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Alternative Publishing Platforms

Knowledge Exchange activity

Published onApr 21, 2022
Alternative Publishing Platforms
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Project Leads

Jeroen Sondervan (Utrecht University), Jean-Francois Lutz (University of Lorraine), Mafalda Marques (Jisc), Anna Mette Morthorst (DEIC), Karin van Grieken (SURF).

T&F group members

Daniel Beucke (Goettingen University Library), Xenia van Edig (Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB)), Serge Bauin (CNRS), Alexandra Freeman (University of Cambridge), Janne-Tuomas Seppänen (University of Jyväskylä), Rasmus Rindum Riise (Copenhagen University Library / Royal Danish Library), Claus Rosenkrantz Hansen (Copenhagen Business School), Arianna Becerril-Garcia (AmeliCA), Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer (Leiden University), Bianca Kramer (Utrecht University).

Introduction

Research findings have traditionally been published as peer-reviewed academic articles, monographs and edited collection, proceedings, or theses, with academic publishing companies being the main venue for the publication of findings. In order for research organisations to make research findings available to their researchers and students, they have to subscribe to journals and monographs agreements. One of the issues with this process of publication and discoverability of academic content is that it has become increasingly costly to research organisations and has tied them to big deal agreements with a limited number of publishers1.

More recently, changes in the scholarly communications landscape have fomented the emergence of other forms of communication and dissemination of research findings. For example: preprint repositories, data journals, scholarly blogs and websites, innovations of the peer review process, and micropublications2. These are innovative forms of publication that seek to remove the barriers, constraints and costs imposed by legacy academic publishing companies.

In the title of the activity and this scoping paper we use the term ‘alternative’ with which we precisely envision those publishing platforms and projects that follow different paths (e.g. in equitable publishing models, quality control, technical features, open source, iterative publishing workflows, etc.) compared to the already mentioned legacy publishers. Although we use the term alternative, we recognize that this can also lead to narrowing or even ambiguity. Where necessary, we try to address this in the right way or to make it explicit in our results.

Alternative forms of publication have been explored by multiple stakeholders in the last two decades, with open access publishing being the most widely known, which encompasses, for example, the publication of peer-reviewed articles in full open access (with or without article processing charges (APCs)) journals, in hybrid journals (subscription based journals which allow open access publishing upon payment of an APC), or via deposit of the research output in a repository (green route). One issue that has emerged from making research findings publicly available for free is that a large commercial sector has relied on journal publishing as a income stream with often large profit margins. These commercial players have developed considerable power over academia because academic research assessment has become intrinsically entangled with journal publications, making them almost the be-all and end-all for researchers. Hence research organisations spend large proportions of their budgets on access to journal publications, through academics themselves paying for APCs or research organisations signing up to transformative agreements3).

Globally, many have criticised focussing only on APC-based journals as a way to foster open access. The critique is that this merely shifts the onus of payment from those wanting to read to those wanting to publish and consequently creates new inequalities. Moreover, by linking the publisher's revenue to the number of accepted articles, the APC-system runs the risk of encouraging the lowering of scientific standards for acceptance in journals4. Diamond (i.e. free to read, free to publish) journal publishing models deserve attention as a way of making research articles freely available to readers whilst avoiding the potential drawbacks of APC-based publishing. Existing diamond journals are sometimes regarded as not requiring any fostering as they are already fully open access and do not charge authors. However, for these (often smaller) journals to remain a viable publishing venue, they cannot be neglected.

There are projects to set up diamond publishing options for institutions, and to support development of new and existing diamond journals in terms of infrastructure and visibility, such as through national and regional journal platforms.

Not all diamond journals can be considered as alternative publishing (platforms), but diamond journals can definitely make use of alternative publishing platforms such as infrastructure (including new, more inclusive, governance models). In addition, alternative publishing platforms can have diamond models. The connection between diamond journals and alternative publishing platforms is that they both can play a role in fulfilling the need that is felt for a form of open access that is characterised by lowering costs and keeping control of publishing, in terms of public and academic led governance. In addition to the problem of cost, there are several researchers' needs which aren’t being met when publishing in traditional journals and why alternative platforms are seeing the light.

Alternative publishing platforms

Over the past decade a vibrant ecosystem of so-called alternative open access publishing platforms has emerged, many of which aim to tackle some of the perceived issues with the journal publishing system other than cost. Platforms represent a move away from the traditional journal as an organising principle. These platforms might differ from traditional scholarly journals in a number of ways, including publication process, governance and underlying infrastructure.

They often apply a wider disciplinary scope, include the publication of submitted versions/preprints5 and apply open peer review. Often the focus is on free availability of content, transparency and efficiency rather than selectivity or prestige.

Alternative publishing platforms may also focus on one or more of the following aspects:

  • speed of publication (e.g. preprint servers, and F1000 prepublication);

  • reforming the peer review process (e.g. Copernicus Publications; SciPost; F1000 open review; Peerpub, Peer Community In);

  • reproducibility and replicability of research results (e.g. Open Science Framework; eLife’s Executable Research Articles);

  • publication bias; incentive structures.

