Research Practices and Tools: Germany won't pay for Nature's "scientific porn", and other messages from Couperin's open science days

"Earlier this week, there was a mini-workshop in Paris called Couperin’s open science days 2018. (Original title in French: Journées sciences ouverte 2018.) I followed most of it via webcast, and I will now summarize some of the salient points. The videos are available online, but most of them are in French.

The German way: Horst Hippler and Ralf Schimmer. The most important messages came from Germany: the country whose academic institutions have thought seriously about scientific publishing, and have organized themselves so as to drive the needed reforms. The most salient manifestation so far has been the standoff with Elsevier, and it was nice to have further details on the strategy. The basic idea is that nobody should pay for reading articles....

Other noteworthy soundbites

Jean-Sébastien Caux gave a dynamic and entertaining speech about his work on founding and operating SciPost. The insistence on open peer review (on top of open access) was most welcome. He explained that SciPost positions itself as a top-quality journal that largely emulates traditional journals (while being independent and much cheaper), although he is well aware that our current notion of an article is artificial and possibly doomed. Publishing an article costs SciPost about 300 euros. And the plan is to release the code behind SciPost in a few month.

Bernard Rentier started with a thorough demolition of the impact factor, concluding that anyone who uses it for evaluating researchers should be fired. He then embarked in proposing an admittedly complicated system of evaluation.

Benoît Kloeckner said that paying the "centre Mersenne" for formatting articles costs 7 euros per page. Such data about costs should of course be compared to the 5000 euros per article that legacy publishers are charging."