Is scientific publishing broken? What can you do to help fix it?

“People often question the equity and efficiency of how research is published. One problem is the cost to access scientific research... Another problem is that some publishers have flooded the market with thousands of journals, turning away from their traditional role as content filters... Concerns over scientific publishing have of course existed for some time (for example, see this insightful abstract from way back in 1984)... The demand for change seems to have intensified recently, primarily in response to some publishers’ support of three very contentious pieces of legislature in the United States... SOPA was a law introduced in the US House of Representatives, designed to stop online distribution/advertising of counterfeit goods, in part, by holding internet service providers (ISPs) responsible for their customers’ behaviour... PIPA is the Senate counterpart to SOPA... it was the RWA that truly angered some... This all leads to one obvious question, “What are we supposed to do about it?” I recently added my name to The Cost of Knowledge, a website where you can declare publicly that you will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate... I am much more encouraged by the growing community of people who have actually done something to improve scientific publishing. I was first introduced to this community at a meeting of Liquidpub...The first thing any of us should do is take advantage of open-access, online repositories... You can also choose to submit papers to open-access publishers... Some examples of open access publishers are PLoS, BMJ Open, and BioMedCentral... There are ways to share other research outputs. F1000 Posters is an open access repository for posters and slide presentations... Figshare...allow[s] researchers to publish all of their research outputs (including figures, videos and datasets) in an easily citable, shareable way... There is also a growing recognition that we can improve on peer-review (just see Retraction Watch for examples of what peer-review missed). PaperCritic.org offers researchers a way of obtaining and providing feedback for each others’ work in a fully open and transparent environment. Similarly, Peer Evaluation opens access to your primary data, working papers, articles, media,  facilitating facilitating their discussion and review by your peers. As more and more research information is made available, we will need ways to evaluate the impact of that research. Altmetrics.org is a good please to start if you are interested in learning more... “