Eva says that we do the questions because now we have the roundtable,
because if I heard, we can do like a keep on going.
And then we will need that.
So, Remy comes to the roundtable with Eva.
Remy, I see already, Juan Muriel, but I cannot see him.
Becky Castellon, I don't know if you're here.
Yes, okay.
[inaudible]
At the end, it will be in English?
Yes.
I don't know the link.
You're so short.
[inaudible]
Okay, I will switch into English because I think
we need to be more proactive, more flexible.
I'm sure that everybody can follow us.
And also, there is simultaneous translation.
I don't know if it's going to change Korean.
No, I will not speak Korean.
Okay, so this is my pleasure as extension for
my talk that it was provocative in purpose.
So, we can just have this new topic, which is a fantastic topic, the
role of scientific editors, publishers in the open science scenario.
And I have four very interesting people
with me today to have different voices.
We have Wilhelm, that he was also our panelist today.
He talked with the hat of the librarian, with the hat
of the US, many other hacks that I know you about that.
And he will represent this library and this institutional role.
We have also Remy Melero that you know very well because
she's a researcher herself, and also an open science militant.
I give you that role because it's how I define myself.
She's a researcher.
She works in the Institute of Agrochemistry and Food
Technology and the Spanish National Research Council.
And we have also two representatives of the publishers.
We have one Buriel, just close by my left,
and he works for Cambridge University Press.
He's been spending more than 20 years in this career of a publisher.
And your current position is, if I have it
well, is your senior sales executive, right?
And the point is that I think Cambridge University Press is one of these publishers that you mentioned
this morning that not many of them want to change the business model because they have the golden eggs.
So probably they don't want to change it.
But particularly in the case of Cambridge University Press, they have been working
to change the business model, even if you keep being a for-profit institution, right?
And also we have other kind of publisher, which is the representative of MDPI, which is
also well known for the Spanish researchers that we are rushed to pay MDPI to get published.
And also you give me the journal impact
factor, you give me the position I just pay.
I'm super happy about that.
But it's another business model based on goal-open
access, pure goal-open access, and it's Becky Castellon.
She's the institutional partnerships manager at MDPI.
And you have been in this current position for three years, right?
And all of them, we have, including me,
we have a background in library science.
You are not a librarian.
But you are a very good interlocutor.
Sometimes the librarians, we need researchers that they are good interlocutors
to understand what is the business and what is the problems that we have.
But I will start the panel asking just a very obvious question.
What is the role of scientific publishers in open science and scenario?
I think since you have more or less set up in your presentation, you can just
pin down the main issues that you want to just underline from your presentation.
What is the role for you as a librarian, as an
institutional leader also in the context of open science?
Well, I think we all know that the publishers have
taken a role in open access and in open science.
And that is good.
I think in the beginning, the publishers said no to open access.
But they have flipped and changed, and they
have made open access as a business model.
Also, inside, when you're talking about open data, many publishers are
investing in repositories and other ways to get us to pay for the data as well.
So I think the main problem, many publishers want to work in
open science, but the main problem is that it costs too much.
And I think I'll stop there.
Okay, they have a role, but it's very expensive.
Wow.
What do you think, Juan?
Let's have the voice of the publishers now.
What do you think about the role?
What is the role and what is it you think is very expensive or not?
That may be also another question.
Well, as I said before, we are, well, we play a different
role than the usual because we are part of the university.
So we have a different approach.
And as you know, now we are in the face of the, well, maybe I wouldn't talk
too much about transformative agreement, but read on public or whatever.
But we are trying to change this model.
So it's not just a question of, as we said before
about Antonio Machado, it's not to talk the talk.
We're going to walk the walk.
And that's what we are doing now.
And not just with the transformative agreement.
It's something that we are doing with our journals.
We are flipping them to open access.
We are transforming hybrids to open access journals.
We are launching new journals, all of them in open access.
We are transforming our own systems.
So we were not ready for the transformative movement.
So it's something that we have to, our
workflows were not ready for this new system.
And at the same time, we are giving voice to another stakeholders because we think that, for
instance, for researchers in low and middle and low income countries, they don't have the opportunity.
So we have created a program to give them the voice.
And in general, we think that it's a question
of all stakeholders have to bear in mind.
So we have to change the panorama, the scenario.
We have to change our systems.
It's a task for all of us.
