Analysis and news


New business models for the open research agenda The rise of preprints and the move towards universal open access are potential threats to traditional business models in scholarly publishing, writes Phil Gooch


Publishers have started responding to open access (OA) with transformative agreements[1]


, but if authors can simply


upload their research to a preprint server for immediate dissemination, comment and review, why submit to a traditional journal at all?


Some journals are addressing this by


offering authors frictionless submission direct from the preprint server. This tackles two problems at once: easing authors’ frustrations with existing journal submission systems[2]


, and providing a


more direct route from the raw preprint to the richly linked, multi-format version of record that readers demand and accessibility standards require. How do we preserve trust in the


scientific record in this open research world, and who will mediate it? Both preprints and open access have been criticised for enabling the rapid dissemination of unsound, fake or harmful information[3]


. Proponents of


this view have cited the furore over a coronavirus bioRxiv preprint, which suggested, with much hyperbole, that Sars-CoV-2 contains genetic material from HIV. The preprint was rapidly withdrawn following strong evidence that the results were spurious and false. Yet, isn’t this precisely how science should work? In this case, the community acted in days to disprove and remove bad science, whereas journal retraction can take years[4]


. These arguments will continue,


but it seems that both preprints and OA are part of the future scholarly communications. So how can publishers and vendors thrive in this new environment? If scholarly publishing is in crisis, the public understanding of science is more so. Growing concerns about fake scientific news, poor reporting of research in some quarters of the media, and lack of trust, are having profound consequences – declining vaccination rates being just one. These crises present an opportunity to reinvigorate the supply-side and demand-side of research dissemination.


26 Research Information April/May 2020


“These crises present an opportunity to reinvigorate both the supply-side and demand-side of research


dissemination”


Supply-side business models in an open, preprint-first world New tools and services harnessing AI are emerging in the industry. Their aim is to reduce the time needed for desk-editorial screening of submitted manuscripts (which typically takes around 30 minutes) to one or two minutes. They achieve this by flagging problematic areas of the paper, both from a structural and scientific perspective; verifying affiliations; and checking cited works for retraction, confirmation, refutation and overall quality[5]


. These tools need to be


integrated into the submission workflow, and platforms such as ScholarOne and Editorial Manager have begun trialling a number of such integrations. As it would be uneconomic for a journal to subscribe to all these services, and a number of them have overlapping functionality, we are


likely to see some consolidation. A natural extension would be to apply this screening technology to preprints, both to ease the burden on volunteer screeners used by a number of preprint servers, and provide basic screening for those preprint servers that currently perform none. Improved screening, with the help of automation, has the potential to build trust in this content. With developments in technology enabling format- and domain-agnostic document parsing, this is an area we have recently been exploring at Scholarcy.


Demand-side business models Dissemination of early-stage research as mobile-unfriendly PDF is arguably a step back. If preprints are here to stay, the reading experience needs to improve. Several vendors have developed native XML or LaTeX authoring environments which enable dissemination in richer formats. BioRxiv has been funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to convert PDF submissions to machine-readable content for web and mobile[6]


. Regardless


of the open research agenda, the need to process and reformat manuscripts to richer formats, using automated tools or otherwise, will continue to provide a business model for specialist vendors. Making research available to a wider


readership, both inside and outside academia, is important for visibility,


@researchinfo | www.researchinformation.info


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