This is an important question to ask and provides some of the graphics discussed in our final preprints in motion podcast episode

A fantastic report commissioned by PLOS.

What I love about this study is that it provides evidence for so much of what I’ve been saying. This also highlights some important issues around advocacy. As James Butcher covered in his newsletter, preprinting is stalling (also see the data from our report) and the current advocacy efforts have largely been abandoned. In fact, we’re one of the only organisations with appropriate expertise advocating for preprinting currently (alongside openRxiv and PREreview, although the latter focusses much more on preprint review).

“the Open Science movement that was founded to reform science often recycles the same extractive dynamics of neoliberal capitalism described by dependency theory. I show that even when the Global South gains representation at the table of Open Science, they are never allowed to rewrite the rules of the game.“

This is such a great article!

Find the platform here, chemRxiv has moved to this new platform

“The results clearly show that there is a need for support in almost all of the topics surveyed. Questions regarding financing and viable business models, quality standards in publishing, and indexing in relevant databases were particularly highlighted“ - To me this shows significant barriers to wider adoption of Diamond OA

Good to see that despite a lot of redundancies, eLife is doing OK. I very much support eLife and how they approach peer review but I do think it’s a huge shame they’re pushing PRC so much as I can’t see that model leading to the change they think it will, but it will come at the cost of standalone preprints and experimentation around trust in particular. It feels more a shifting of the goalposts rather than anything genuinely new and innovative. It’s also always worth remembering that they are heavily reliant on funders and (still) not operating independently as a publisher - which may be a big reason they push PRC as the biggest benefactors (& unfortunately, it isn’t researchers that most benefit from PRC).

Good article and I’ve been calling for greater collaboration for a long time now. But this only works if these efforts also broaden who participates and stop concentrating power with a minority.

This is such an excellent read - highly recommended in this newsletter

See also this response by Johan Rooryck. I definitely sit somewhere between these two on Diamond OA.

This is a growing problem and there doesn’t seem to be any ideal solutions as of yet.

Perhaps a good reason not to use Grammarly in your academic work

“I wonder whether a specific APC should be established for each individual author, enabling small groups to obtain some modest compensation with respect to the “excellent” giant teams“

See also this Nature coverage. Sadly, this probably isn’t surprising.

I’m certainly a proponent of critical metascience, particularly given the behaviour of some within the effort

“A key solution is for a range of stakeholders to reduce the demand for tick-box papers. Where they are not needed, institutions should stop requiring students to produce a paper to qualify. Universities should disengage from league tables that are driving the hyper-inflation in paper and citation numbers. Funders should focus on a researcher’s top five papers and wider impacts rather than basing decisions on the number of publications.“

I believe that for accountability, you need transparency but fully agree that transparency alone is insufficient.