So it's just for, not just for publishers, for
researchers, for funders, for all of us involved.
And it's something that, as we say, we are in a transition moment.
But it's something that we are really committed
because, as I said, we are part of the university.
So it's not just because it's what it is now.
What we have to do is because we are
part and we believe in what we are doing.
That is the best one for the research and for the open science.
Okay.
So what is your point in here, Becky?
What do you think is the role of the publishers, particularly your?
I just want to start by thanking you for letting me be on this panel.
I can provide a bit more of a formal statement.
So I might just read that out and then I
guess hopefully that will answer the question.
So I will be showing more the perspective
of a native, fully open access publisher.
So MDPI, since its creation in 1996, has been
a bit of a disruptor in the publishing space.
Everything we do is open access and
it's always been one of our core values.
It's something that we champion every day through the
articles that we publish, the initiatives that we fund,
and the services that we give back to the scientific community.
We seek to innovate and make a world that is a more open place.
So we see the democratization of knowledge as a
linchpin of progress, removing barriers and
paywalls, building a free flow of information.
These are key aspects to drive progress and equality.
And open access is about changing how we share
knowledge in this growing world of globalization,
to work together to solve some of the world's most pressing problems,
including some of the sustainable development
goals that I see are listed behind us.
But obviously these are more benefits of open access
as a whole, which isn't what we're here to talk about.
So the transition towards open access has been pretty slow,
and one of the blockers has been the shift of the blame Baton.
So who needs to push the change?
Is it libraries, the researchers, the funders, the publishers?
All of these stakeholders play a key role in this process,
and all of these different roles are deeply interconnected.
The role of the publisher, I would say, to answer the question,
is to maintain the integrity of the publishing process,
whilst innovating to make open science bigger and more accessible.
We can't just keep doing what we've done for the last 200 years.
The world has evolved, and so has our role.
So our role is not just to provide a platform,
but we need to build a scalable and
sustainable framework to support open science.
The current status quo, as you mentioned, with
transformative and read and publish agreements, is where we're at now.
However, this has not proved to be very
efficient, or as efficient as originally intended.
Journals are missing their OA targets,
and progress has been pretty slow.
So are these really helping us lead to
the desired end goal of open science?
Generally, I think that publishers could be
doing more to achieve open science faster.
MDPI, obviously, is a kind of native OA publisher.
All 430+ gold OA journals that we publish are under a CC BY licence.
We have an open access books catalogue,
and we recently launched a new diamond open access journal.
In our support of libraries, MDPI is dedicated to being
an independable and transparent publishing partner,
and we want to help you help your researchers by
providing transparent and flexible open access models,
and creating new ways of supporting your researchers.
So open access is not just a publishing model,
it's a fundamental shift in the way knowledge is accessed and shared,
and it's a critical enabler of open science.
So to answer the question in one sentence,
the publisher's role is to be a facilitator.
We shouldn't be the gatekeepers of
knowledge, but the drivers of change.
Wow, that's an interesting point of view.
Remy, what is the voice of the researchers coming here?
And I have a specific relation with her answer to give it to you.
Do you think that the researchers, we need
the publishers to maintain our integrity?
Because it's what she said, I think it's
that it's straight to the researcher.
Well, in some way, so depends on the evaluation
assessment, because, well, we are still,
I remember last year, maybe you remember
too, and I can't remember the name.
It doesn't matter. He was saying, Raffles,
that researchers have in their genes,
so the impact factor. So when you were
talking about evaluation, so evaluation,
I mean, the researchers can change
how they behave in broad open access,
but the people who evaluate, are they
still have these genes in their mind?
So, said that, so I would like to put on the
floor something that we have been talking about,
changing business model. I will put an example.
The American Chemical Society,
which has several journals and they
have APCs, but they have a new model.
It's called Article Development Chart, the ADC,
that is for zero embargo green open access,
just 2,500 Euros. So this is not a change
in business model. This is ridiculous.
So I'm against APCs. I recognize, I mean, the
private companies that they have their business,
but I mean, the cost, I mean, is completely not transparent.
There is no transparency about how much it costs to produce a journal.
So it doesn't cost the same to publish 10 or 100 year journals.
And I mean, even the American Chemical Society, that is on their web.
So there is an infography with Donald and
part of one or more, one third or more.
So it's the cost of peer review management.
