CERN to host a new phase of Open Research Europe
home.cern171 points by JohnHammersley 4 hours ago
171 points by JohnHammersley 4 hours ago
This should have been in the article:
Diamond Open Access (or Platinum OA) is a scholarly publishing model where journals and platforms are free for both readers and authors, with no Article Processing Charges (APCs).
It'd be great if this could one day be a real alternative to Elsevier. Today, professors and postdocs are doing the peer-review for Elsevier, for free. They can do that because they get a paycheck from the government (through university and grants). Then, the governments pay for Elsevier access through university libraries, ontop of that. It'd be much more efficient, if everybody could just publish and subscribe for free on a publicly funded platform.
Arxiv and the internet do more for science than Elsevier. They're rent-seeking middlemen, having lost any of whatever their purpose might once have been.
I think the worst part is, Elsevier could still serve a purpose and make money by curating and leveraging reputation even if all academic research was openly published and freely accessible - they could select what they consider to be the best research, have editorial content, produce visualizations and accompany content with a high quality of journalism, like Quanta. Papers being locked, researchers and institutions paying out the nose, and the other artificial scarcity / artificial stupidity features are entirely unnecessary.
For some disciplines unfortunately that's not true. In medicine the publishing cartel is much stronger than arxiv.
The problem - for them - is that they wouldn't be able to make as much money as a curator than as a grifter, a middleman. As a curator or a creator, they would be actually forced to work, as compared to the current rentier model that they enjoy.
Those executive bonuses don't pay for themselves you know.
You absolutely need to solve the gatekeeping and reputation part, otherwise your newly-minted open access journal would be filled to the brim with cranks and charlatans.
There are many more publishers than Elsevier for scientific publications, some of which are already following a strictly open access policy.
Open access typically means authors pay a publication fee, which leads to the same result of the government paying twice and the journal profiting twice.
And most of those require ridiculous "article processing charges". Even non-profits. Elsevier is bad, but it's not much worse than other publishers.
Author (in practice author institution, in practice with public funds) pays open access is less bad than locking articles behind paywalls, but it's still a racket.
This CERN system is about diamond open access, meaning that neither authors nor readers pay.
Good initiative!
The problem is: publication is based on reputation. Reputation takes time and effort from the entire community.
I feel like modern infrastructure (Google Scholar, AI research, LinkedIn, etc) helped to decrease the importance of high-impact journals such as Nature, etc. Researchers don't rely on highly curated printed journals in their physical mailbox to get informed what's happening. You can just use tools to scrape content much faster.
But still: It can be career decisive if a reseachers lands a publication in a for-profit journal such as Nature.
The CS community has a much nicer publishing pipeline where most top journals/proceedings are attached to non-profit conferences and the fee is 0 (beside a conference fee).
I wish more fields would work like this: you publish with a conference proceeding and talk on the conference about your paper.
Researchers are themselves responsible for typesetting, advertising, etc. This and removing for-profit stakeholders can reduce the costs a lot.
A difficulty, too, is that choice of publishing venue is based on visibility and readership. And in my experience, EU-administered projects around scholarly publishing like these are well-meaning, but make baffling choices about focus, organization, and scope that hobble them.
Consider that this is a journal whose scope is defined not by field, but by funding initiatives. It places an astoundingly small emphasis on making research visible: contrasted with most major journals, with websites that might be split between research articles proper and editorial articles, but are still heavily focused on presenting articles, Open Research Europe doesn't have a single non-truncated article title on its front page, and devotes the vast majority of the page to journal administration and self-advertisement. The current lead highlight of PNAS is a section of rotating blurbs about articles, both research and editorial, for example. The current highlight of Open Research Europe is a description of Open Research Europe and logos of associated groups, including a second copy of the European Commission logo, in addition to the one on the top of the page. For that matter, the journal has a three-letter domain name, ore.eu, that it uses entirely to talk about itself, with only a single, small, text link to the journal itself. Why publish at a journal where your research seems to be far down their list of priorities?
With that said, I'm hopeful that CERN taking this over is a good sign. Zenodo is a great asset to the research community, and I feel like CERN is better situated to understand what will make a journal where researchers will want to publish. And I'd note, unlike Open Research Europe, Zenodo's front page is primarily a list of recent uploads, complete with partial abstracts.
>Researchers are themselves responsible for typesetting, advertising, etc. This and removing for-profit stakeholders can reduce the costs a lot.
That can depend on how the proceedings are published. Dagstuhl Publishing, for example, does do some typesetting and proofreading work for proceedings they publish, they just have it arranged in an extremely efficient way (everyone submits LaTeX using their class, so they're mostly fixing mistakes). They also do charge (an extremely small) publishing fee to the conference.
Conference papers should be abolished, because they require international travel, which is getting more difficult every year. 10–20 years ago, when travel was cheap and easy, it was mostly just people from developing countries who could often not attend. Typically because they could not afford it or get a visa in time. But today almost everyone is impacted by wars, international tensions, travel restrictions, immigration policies, and the overall uncertainty.
I've attended three international conferences in the past year. In each of them, there were plenty of people missing. People who would usually have attended but could not, due to issues that did not exist in the 2010s.
1. looks like duplication. why not arxiv? could lead to multiple submission pipelines
2. as I understand researchers still pay to publish, no?
3. initiative could lead to centralization of publishing power(biased?, politics?, bureaucrats)
4. the problem is not just in access to papers (what about connection to business and real applications)
5. the article is published by CERN and is promotion (vague on details, buzzword-heavy)
> looks like duplication. why not arxiv? could lead to multiple submission pipelines
Arxiv is for preprints, this is full peer-reviewed publishing. It replaces academic journals, not preprint repositories like arxiv.
> as I understand researchers still pay to publish, no?
They mention Diamond Open Access, so probably not
> initiative could lead to centralization of publishing power
Publishing power is already incredibly centralized in hands of a few oligopolistic publishers
> the problem is not just in access to papers (what about connection to business and real applications)
Not sure what this point means and how it's relevant to this initiative
> the article is published by CERN and is promotion (vague on details, buzzword-heavy)
Idk, seems pretty specific to me
> In the five years since its launch, the platform has seen steady growth and uptake across the research community, with more than 1,200 articles published.
That actually doesn't seem like a lot (240 articles per year), but I suppose they're still in the process of gaining traction.
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