Take cOAlition S’s survey by the November 29th deadline to support a new model of publishing
cOAlition S, an initiative of more than 2 dozen national funders and charitable organizations, has recently released the “Towards Responsible Publishing” proposal.
The two key features of this proposal, as stated in an introductory blog post, are:
1. Authors, not third-party suppliers, decide when and what to publish.
In such a ‘scholar-led’ publishing system, third-party suppliers can still offer and charge for services that facilitate peer review, publication and preservation. However, they will not block scholars from sharing their work at any stage during the research and dissemination process.
2. The scholarly record includes the full range of outputs created during the research cycle, and not just the final journal-accepted version.
By making early article versions and peer review feedback critical elements of the scholarly record, a future scholarly communication system can capture research ‘in the act’. Shining a light on how research progresses towards increasingly trustworthy knowledge creation offers opportunities for reviewing and filtering scholarly outputs for the purposes of curation and research assessment.
Towards Responsible Publishing
Together, these features support an ecosystem of preprint servers on top of which open peer review and curation may be layered. In the proposal, cOAlition S additionally addresses inequities associated with the APC model, writing, “We fully recognise that publishing incurs costs, but we believe that all researchers should be able to publish their work as Open Access, without author-facing charges.”
This proposal is thought-provoking and transformative, yet it is already a reality in the case of preprint review projects. To learn more, see materials related to the 2022 Recognizing Preprint Peer Review meeting.
Take action
This plan is already being criticized as placing additional burdens on researchers and not involving their voices adequately. Therefore, especially if you are an active researcher, it’s important to provide feedback to cOAlition S to share your views on these ideas.
It’s easy:
- Review the project summary, or if you have more time, the proposal.
- Take the survey. You can choose which free-text responses to respond to.
Please share the survey with your labmates, classmates, and colleagues, too.
Image from Towards Responsible Publishing by cOAlition S is licensed under CC BY.