And I say, oh, peer review management,
you mean the infrastructure? But so the cost of
peer review is the hours we researchers spend.
evaluating or revising the article.
So and another question is copyright and secondary rights
and copyright assigned to the publishers. I'm against that.
And institutions should be, should do something against that.
So forbidden to assign way the copyright, the rights
of the authors that they produce their own products.
They contribute to their business and they charge again for the same.
So I stop here. That's very interesting.
But do you think still I think you didn't answer the question.
Do you think they have a role in the open science, the researchers?
I mean, from the point of view of the researcher,
the publishers have a role because you mentioned
all these issues that they are just
more and more invasive in our career,
which is something like charging for
processing, not only the article charge,
but also the development of the thing.
But do you think they still have a role?
Well, yes, I found out one role is about data
because you have mentioned before that the funders,
so they can request, they can force so they move for the open science.
So and I think the publishers could have this
positive role in the sense that some publishers
are requesting the previous archiving the data. Oh, yes.
But listen, so we have the law and the law is talking
about fair data and you have to deposit the data.
So but if plus, for instance, plus all the journals, plus
ask before, I mean, ask your data must be deposited before,
before submission. So believe me, so every
researcher is going to put first the data.
So and I think this is a kind of
probably a role in favour of open data,
but just not in their own repositories, but
in their institutional or trust repositories.
I think this could be a positive, positive thing.
But what the subjects about rights is still in the air.
OK, I disagree, but I would not have
speaker here just leading the discussion.
What do you think, Becky, about this role that you'd
mainstream that you think that research, I mean,
the connection between publishers and
researchers, you are a facilitator.
Do you think that this role that Remen Vision is just something
that you can work facilitating the openness of the data?
Do you have MDPI has any policy about that?
Well, we're kind of really pro open everything,
so we do really heavily encourage open data,
making data and research or research data available in the
submission, kind of fair research data policies, things like that.
So I yeah, I said use the word facilitator because obviously
as a publisher, we are kind of a venue for the research.
We undertake the kind of peer review process and enable that
kind of that verification of the science by other researchers
and then provide the the platform
for the reach of the of the research.
So, I mean, yeah, kind of with what you were
saying, it's coming from a native publisher.
Obviously, everything's published on the CC
by so the researchers maintain copyright.
They own everything. And we really push to be more
transparent and open in as many ways as we can.
You have any any perception on this and the facilitating between the publication and
data or what is the role of do you have from which any kind of policy in that sense?
Well, I think that following that more about the role
of the facilitator is that, for instance, in our case,
we publish about more than 400 journals and
a big percentage, about 60 percent of them,
the journals are published on behalf of the societies.
So that's the I think one of the key roles that we give visibility,
we give the promotion and the the
amplitude needed for all these researchers.
So I think it's one of the of the key of the key roles.
Apart from that, we have well as part of the university,
we have to comply several policies are aligned
with the with the rest of the university.
As I usually say, we are we are like a press department that has
grown and it's it becomes a separate part of the of the university.
We have our own entity, our own and we have to be sustainable.
And on the other hand, we have to reinvest in our in
our own systems to make this work as it should be.
So I think there is one of the key roles maybe we have.
I think we have several other opportunities, for
instance, and we have a loan more than 400 years.
So that's the the advantage that we know we have.
They know how we have this produce to publish.
We have the contacts, the workflows, all the peer review system.
So it's I know that it's something that has to change from
the old model, the big deal to the new model, whatever it is.
But one of the key is the stakeholders, it's publishers, because
otherwise I think it's something that is not going to work.
And all of us has our voice and we have as
stakeholders, as I say, like fund the researchers.
But all of us have to dialogue to have an
open dialogue and to go in the same direction.
OK, interesting to you mentioned before that is very expensive.
You know that in Spain we say that we don't
talk about money because it's not polite.
But let's talk about money. I think it's important issue here.
You mentioned in your talk that you have been negotiating with Elsevier,
I mean, with a publisher, which you mentioned particularly Elsevier.
But you said that at the end, the negotiation, it
cost 14 million of Euros at the national level.
It's not expensive. What is that? What is expensive for you?
Because you mentioned yourself. Wow, we won.
Well, we took a little step, I think. So it is really expensive.
And we didn't win, but we continued to work with Elsevier and we
got a decrease of the costs and got a big decrease with 11 percent.
