Why does reform of scientific communication seem so difficult and slow? | SciELO in Perspective

The benefits of open access, particularly to research where urgency and speed are so important, are obvious. Unfortunately, though, the proportion of new scientific research that is being published with open access is, disappointingly, nowhere near 100 percent yet. In the light of the urgency presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, there are some interesting initiatives to increase the openness of research, data and publications.

Ambitious initiatives to make open access to scientific research results the norm, still try to reconcile the conflicting desires of the different players in the field of scientific communication. They try to spare the goat and the cabbage, to use yet another saying that illustrates the difficulty of such an effort.

In the context of the European Union Horizon 2020 programme, the EU has issued a tender for a “European Commission Open Research Publishing Platform”. On 20 March 2020 the contract was awarded to F1000 Research Ltd, which has been taken over by the large publisher Taylor & Francis (part of Informa plc) early this year. This is seen as a missed opportunity, as open access advocate of the first hour Peter Suber tweeted, and it is by many others, too. Jean-Sebastien Caux, founder of scipost.org, pointed out the flaw in the criteria for tendering on Twitter: “Criterion F1 for first call (2018): need to have above 1M euro turnover to apply. Criterion F1 for second call: reduced to 500k euro. We don’t have that kind of turnover at scipost.com; that’s kind of the *whole point* of our business model”.

The trouble is that the powers that could drastically reform science communication, are too timid. They do not dare to upset the apple cart of the traditional publishing system. They stick to a frame of mind of cake-ism. Whereas drastic reforms are not unrealistic. Preprints, for instance, could play a crucial role in the separation of communication of research results (speed, efficiency, openness), and assessment (peer review). It won’t be easy to reform the system, to be sure, but tough choices must be made. Slightly modifying the status quo, as seems to happen now, is not enough.