new findings known, a problem now being partially addressed by the growth in preprint servers;
• The opaque process journals operate to decide what to accept and what to reject;
• The influence that the desire of journals to increase their impact factor has on the decision on what to publish; and
• The range of rules and formats that different journals operate.
We have over the last six years developed a new publishing process, which we call
www.researchinformation.info | @researchinfo
open research publishing. We believe that this process, which completely bypasses the research journals, has a real chance to remove many of the problems currently damaging and distorting the publishing of research. The objective of these developments is three-fold: to pass the control of the process from research journals and their editors to the researchers themselves; to simplify and speed up the availability of new findings; and to introduce as much transparency to the process as possible. To aid understanding of what it is we
have proposed to replace the scheme operated by research journals, I have detailed a broad description of the steps of the process we have developed. The basic aim is to allow every researcher to report findings they feel should be reported without delay, and then submit themselves to a full and transparent scrutiny by peers after publication.
How open research publishing works Researchers who want to report any findings can place them on an open research publishing platform. The decision to publish is in the hands of the researcher, and will be published immediately, after a check that it is research, by a researcher, it is legal, readable, and that the data underpinning the findings are made accessible. The publication will be fully citeable and available on the open research platform and indexed by search engines etc. This is similar (though the checks are more thorough) to a preprint scheme. Unlike a preprint, an article on an open research platform cannot be published elsewhere. The initial publication includes in the
request from authors (transmitted by the operator of the platform) make a general determination of acceptance (approved, approved with reservations, not approved) and write a reviewer report. This is published immediately alongside the article, with the names of the reviewers and their affiliations. Authors are free to respond openly to
the reviewer comments and to write a new version of the article. The new version is published above the previous version, with a summary of the changes. The peer review status is amended to (for example) “version 2, one approved, one approved with reservations”. This process continues for as long as the authors wish to continue. The advantages of speed and lack
of editorial bias from the preprint-like component are combined into one simple and rapid process with the independent formal peer review, archiving and indexing components from the traditional journal model. We also work with authors to ensure that the source data underpinning any published findings are made available to support reuse and reproducibility. This model makes it possible and
desirable to bypass traditional publishing, and the associated problems of delay, non-transparent selection, and high costs to the research community. It has already been adopted experimentally by some major funders and organisations such as Wellcome, the Gates Foundation and many others, and I believe will become broadly adopted and, in time, mandated by funders, societies and organisations. If this happens, it will finally free researchers to communicate any findings they think are worth reporting, while having to submit themselves to transparent scrutiny by peers. The great treasure our societies have – the results of research efforts by millions of researchers – will finally be able to flow freely, available to all.
Vitek Tracz is founder and chairman of the F1000 Group
February/March 2019 Research Information 13
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