But that is not not the future. I don't believe
that transformative agreement is the future.
It won't change the system at all. We still don't have
innovation within the scholarly communication system.
And we don't really have as much competition as we need.
We have new publishers like MDPI, but
you are still based on the APC market.
You don't show us how can we make more
publishing as a service that we discussed.
What will publishing for Stockholm University cost?
What do we work together on to make it transparent? And we are paying for what
we should, the costs of the publishing, not what you need for your investors.
I don't say that all the commercial companies are bad or something.
I understand that there are costs for publishing, but we can make that the
lowest cost decrease if we change the system within the publishers as well.
I know that Cambridge are doing a lot at the
Cambridge Advisory Board and things like that.
So that's a good step, but not many that follow us.
And then, of course, we need Quora. We need to change the merit system because the merit system put
us in the position that the researchers need to publish with the big publishers to get promoted.
So without that, we can change it.
But I think the publishers need to start changing that.
I think that publishers like MDPI also have to think about how can we work together with the
community and how can we leave the APC deals, because I don't think that's for the future.
Just let me pass the word of the publisher boys.
What do you think about Quora? Because that's very interesting.
We have attempts for publishers to be members of Quora.
Do you think you have something to
do in the research assessment system?
Because as a principle of Quora, we don't accept
any member in the coalition that is for profit.
So that's full stop. It's not allowed. And I remember a discussion that I had with
one of the members that they want to put Elsevier in one of the working groups.
And I said, excuse me, it's not that I'm against Elsevier.
It's that never the solution came with the hand of the problem.
So if we cannot put the problem on the discussion, because we are
creating Quora because of the publishing mechanisms currently.
But still, I may be confused. So I think you might have a role
to play in the research assessment as a member of the coalition.
I'm looking at you, but I'm looking at both of you.
I mean, publishers in general, no MDPI or not any business model.
Forget about the business model. What do you think in your ideal world
that the publisher will have a role in the new research assessment?
It's crazy to think about it. It's OK.
You are trying to kill my business model.
So what I will be collaborating with you guys, I want people to
publish in my journal Impact Factor, super high reputation journals.
So do you have any connection that
perhaps we can hear from the publishers?
Well, first of all, I will say that in our case, it's a little
bit different because we are not a commercial publisher.
Yeah. So it's just a little bit. But even I'm not
going to be an advocate of the devil in this case.
I will say that all of us, I think that's even my personal opinion.
So maybe someone at the Cambridge University persists.
I'm going to say you can do you can say that whatever you can say,
but you say, but I think that if it's something
that involves all of us, as I say, as stakeholders.
So I think it doesn't matter if in our case we are not,
as I say, commercial publisher, we are not for profit.
We have our mission. But even so, even thinking
about all publishers, all the actors involved,
no matter if they are for profit or not for
profit, but I think they all have their voice.
So I think we have to grow in the same direction.
So it's like the just the races.
So I think we have all of us have something to support.
We have our opinion. We have all of
us in depending on the way we behave.
All of us have to be sustainable in different ways.
And for example, for Cambridge, all as a non profit organization, we have to
be sustainable and we have to reinvest in the university and in ourselves,
in new systems, in new programs, in new journals and whatever.
But even as I say, not telling the difference
between commercial and non-commercial,
I think there is a voice that has to be heard
because maybe because there is a history behind us.
And we have to be we have to step ahead of that. We can maybe it
would be the ideal to cut as it is now and start from scratch.
But it's not possible. So we have we have a
background and we have something behind us.
And we have to start from that point and to make a real
transformative, a real progress, not in 80 years, of course,
a less than that amount, that a long period of time.
But it's something that all of us have to involve.
I don't know the ways, how to organize, how to implement.
But that's in that case, it's my personal opinion.
OK. Anything from your side?
I don't have very much to add, I think what they're doing in the UK with the research evaluation framework is
very interesting of actually not looking at impact factors at all and just looking at the impact of the research.
So not looking at the publication venue itself,
but more looking at the actual research.
And I think that's a very interesting concept. So whether
that's kind of similar to what Koara is kind of hoping to do.
But in terms of publisher involvement, I think. You know, whether obviously we can provide our side of things,
as you said, obviously, if some companies, some publishers will want to push impact factors more than others.
But I think it also depends on kind of what the kind of the prestige journals,
obviously, would prefer that we kind of focus only on impact factors.
