Creating a market to replace publisher monopolies | Plan S

an abbreviated version of a more detailed proposal available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5526634 by Björn Brembs, Philippe Huneman, Felix Schönbrodt, Gustav Nilsonne, Toma Susi, Renke Siems, Pandelis Perakakis, Varvara Trachana, Lai Ma, & Sara Rodriguez-Cuadrado. Replacing traditional journals with a more modern solution is not a new idea, but the lack of progress since the first calls more than 20 years ago has convinced an increasing number of experts that a disruptive break is now necessary. The list of problems that have been accumulating is long, but three stand out as the most severe: Quality control by traditional journal peer review has often proven to be opaque, capricious, and insufficient for catching even overt errors, leading to what is now called a “replication crisis”; An “affordability crisis” is the consequence of large international corporations that each own their separate monopoly on scholarly content and enjoy an exemption from procurement rules such that they can dictate conditions; A lack of digital modernization has caused a further “functionality crisis”, where some of the most basic digital functionalities are missing for research objects. The reason for three decades of inaction is a social dilemma, where every player – researchers, libraries or institutions – is at a disadvantage if they move (first), so all remain locked-in. Reminiscent of the big internet platforms, the corporate publishers exploit this situation by using their massive profits not only to resist and delay any research- and public-oriented reform, but to fund a reform of their own and on their own terms: The major publishing houses are tracking their academic users in order to, among other reasons, expand their monopolies beyond scholarly texts. Over the last decade, the four leading publishing houses have all acquired or developed a range of services aiming to develop vertical integration over the entire scientific process (Fig. 1). For any institution buying such a workflow package, the risk of vendor lock-in is very real: Without any standards, it becomes technically and financially nearly impossible to substitute a chosen service provider with another one.