How Can We Help Journal Editorial Teams Escape the Commercial Publishers? | The Road Goes On, Thoughts and Essays by Daniel Bingham

by Daniel Bingham

For two years I’ve been working to build a non-commercial scholarly commons. I first explored crowdsourcing review using a reputation system. About a year ago, I concluded that wasn’t going to work and I recently wrote up my reasoning in this post.

In late February, participants in the Recognizing Preprint Peer Review workshop posted a paper outlining a vision for preprint review. They examined how much progress we’ve made in the last 6 years, and it isn’t much. In my last post, I analyzed why.

Preprint review efforts suffer from the same impediments as crowdsourced review. Scholars simply do not have the time and they’re locked into the journals.

If we want scholars to adopt preprint review, or any other publishing experiment, we have to make it as frictionless as possible. We need to build it directly into scholar’s journal publishing workflow.

But the commercial publishers aren’t interested in reform. So can we bring the journals, and their authors and reviewers, to us?

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