But really, is that the only kind of research that we care about? Something that
we do at MDPI is that we've published false results that are not inconclusive.
Yeah, well, it doesn't have to be kind of, you know, a new kind of Nobel
Prize discovery if it's, you know, an experiment that hasn't worked out.
That's also useful to know so that the next researcher that comes along, you
know, they can see that, oh, someone's already tried that and it doesn't work.
And that's important to publish as well. So that's something that we strongly believe at MDPI of,
you know, research as, you know, if it's valid and it has a use, then it deserves to be published.
Well, but it's something I'm just thinking in a loud voice, that is something is
important. It is not important for the society because it's worth it to be published.
It's because it's important for the society to stop.
I think we are putting and we're considering Guara is exactly that.
We are putting a lot of energy on the venue and the fact that it's published. But imagine, for example, somebody can discover
the new software that changed everybody, you know, in the administrative, you know, in one topic, changed completely that system.
But the guy who made a software never think about publishing it. So what we want is that the fact
to be published doesn't legitimize an invention, or doesn't legitimize the real impact of something.
So it is the problem of the publication focus, the paper-centric system that we have created, is that we are avoiding other people
naturally discover things because they don't want to publish something particularly or because they don't want to pay for being published.
They can't do it. I know that my students, the PhD students, they are very happy to share everything in GitHub. They publish or they don't
do it in GitHub because they have to keep the cards here until it's already published because if not, they will not have the promotion.
So at the end of the day, we are creating a non-natural way of behaving. So that's why I think completely that the communication system has to
change. I don't know what is the role of, I mean, what is the point of view from the researcher as such, or the library as a support system?
Because in my opinion, the person who has the commitment with open science is the researcher. The institution helps you. The publisher is a facilitator,
offers you a venue just in case you want to publish. But your commitment with the society is you as a researcher. You, Remy, only you. Go ahead.
Well, I'm a researcher, of course, but you have to consider
that not all the disciplines behave in the same way.
That's a good point.
Because we were talking at the beginning, I mean, the lawyers, they don't publish, probably they publish
more books or they are based in another, they communicate in another way. So it depends on the discipline.
And I must say there are disciplines that behave from the beginning, like physics, and they upload the preprints. And I
would like to talk about preprints because normally publishers, or most publishers now allow the deposit of preprints.
So that is a way to put forward the new advance in science. But there is redundancy from the researchers. I
must say that we have run some surveys and asking for, I mean, asking for, do you upload normally preprints?
No, because I'm afraid I'm going to be scooped, or it's a novelty, and blah blah, because they
are afraid that they, I mean, I don't know if somebody is going to plagiarize the original work.
But it's difficult to be convinced that this is not going to happen. Because what I used to say at the
beginning of the open access movement, so it's no, no, preprints, no, because I'm going to be plagiarized.
And I said, okay, and you are not going to be plagiarized if you are, for instance, in an open
platform of Elsevier or Francis and Taylor, because it's open, I mean, or you have access.
So I think there is, researchers must also change behavior, and not only the publishers, by the way, and I agree with you that the
publishers should be service providers in some way, not just because a product that we produce and then we have to pay again for that.
And so probably we are always in a chaos, in thermodynamics, if there's some physics here, probably can
explain better, but the chaos is always something that there is reorganizing, the theory of the chaos.
And probably we are not in a transformation, but in this chaos process. But yes, I think part of the, I mean, of the
guilty part of the story are also the researchers because all this panic to be plagiarized by anybody else, and so on.
And I think that we have to work in this sense. I'm talking about the price. So I have given many courses
and workshops and so on. And I have heard many times that, oh, yes, but the open access is expensive.
And the open access, I mean, wasn't born because to make this business model, I mean to charge nearly
$1,000 in nature. So why nature charge 10,000 Euros or maybe 10,000 Euros for a paper? Prestige?
I can tell you because they can. Yeah, because there are somebody that is willing to pay
them. If you can get 10,000 for this pen, you will not charge less. That's the point.
Yeah, that's the point. But who can afford that? Because, I mean, there are
researchers in the, especially in this cold global south that I don't like the name.
Yeah, I don't like the word, but it is reality.
And who can afford that? So then they say, oh,
no, we have a waiver for the poor countries. Okay.
That's a good point. Who can afford the quality? Who gives quality to
the journals? And then I will just go to something that I sent to them.
