How to move towards a system that looks to ‘publish, then filter’ academic research

“Every week there’s something new in the open access debate. A couple of weeks ago the Finch report concluded that all publicly-funded research should indeed be made available free online (hurray!). But it favoured the so-called ‘gold’ model of open access, in which the highly profitable academic journal industry carries on as normal, but switches its demand for big piles of cash away from library journal subscriptions and over to authors themselves – or their institutions (boo!). Campaigners such as Stevan Harnad questioned why the Finch committee had not favoured the ‘green’ model, where authors put copies of their articles in free-to-access online repositories – the answer being, it was assumed, a successful blitz of lobbying by the publishing industry. The ‘green’ model, which favours the interests of society over the interests of publishers, is clearly the best option. But whichever solution prevails, the promise of straightforward free access to all this research is exciting. To be honest, though, I am most enthusiastic about open access as a stepping stone on the way towards a situation where we get rid of academic publishers altogether, and shift to the ‘publish, then filter’ model. Publishing things used to be an expensive business... Therefore it was rational to be very cautious and selective about what things would be published. Filtering therefore had to be done by a small number of gatekeepers on behalf of everybody else... Today, an author can make their text look presentable, and pop it on the Web for anyone to access, very easily. So all of the previous assumptions can be turned on their head. This doesn’t mean that researchers will suddenly publish a flood of random jottings – But once they’ve written a nice article, why can’t we just access the thing straight away? The author can put the text online, let people in their networks know about it (via a blog, Twitter, or announcement on an email list), and interested people will see it and, if they find it valuable – or just think that it looks potentially valuable – will share it with others. Two obvious good things about this model are: [1] it’s immediate (rather than the standard model, where you wait two years for the thing to appear); [2] it cuts out the process of pre-publication ‘peer review’ ... And in fact, as is becoming increasingly well-known, a version of the ‘publish, then filter’ model is already in operation for some open access science journals. As Mike Taylor explains in this blog post, journals such as PLoS ONE only check that papers are ‘technically sound’, and then put them into the public domain so that the whole community of interested researchers (potentially) can do the work of picking out and circulating the articles which they find to be interesting and innovative. Similarly, in ‘Time to review peer review’, Andrew Pontzen notes that: ‘These days most physicists now download papers from arxiv.org, a site which hosts papers regardless of their peer-review status. We skim through the new additions to this site pretty much every day, making our own judgements or talking to our colleagues about whether each paper is any good....’ Pontzen proposes that a journal should become more like a curated online platform, where ‘the content of the paper is the preserve of the authors, but is followed by short responses from named referees, opening a discussion which anyone can contribute to...’ Returning to the open access debate, I was initially surprised that the Wellcome Trust came out in support of the Finch committee’s ‘gold’ access model... But their view was based on the understandable principle that they want research to appear as quickly as possible, and with no restrictions. This would happen under the ‘gold’ model: having got their cash, the publishers would be happy to make things available online quickly and would not prevent data mining. This speed and flexibility is good for science. The ‘green’ model, meanwhile, tends to be based on the idea that academic journals would still exist, and that researchers would put their work into online repositories after an embargo period of 6 or 12 months, and might still put restrictions on access for data mining. So the ‘green’ solution turns out to be a bit of a messy fudge – you can understand why the Wellcome Trust might prefer to fork out for a faster, unrestricted service. But the ‘publish, then filter’ model solves that one as well. As a publishing model it’s immediate, it’s as unrestricted as you like, and it’s cheaper by several million pounds... So let’s skip through this publisher-preserving phase of open access as quickly as possible, please, and move on to a publishing model suitable for this century.”