The value of alternative publishing platforms is not to be underestimated. They can represent not only examples of real innovative, open access scholarly communication, but also effective "threat infrastructures" to traditional journal publishers.6 Depending on one’s point of view the acquisition of F1000Research by Taylor & Francis either confirms the value of such a threat or shows its limited effect. A number of developments can be seen, which are being set up by various parties with a specific goal in mind.

Below we identify three examples in which various aspects of ‘alternative’ are manifested.

Funder platforms

Notable examples of alternative publishing platforms have been started by funders like the Wellcome Trust, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Irish Health Board and more recently the European Commission with its Open Research Europe (all using the infrastructure and publishing model provided by F1000Research).7

Stakeholder governed (institutional/national/regional) platforms

In the Netherlands alternative publishing platforms is one of the five pillars of the national open access strategy of the Universities of the Netherlands (UNL) in 2018.8 Until now these initiatives have not received the same level of attention from research institutions that has gone into negotiating transformative deals with traditional publishers. An exception is the ‘University Journals’9 initiative that was announced in 2018, but to date has remained in a conceptual phase10. Another example is from TU Delft that aims to set up its own open access publishing platform as part of their open science programme.11 Examples from other Knowledge Exchange countries include, for instance, UCL Open: Environment, the first journal from UCL Press run on ScienceOpen12, and national, community-owned journal platforms in e.g. Finland, Denmark, France and the Netherlands13.

These examples show that these alternative platforms can offer an interesting and innovative route to open access using a different infrastructure. These platforms are also often responsible for publishing in native languages and therefore supporting multilingualism.14 In some cases, they act as a counterbalance to the massification and uniformisation of big publishers and as such they bring bibliodiversity.15

Experimental publishing platforms

Scholar-led platforms like SciPost16, ResearchEquals17 and, in the slipstream of the recently announced UKRI Open Access policy18, the Octopus19 platform, could just as well qualify as alternative publishing platforms. The underlying technical (open) infrastructure of such platforms enables communities to build and establish new publishing models, that for example disintegrate the publishing functions, or offer new open science workflows like, amongst others, open peer review, replicability, modularity, machine-readability, pre-registration of hypotheses and methods, transparency and ease of accessing methods, validation and re-usability of data and inference. These new ways of publishing research, designed as they are specifically around the needs of research and researchers rather than for readability or income-generation, should be able to change the incentive system of publication to favour any or all aspects of good research practice.

Sustainability of alternative publishing platforms

A big question is what kind of support alternative publishing venues need and how to organise that support. It may start with wider recognition of their role. Gaining more insight in infrastructural support and scalable mechanisms for financial support where necessary is also needed, and these may depend on collective action, as outlined in a recent Knowledge Exchange report.20 The challenge may lie in how to apply the idea of scaling small: generating economies of scale while maintaining diversity and decentralised control.

Towards a taxonomy of alternative publishing platforms

As illustrated above, alternative publishing platforms are considered by many as avenues to effect positive changes in the publishing [or scholarly communication] system. However, different people think of different things when they talk about ‘alternative publishing platforms’. To facilitate a productive conversation among stakeholders (including researchers, institutions, funders and (non-profit) publishers), a proposal is made to construct a taxonomy of the concept of alternative publishing platforms, teasing apart the different characteristics at play. Far from proposing one definition, such a taxonomy can help to clarify discussions around alternative publishing platforms and highlight opportunities for development and investment.

Follow-up actions

In the first phase of the activity the Knowledge Exchange Task & Finish group will ask the following research questions: what characteristics of alternative publishing platforms can be distinguished and how do existing alternative publishing platforms fit into the proposed taxonomy? As a first outcome, the group will develop a toolkit which integrates the proposed taxonomy. Throughout the process we would welcome feedback on this scoping paper and the developed taxonomy. To collect community feedback on our work, like this scoping paper, all results will be published on the MIT PubPub platform, which allows others to contribute during the duration of the activity.

Comments
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Toby Steiner:

Coming back to my comment from 9months ago, COPIM’s Experimental Publishing Compendium has now been made publicly available, and the team will be continuing to curate and develop the database under the remit of the Open Book Futures project (2023-26).
This includes a typology of approaches to Experimental Publishing based on the COPIM WP6 research reports, all of which can be accessed via https://compendium.copim.ac.uk/ with background details available at https://compendium.copim.ac.uk/about

Toby Steiner:

just to add that with Octopus now being hosted by Jisc, this would not fall under the definition of “scholar-led” platforms ;)

Toby Steiner:

Just in case you aren’t already aware of this, the 2019 mapping exercise that led to the Mind the Gap report might be a great starting point, see Maxwell, J. W., Hanson, E., Desai, L., Tiampo, C., O’Donnell, K., Ketheeswaran, A., … Michelle, E. (2019). Mapping the Landscape. In Mind the Gap: A Landscape Analysis of Open Source Publishing Tools and Platforms (1st ed.). https://doi.org/10.21428/6bc8b38c.2e2f6c3f

And focusing on open source experimental book publishing, COPIM’s Experimental Publishing Compendium might also be of interest here, see https://compendium.copim.ac.uk/

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Alexandra Howat:

Great paper! One comment is that during your taxonomy work, it might be useful to consider the significance (or not) of the process of peer review and acceptance on an article, and whether this impacts if something is truly considered ‘published’ or not - is it ‘posted’ instead? And by extension, are all those discussed therefore publishing platforms? Should this idea be included in the taxonomy? Can be a useful way to relay information about the role of the platform and status of an article.