And it was the last week on the 12th of September. I don't know if you heard about this, but it was published that in the United States,
it was a case open to six publishers, particularly Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Sage, Wileyland, Wolters & Kluwer.
And you know that they are the most expensive and the most rewarding business. And they have opened in the United
States an antitrust lawsuit against academic journal publishers because they mentioned three main components.
One is that they don't give any money, they don't pay,
the peer review service is zero for the researchers.
And this is one of the things that I want you to think about.
Who gives the quality to the publisher?
You mentioned that the publisher has a role on guaranteeing the
integrity of the publishing process. But who puts the quality?
If there are not researchers, peer review involved, it is absolutely not possible to
maintain the quality of a journal because the quality is not the layout, it's the content.
This is one of the key things that was very in the case. The other thing is that the publisher defendants agreed not
to compete on each other for the manuscript by requiring the scholars to submit a manuscript only to one journal.
This is something that is very against the advance of the research because if you just submit
it to one publisher, then you don't get published, your paper will be out of the market.
So this is something very interesting too. And the third case is that a publisher
defendants agreed to prohibit head scholars from freely sharing scientific achievements.
So this is the right retention strategy that comes from the plan S, that they don't like plan S, but this is something
interesting. Or how can afford to pay, who can afford to pay sharing the knowledge if sharing is not as appropriate?
Or what is the system against this kind of things? What do you think about this legal
process that is open? I was tweeting last week and I said, that's nice, but they will win.
They can pay with our money, the best lawyers in the whole world. So there's nothing to do. But I
think at least it's good that the publishers, and it's not you as publishers, but it's not you, you,
but the publishers recognize that they cannot make the work without their work of the researchers that we do for free. Actually, I don't do it anymore. When
they asked me, I remember one guy from a Springer Nature that asked me to review a paper and I say, how much are you going to pay me for review the paper?
I can say, no, nothing. This is included in your contract. And I say, excuse me, my contract as a faculty member
in the University Carlos III de Madrid didn't say that I have to work for free for a for business profit publisher.
I don't have anything in my contract. No, yes, but it's included in the activities that the researchers has to do. Who says that? So the point is, what is the value of the role of
the researcher in the quality of the publications, which is the only thing that could be on the top of your arguments, the quality of your business, the quality of your product?
What is the role of the researcher for you? Do you admit that the researchers
that they do their review, they should be paid or not? What do you think?
I mean, I think this is a big question, which I don't
think has a good answer, to be honest, because while...
I would agree that yes, obviously, we need researchers to carry out the peer review in order to kind of get the science kind of verified.
However, there's the kind of consideration that if we are paying peer reviewers, doesn't that put into question the integrity of the process?
The kind of the question of editorial independence and researchers being able to kind of freely kind of do the review as they
see fit, whereas if they're being paid, you know, that could potentially cause some questions about scientific integrity.
It's something that at MDPI, we do offer kind of reviewer vouchers to use on APCs. So whilst that isn't, you know, a kind
of a full kind of answer to the problem, it is something that we're aware of and trying to, you know, counteract somewhat.
But I do think more generally, the lawsuit is a little contradictory in terms of wanting to pay researchers for the peer review. But then the question about the single
submission or questioning the single submission, because actually, if a researcher were to submit their work into four different journals at four different publishers,
surely then we're creating even more work because then we have even more researchers who need to review the paper,
or you could have one person receiving four review requests for the same manuscript to different publishers.
Yes, but we want to have our business model like you have. That's why the researchers, they want to have money too. That
would be fantastic for us. If we review the same paper four times, that would be great if you pay for us that. Why not?
Well, I mean, then... I put you on the other side of the road.
I mean, well, I mean, I don't have a kind of a good answer for you. But yeah, it could, you know, then turn into that of, are
you going to do the peer review four times? Are you just going to use the same one? So actually might be beneficial for you.
I will use the same one, and I will keep making money. That would be perfect
for a researcher. I'm just joking. I don't think it's going to happen.
The big problem is that it will end up that the libraries are paying for that even more because the publishers
will take it out on the subscriptions or on the APCs. So if you get money, we have to pay on the fourth time.
But I don't really think that we should pay for peer reviewing because peer reviewing is the
scientific discussion among that drives the science forward. So I think that is within the system.
