Better deals?

German academic institutions are currently negotiating with large publishing houses their contracts to reduce their expensive publishing and subscription costs. It is sign of the growing discontent among scientists and their host institutions about the cost and wierdness of the publishing system. Scientists produce content for the journals, in many cases they even pay to get it published (e.g. color printing or open access), they edit and review the content for free, and then the publishers sell it back to scientists through library subscriptions. I personally feel exploited by the commercial companies that run this business, and many other scientists probably feel the same way.

The questions is, what can we scientist do about it? Is it a new deal between libraries and publishers a solution? I believe no.

A new deal would simply make it cheaper for the libraries, but it would not bring any structural change to the system, and I still will be feeling robbed. I think it is time to explore new radical changes in scientific publishing.

New models

Publishing in the hands of scientists

The current crisis on scientific publishing can be taken as an opportunity to develop new ways to communicate scientific findings without relying so much on publishing companies. We now rely less on printed paper and more on the internet and digital technologies, which can bring several advantages: rapid communication of results; new media to transfer knowledge such as audio, video, animations, and computer code; more transparent peer-review workflows; among others. Furthermore, we have now a wide set of new tools that can revolutionize the way we publish using open source software technologies, for example: version control systems such as git; universal text converters such as pandoc; reproducible research tools such as jupyter notebooks or knitr; static website generators such us Jekyll, or dynamic site generation with Rails. These are just a few of the thousands of tools available, some of them created by scientists themselves, that can be used to transform the publishing industry and put it in the hands of scientists.

Obviously, such an enterprise is beyond of what an individual scientist can do, and would have to be embraced by institutions such as scientific societies, universities and research organizations, or national funding agencies.

Here’s an example of what can be done now. The Max Planck Socieity creates a separate non-for-profit publishing organization with startup funds and managed by scientists. It creates a flagship journal that competes with Science and Nature (I know, eLife alredy does this but only for biology). It also creates a publishing platform that offers new innovative publishing schemes for peer-review and content management, and lobby scientific societies to move their journals from the commercial companies to this new non-for-profit publishing house. This new organization acts as a real competitor to the commercial companies, offering publishing prices according to more realistic costs, but still with a profit margin. Profit is then reinvested in open source publishing technologies that would help to reduce prices even further, also guaranteeing the long-term sustainability of the system. Although eLife and PLOS are doing something along these lines, they are too much focused on the field of biology, and a much larger organization with a much larger offer of journals is still needed.

Ownership of publishing companies

Wiley and Relx (parent company of Elsevier) are publicly traded companies and anyone can buy their stock. Springer Nature may even have an initial public offering soon. If large scientific societies and individual scientists invest in these companies, not only can they get part of the profit through dividends, but can also influence decisions on these companies by participatory decision processes for share holders.

If scientists are share holders of large publishing companies, we can have an impact on topics such as the election of the executive board, re-investment of profit, and long-term sustainability of the publishing system. These are important issues in which we can make significant contributions, and the legal infrastructure to do it is already in place through the financial market and corporate law.

Obviously, this would require a substantial amount of capital, something that only large scientific societies or large groups of individual scientists could afford.