Secondly - the Microbiology recently launched an open research platform by converting their sound science journal into the open research platform platform using their current technology stack. So this is both not-for-profit led and owned, but underpinned by more traditional/vendor technologies. So it shows it is possible for smaller orgs can ‘stitch’ together and create their own and don’t have to rely on bigger commercial platforms in the move to open science and innovation. Slightly different angle to the ones discussed in the paper. More info here: https://microbiologysociety.org/news/society-news/microbiology-society-launches-an-innovative-open-research-platform.html

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Marie-Claude Deboin:

A taxonomy (much more a typology) of publishing platforms seems to be very useful to share concepts, definitions, features. It would be useful to caracterize platforms by their owners (public or not), their location, their governance model, the objects that they handle (preprints, postprints, articles, books, research data, …) and their place in the research life cycle, their software, their functions, their process (depositing, reviewing, editing, publishing, disseminating), their interoperability or interconnections with other platforms or initiatives, their transparency, openness, etc. I think that some institutional or national (public) platforms shouldn’t be considered as so traditional as they have integrated in the recent years some innovative, useful and efficient features (I think to OJS with its plug-in for ORCID, Crossref, Dataverse, etc. implmented by many academic institutions)

Toby Steiner:

I do indeed wonder with regards to ambiguities if ‘alternative’ is a very productive characteristic to work with here - as it quickly raises the question about “an alternative to what exactly”?

I don’t think legacy publishers constitute ‘platforms’ in themselves that one would seek to establish an alternative to - most legacy outlets I'm aware of simply provide paywalled PDF versions of articles on their websites (which hardly makes for an actual "publishing platform" that an alternative to would need to be sought), while a few also provide extended features - that then are suffering from the lock-in effect of paywalls.

So I'm thinking, would the alternative maybe manifest more in the format of presentation, i.e. open, often not-for-profit, born-digital, hybrid and multi-format publication platforms that go beyond the 'classic' PDF provision that legacy providers tend to provide?

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Jeroen Sondervan:

Dear Tobias,
Many thanks for your comments in the document.

This is a good point and indeed we consider these features on format of presentation as one aspect of ‘alternative’. But we think e.g., business models, the disintegration of publishing and innovative strategies to enhance and open the entire research cycle for publication should be taken along in this respect as well.

We acknowledge that it is probably not the most ideal term, but without having a better alternative (no pun intended) yet, we will start with this.

Demmy Verbeke:

I get “publication bias”, but what do you mean with “incentive structures”? Is there a platform that explicitly aims to change “incentive structures”? If so, giving the example like in the previous bullets would help.

Toby Steiner:

Just as a formal note, while MIT has been a home to PubPub during its early development phase, I believe the legal entity now maintaining PubPub is the membership organisation Knowledge Futures Group. https://www.pubpub.org/about

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Jeroen Sondervan:

You are right. We will amend this and acknowledge KFG as hosting service properly (and MIT as early developer).

Toby Steiner:

for open transparency’s sake, should this also include a note to point to F1000 being a Taylor & Francis venture? (see Martin Eve’s article cited above, and e.g. Page 2020).

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Jeroen Sondervan:

This is already mentioned a few sentences earlier (heading Alternative Publishing Platforms).

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Jeroen Sondervan:

Good suggestion to include developments with open books more explicitly. They would fit under the experimental platforms, but also national platforms (like we’ve been seeing with the development of Finland's open book platform). We will look at your suggestions and try to properly add references and information about the COPIM project and other related initiatives with open books and/or longer formats in the scoping paper.

Toby Steiner:

oh, that’d be great, thanks so much, Jeroen!

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Toby Steiner:

Not sure if ‘stakeholder-governed’ is the best way to characterize these platforms?
Wouldn’t shareholders also be stakeholders in the context of commercial publishers?

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Jeroen Sondervan:

Good point. It should be ‘academic stakeholder-governed’. We will change this in the next version of this scoping paper.

Toby Steiner:

Would suggest to provide more information on that topic, including references to existing literature in the field, e.g. Barnes & Gatti, 2019 , Ferwerda & ScholarLed, 2020, and Adema & Moore, 2021.

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Jeroen Sondervan:

Very good suggestions, we will add these references to a next version of the scoping paper.

Toby Steiner:

Thanks so much for your work on this to the whole team involved in this KE initiative!
One conceptual question, if I may - in the opening paragraphs, you mention the breadth of different output channels and formats present in the scholcomm landscape, while the later paras then very much appear to narrow the scope of investigation towards what appears to be a journal-only focus … Is that the intention of this exercise, or would you see other kinds of platforms also falling under the remit of this scoping exercise?

Toby Steiner:

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