But I really understand why they are suing because if you can see the profit margins on 40%, they ask, why don't we get paid when
you have margins like that? So I understand why they do it, but I don't think the solution is to pay the researchers for peer review.
Okay, so that's the matter. You first.
I was thinking that this question is linked to something that I think
we have mentioned before about the article and the traditional article.
And I think it's important to highlight that all our system is based on an article in the paper, and we have to think
about how to break up this model, how to give opportunity to another kind of research, another different output.
And it could be linked to this peer review question because one of the maybe the things, the factors that we could take into account, it could be
you have peer review this number of articles you have published in this platform is not an article is not in a journal, but it's collaborative work.
So there is there. Well, we should have to try to find another ways to
incentivize to change this merit reward and this recognition scheme.
So it's not just it's linked to the traditional article
paper that has to, it's a model that has to be changed.
And it should be linked to the way we report and do the work of researchers, not just because you
have published a book, an article is because you have you are researching, you are contributing.
Yeah, so that's, I think that's that's key to change the mind to think out of the
box and think not just in which who is the guilty, who has a, what's our role.
I think it's something that maybe we, well, this is a good forum to talk about, but we
have the opportunity to come to talk more in depth, because we only have five minutes.
Yes, I'm very conscious of that very well about the time but thank you very much for
reminding that probably some words about open peer review, Remy, that I can read your mind.
Did I? Well, I, I wanted to respond to the previous one. So I don't want to be paid by I mean, for
reviewing a paper. I don't know if in English is the same, but we say, today for you tomorrow for me.
So it's the same one. Yeah, sure. And, but I don't want that publishers argue that peer review is expensive, because they don't pay anything for
that. So, please don't argue that peer review is part of the cost of the of the publishing process, because it doesn't cost anything for them.
So I said that. So the second question was about open peer review. Yes, because I agree with you
that the solution is no pain for that. I was just joking and trying to make you my business model.
So you be aware that is super sad when people make a business model in front
of you. So, for me, the solution is no pain for that is open peer review.
And the open peer review is again, the invitation to quality. If you do it openly available, that's much
better that you pay me for that. Because that will be absolutely the way of legitimizing the system.
And for that, we don't need a publisher because the researchers, we know each other. And actually, it's
very funny when I submit a paper and the journal asked me, who will be a good, good reviewer for this paper.
And I'm on my friends that I already sent to them and they have already reviewed it, you know,
so that's a kind of we are a collective kingdom and we do together and we can do it together.
But probably the open peer review is the
real way to do it. What do you think, Rémy?
Well, probably is and probably is not because again, disciplines behave in different ways. So, and especially the,
I mean, the young researchers, sometimes they are afraid to put their names, I mean, in their open peer review.
Well, first of all, we should define what is open peer review. Open peer review is to show the names
of the reviewers and the authors or is to have a conversation on the web with open to everybody and...
It's what Ory does. Open Research Europe, that is the model of F1000. I remember once that one of my reviewers, I said to him, I will put you
as a co-author, because his review was better than my paper. And it was, this is my sense of science, constructing together something better.
Yeah, yeah.
That's why I think the open peer review is the model.
But also, I don't know if there is another alternative way.
No, I think so. It could be a solution, but I'm aware of that, that there are some people that they don't want to participate in
open peer review because they are afraid of the seniors or funders or whatever to put, I mean, to participate in this process.
But at the same time, it could be also part of this narrative, open science in this evaluation. So
how I have participated in this open peer review processes and without being afraid of anything.
Yeah, if it is rewarded, it is not afraid. I mean, if the other, in the
old system, all in the black boxes, there is, you know, kind of reluctant.
We have two minutes for questions for the audience. One question. That is some burning question all the
week, all the morning, listening to us, but nothing happened from the audience. Pablo, just go ahead, please.
Probably yes, because there is somebody online.
Yeah, that will be better with the microphone. No bear.
Yeah. Go.
Thank you. Quick comment. I think journal editors and publishers are different things.
If you had journal editors on the table, the discussion will be completely different.
Thank you.
Good. Good job. And also the journal editor, sometimes they put their name and their
prestige to make the publisher thing happen. So I will tell you an anecdote afterwards.
OK, so thank you very much for the panel.
I think it was very challenging and sorry for pushing you so much.
And we will see each other tomorrow or this afternoon. There is
some other. I have to go back to my class. Thank you very much.