The future of research dissemination

Fred Breese – Research Services Co-ordinator, University of Manchester Library.

The big idea: should we get rid of the scientific paper? and Replacing academic journals.

How should scientific results be published and shared? This is an important question for the open research movement. The combination of pressure to publish (in high profile journals) and publication bias clearly has a concerning effect on reproducibility.

It was exciting to see this addressed in the Guardian newspaper this month with Stuart Ritchie’s piece for the 'The big idea' series. He advocates for a shift away from the traditional journal article and towards open notebooks (a similar concept to executable papers). These use technology such as Jupyter allowing for research data and statistical analyses to be directly embedded on a website, alongside the commentary you’d usually find in a journal article. Notebooks also offer substantial

Improvements in research transparency, even compared to current best practice of openly depositing data in a repository.

Proposed solutions

It can be helpful to look at Ritchie’s suggestion as two interconnected proposals:

1. The transition papers to notebooks

This comes with a set of trade-offs familiar to those working in open research. The switch to writing notebooks would be time consuming (broad scale adoption would require proper training and incentivisation), but ultimately beneficial in increasing transparency.

2. A move away from journals

It’s important to note that in Ritchie’s proposal publication bias is addressed by academics hosting their own notebooks. This would be a truly revolutionary change in how scientists share their results. It should be noted that reforming a publishing landscape dominated by large commercial players has been a long-term goal of the open access movement. Indeed, taking the next steps towards notebooks alongside commercial publishers could be advantageous, especially given Elsevier’s previous interest in this area. 

To get an idea of how a deep reform of journal publishing could look it’s helpful to read proposals from within the open access movement. One set of proposals to reform journal publishing are set out by Björn Brembs and colleagues in their 2021 paper Replacing Academic Journals. They advocate for a radical move towards open infrastructure and open standards at all stages of the publication process. This contrasts with increased vertical integration promoted by commercial publishers, and the risk of vendor lock-in.

Image credit and source - CC-BY 4.0: Bianca Kramer, Jeroen Bosman,  https://101innovations.wordpress.com/workflows

It is impossible for me to do justice to the complexity to Brembs’ proposals here. However, one key point is that they avoid any need for a hard break with commercial publishers.

Publishers are instructed to work within open standards and compete as providers of interchangeable services, the idea being that this creates a genuine market environment benefiting the scientific community.

Brembs’ proposals provide a vision of the kind of infrastructure which could be built to support developments such as notebooks, while maintaining some of the current journal-based structure.