This is a guest post by Binay Panda (2024 ASAPbio Fellow), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India (https://www.binaypandalab.org/).
I spoke at the 17th Young Investigators’ Meeting (YIM) in Agra, India. The meeting, including the satellite sessions meant exclusively for the postdocs, was spread over 5 days (3-7 March 2025). I attended day 3 of the meeting and spoke about Preprints and Open Science. This was my first YIM, and I enjoyed meeting and discussing it with many of the ECRs and Postdocs, including the trip to see the legendary Taj Mahal. The idea of the meeting, well organized and managed, was to get ECRs and postdocs (those close to applying for independent faculty positions in India) locked in a single room with other senior investigators and institute heads who may help them to understand the process of hiring in Indian universities and research institutions, along with exposing them to the different aspects of the larger ecosystem of Indian academia.
I spoke about how best to practice open science, our efforts to spread awareness on preprints in India, and building a database of preprints with annotations, especially those from India, with information that may help search for relevant information in preprints. I shared our unpublished data on preprints from Indian researchers to make information open, free, and immediately accessible to all. India lags behind the rest of the world in the preprint deposits (with about 1/50th of the global number) in three prominent preprint servers (bioRxiv, medRxiv, and arXiv Q-bio*). I discussed what we could do in the community to boost this number and how organizations like ASAPbio are helping spread awareness of preprints and making the fruits of science reach everyone in a timely and free manner (ASAPbio sponsored my talk).
There were reactions from three groups of folks to my talk. First, the postdocs and ECRs. Those who directly spoke with me after my talk appreciated getting the information. They were largely unaware of the benefits of preprints and learned that metrics like JIF are bogus and not the right surrogate to judge the quality of science. This group also appreciated someone older from academia talking about it openly and publicly. The second group was that of a few senior investigators, all of whom, while appreciating that someone was talking about it, were not 100% sure whether they should embrace preprints fully. Their apprehensions primarily stem from their experience with the old way of publishing the results of science and playing a part in that closed system. The apprehension and fear of losing out in an open field of science publishing were genuine. The reaction from the third group, the publishers in the room, was most interesting. Their reaction was rather a stunned silence except one who told me that he really liked my talk.
Representatives from four publishers (American Chemical Society, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and American Society for Microbiology) spoke before me. ACS is one of the largest, or perhaps the largest, society publishers, with ~800M US $ revenue in 2024. I asked the speaker how ACS is helping authors from India, if at all, to pay their exorbitant article processing charges (APC). While being sympathetic, the ACS representative was non-committal. Next, the Chief Editor of Scientific Reports, a publication from Springer Nature, gave a talk on ethics in publication. It was a great talk, except there was a problem. Only a few months back, a few fraud sleuths, including Elisabeth Bik, had written an open letter (https://deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/10/an-open-letter-regarding-scientific.html) to the Research Integrity Director of Springer Nature on how the publisher is doing very little to protect the scientific literature from fraudulent work! That was what I asked him: how did the journal that had generated >60M US$ in revenue for 2024 with >22K published articles that year spend little on checking the articles for fraud and low-quality work? He gave a standard answer expected from a journal’s Chief Editor from a commercial publisher mega house. The next talk was even more interesting, by the Taylor & Francis (T&F) representative, another publishing giant. The talk was on Open research and how T&F is doing so much to promote it, except that it is not (in my opinion). Recently, the publisher has purchased F1000Res and PeerJ, one of which practiced a post-publication open review system, leaving little options for the authors to submit their manuscripts to small independent publishers. What disturbed me the most in that talk was the news on specific partnerships the publisher has entered into with some institutions in India for publishing on their platform. I asked myself, and I could be completely wrong, why on earth would an institution enter into an agreement with a commercial publisher that sounded almost like bribing the publisher by paying exorbitant APC to publish a certain number of articles, irrespective of basic quality, from the institution in the publisher’s journals?
That set the stage for my talk. Science publishers do not fund research, do not conduct research, do not write manuscripts, and do not review them. The only thing they do (apart from other minor things) is contact scientists to work for them for free and decorate the work in beautiful PDFs. Do we need them? No, we do not. Whether it is a society or a commercial publisher, the bottom line is that both are obstacles to the free and fair dissemination of scientific information. The scientific community needs platforms where they can submit their completed work for free and for other experts to judge and comment fairly and immediately without waiting months (sometimes years) for the peer review process to complete. The idea is to get away from the binary of “Accept” or “Reject” that traditional journals do and to provide objective feedback on one’s science. Indeed, a perfect system for peer review and permanent archiving does not exist today. Still, there are efforts from many individuals and organizations to reach this goal, and it is incumbent on all of us to help achieve that goal.
In retrospect, giving publishers space to speak to ECRs and postdocs was a missed opportunity. We do not need to hear sermons from these publishers on practicing open science and being ethical in our research. We need to discuss how soon we can escape the claws of greedy publishers and make the fruits of science available to all free of cost, enabling our peers to comment and provide constructive criticisms of scholarly work.
