Ending support for legacy academic publishing

"I profoundly disagree with the current system of academic publishing, and so I have decided that I will no longer give any voluntary labour to support it. I believe it no longer serves science well for us to maintain this unhealthy system. Instead, I will spend that time building alternatives....

We need to move to a system where reviews are given on a rolling basis to work that is immediately published on submission (post-publication peer review). This will increase the chance that errors are found, because there will have been more eyes on the paper, including from people who are more invested in the results....

Integrating all these functions into a single system of peer review and journal publishing rather than keeping them separate introduces additional problems. Since evaluation of technical correctness is considered together with opinions on significance that determine future career success, authors are highly incentivised to write their papers in a less transparent way that makes it harder to find errors, and to overstate the significance of their findings. This leads to a situation where the most prestigious journals with the highest competition also have the lowest reliability and highest rates of retraction.

The current system is incredibly wasteful in terms of time, effort and money. Competition for inclusion in journals means that papers often go through multiple rounds of peer review, being rejected by a series of journals after many hours of work by authors, editors and reviewers. The huge effort involved contributes to a culture of overwork in science that excludes people with caring duties and is damaging to mental health. Many scientists do their reviewing and editorial work in the evenings and weekends, for example...."