*partial data, from 2013-2023
This is a guest post by Binay Panda (2024 ASAPbio Fellow), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India (https://www.binaypandalab.org/).
I spoke at the 17th Young Investigators’ Meeting (YIM) in Agra, India. The meeting, including the satellite sessions meant exclusively for the postdocs, was spread over 5 days (3-7 March 2025). I attended day 3 of the meeting and spoke about Preprints and Open Science. This was my first YIM, and I enjoyed meeting and discussing it with many of the ECRs and Postdocs, including the trip to see the legendary Taj Mahal. The idea of the meeting, well organized and managed, was to get ECRs and postdocs (those close to applying for independent faculty positions in India) locked in a single room with other senior investigators and institute heads who may help them to understand the process of hiring in Indian universities and research institutions, along with exposing them to the different aspects of the larger ecosystem of Indian academia.
I spoke about how best to practice open science, our efforts to spread awareness on preprints in India, and building a database of preprints with annotations, especially those from India, with information that may help search for relevant information in preprints. I shared our unpublished data on preprints from Indian researchers to make information open, free, and immediately accessible to all. India lags behind the rest of the world in the preprint deposits (with about 1/50th of the global number) in three prominent preprint servers (bioRxiv, medRxiv, and arXiv Q-bio*). I discussed what we could do in the community to boost this number and how organizations like ASAPbio are helping spread awareness of preprints and making the fruits of science reach everyone in a timely and free manner (ASAPbio sponsored my talk).
There were reactions from three groups of folks to my talk. First, the postdocs and ECRs. Those who directly spoke with me after my talk appreciated getting the information. They were largely unaware of the benefits of preprints and learned that metrics like JIF are bogus and not the right surrogate to judge the quality of science. This group also appreciated someone older from academia talking about it openly and publicly. The second group was that of a few senior investigators, all of whom, while appreciating that someone was talking about it, were not 100% sure whether they should embrace preprints fully. Their apprehensions primarily stem from their experience with the old way of publishing the results of science and playing a part in that closed system. The apprehension and fear of losing out in an open field of science publishing were genuine. The reaction from the third group, the publishers in the room, was most interesting. Their reaction was rather a stunned silence except one who told me that he really liked my talk.
Representatives from four publishers (American Chemical Society, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and American Society for Microbiology) spoke before me. ACS is one of the largest, or perhaps the largest, society publishers, with ~800M US $ revenue in 2024. I asked the speaker how ACS is helping authors from India, if at all, to pay their exorbitant article processing charges (APC). While being sympathetic, the ACS representative was non-committal. Next, the Chief Editor of Scientific Reports, a publication from Springer Nature, gave a talk on ethics in publication. It was a great talk, except there was a problem. Only a few months back, a few fraud sleuths, including Elisabeth Bik, had written an open letter (https://deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/10/an-open-letter-regarding-scientific.html) to the Research Integrity Director of Springer Nature on how the publisher is doing very little to protect the scientific literature from fraudulent work! That was what I asked him: how did the journal that had generated >60M US$ in revenue for 2024 with >22K published articles that year spend little on checking the articles for fraud and low-quality work? He gave a standard answer expected from a journal’s Chief Editor from a commercial publisher mega house. The next talk was even more interesting, by the Taylor & Francis (T&F) representative, another publishing giant. The talk was on Open research and how T&F is doing so much to promote it, except that it is not (in my opinion). Recently, the publisher has purchased F1000Res and PeerJ, one of which practiced a post-publication open review system, leaving little options for the authors to submit their manuscripts to small independent publishers. What disturbed me the most in that talk was the news on specific partnerships the publisher has entered into with some institutions in India for publishing on their platform. I asked myself, and I could be completely wrong, why on earth would an institution enter into an agreement with a commercial publisher that sounded almost like bribing the publisher by paying exorbitant APC to publish a certain number of articles, irrespective of basic quality, from the institution in the publisher’s journals?
That set the stage for my talk. Science publishers do not fund research, do not conduct research, do not write manuscripts, and do not review them. The only thing they do (apart from other minor things) is contact scientists to work for them for free and decorate the work in beautiful PDFs. Do we need them? No, we do not. Whether it is a society or a commercial publisher, the bottom line is that both are obstacles to the free and fair dissemination of scientific information. The scientific community needs platforms where they can submit their completed work for free and for other experts to judge and comment fairly and immediately without waiting months (sometimes years) for the peer review process to complete. The idea is to get away from the binary of “Accept” or “Reject” that traditional journals do and to provide objective feedback on one’s science. Indeed, a perfect system for peer review and permanent archiving does not exist today. Still, there are efforts from many individuals and organizations to reach this goal, and it is incumbent on all of us to help achieve that goal.
In retrospect, giving publishers space to speak to ECRs and postdocs was a missed opportunity. We do not need to hear sermons from these publishers on practicing open science and being ethical in our research. We need to discuss how soon we can escape the claws of greedy publishers and make the fruits of science available to all free of cost, enabling our peers to comment and provide constructive criticisms of scholarly work.
*partial data, from 2013-2023