According to several studies, “prestigious” journals retract more research. Although there are several explanations for this, but there’s one on which I want to focus on in particular: being reliable is not the reason these journals are considered the best in their field.

These journals publish research that they consider noteworthy, whereas it can even be explicit policy not to publish relatively unexciting outcomes like null results.

So how come we view these journals as the cream of the crop, despite their many retractions? The reason is that funders and institutions, in their quest for “academic excellence”, are evaluating researchers by focusing on measurable impact, using the number of citations as a proxy.

The ridiculous number that can make or break academic careers

And as Goodhart’s law states:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Theoretically, research cites other works because they are relevant to the reader in order to understand the article in question. However, when citations double up as endorsements of previous research, we overemphasise novel approaches and fail to recognise the importance of replication studies and negative results.

So how do we fix this?

I collaborated with eLife and the Center for Open Science to develop Plaudit, a tool that allows researchers to explicitly endorse research to give it the recognition it deserves. And I’m happy to announce that starting today, this endorsement is no longer a one-dimensional signal. Researchers that endorse a work can now optionally explicitly recognise three different qualities: robustness, clarity, and whether the research excites and is expected to make an impact.

We brainstormed these three properties with a team including researchers and publishers, and subsequently validated them by putting them in front of actual researchers. We found that they cover the most important bases relatively well, and although they are not perfect, we think they strike a reasonable balance between breath of coverage and being an easy-to-use signal. However, if you have strong thoughts about this, be sure share them.

You can endorse quality research today, whether it breaks exciting new ground or is just well-executed, by installing the browser extension for Chrome or for Firefox — look for the Plaudit icon in your toolbar.

And for preprint servers or publishers that want to expose research endorsements on their websites, visible to everyone: get in touch, and I’ll personally help you get set up.

Want to stay up to date on the latest developments in research endorsements? Follow Plaudit on Twitter or sign up for the newsletter.

Why replication studies are not rewarded — and how to fix that was originally published in Flockademic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Or at least: that’s what was left for you to do. Starting today, even that is automatically done for you.

By leveraging the fantastic work by our friends at Unpaywall, Flockademic can now find Open Access versions of your research. If a publicly available version of your work is found, it will automatically be made available on your profile.

As an example, take a look at Jon Tennant’s Flockademic page.

At the time of writing, Jon has not yet claimed his profile. Nevertheless, with zero effort from his side, his research is already listed.

And since Jon is really good in terms of making his research openly available, the full text of his articles is just a single click away.

And for those articles of yours that are not yet Open Access, sharing them as widely as possible is still just a matter of a few simple steps.

As you can see, Flockademic+Unpaywall is a match made in heaven. So what are you waiting for? Sign in with your ORCID, claim your profile, and share your research with the world!

And if you want to stay up to date on Flockademic’s quest to promote Open Access, sign up for the mailinglist or follow @Flockademic on Twitter.

• Vincent Tunru (@Flockademic) | Twitter
• Flockademic updates by Vincent Tunru

Flockademic ♥ Unpaywall was originally published in Flockademic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The workshop description referred to open science as

efforts to make the scientific process more open and inclusive for all relevant actors.

They key word here is inclusive. The idea is that, as a society, we benefit if more people are able to contribute to the body of scientific knowledge.

An important component of inclusivity is affordability. Yes, more people can read research if it is freely available, but if that is done by shifting the costs to authors, there is still a barrier to participating in the scientific process.

So instead, if we want to enable more people to contribute to the body of scientific knowledge, we need to bring down the costs of doing so. Of course, making things cheaper sounds good in theory, but is it actually possible in practice?

Luckily, when it comes to scholarly publishing, there is every reason to believe it can be cheaper. There’s two reasons for this.

1. Unlike practically every other publishing industry (movies, music, etc.), the price of scholarly publishing has only increased with the advent of the internet.
2. The major scholarly publishers report profit margins of 30–40%, year after year. These numbers are typical (or even at the high end) of luxury brands — in other words, of exclusive goods, which are not inclusive by definition.

So why is the price of scholarly publishing so high? To answer that, let’s look at another excerpt of the workshop description:

already, in some disciplines, publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals is no longer the main mechanism for communicating scientific results

In some disciplines, authors first share their work on arXiv. Fellow researchers can then immediately read this work, albeit with a critical eye — it has not been peer reviewed yet. If they notice potential improvements to the work, they can report it to the author, who then incorporates that in a new version uploaded to arXiv.

When — and this is the kicker — the author then considers the work “good enough”, it is submitted to a journal.

In other words: the article has already been archived and distributed, it has already received peer review, and yet the author still feels the need to submit it to a journal!

This indicates that the primary value of a journal — one that researchers are willing to pay good public money for — is credentialing. It’s the brand that they pay for. And when businesses do not compete on price or services provided, but on brand, prices rise and affordability decreases.

Another example of this playing out is that, despite providing practically identical services at a higher price, Nature’s Scientific Reports has overtaken PLOS One as the largest journal. Its primary differentiator? The Nature brand.

The question then is: how can we bring down the costs of scholarly publishing?

For the scientific policy advisors at the OECD, my answer to that question is that we should decouple the evaluation of researchers from the publishing process. If researchers are evaluated on the quality of their research instead of the journal it was published in, that would remove their need to pay whatever amount of public money a publisher asks of them just to obtain career credentials.

My message to researchers is similar: find ways to promote your academic work that are independent of the journal it’s published in. I’m working on one such method with Flockademic: by bundling your research together on your academic profile, your research promotes you instead of the journal it’s published in.

Flockademic tries to help researchers make their work openly accessible. Sign up for the mailinglist, follow Flockademic on Twitter, or simply give it a try.

To fix scholarly publishing, decouple credentialing from publishing was originally published in Flockademic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a researcher, you are often urged to make your work openly accessible. And sure, that’s a laudable goal, but… What’s in it for you?

With job prospects in academia being not that rosy, it is no surprise that open access is not the primary consideration for researchers considering where to get their work published. When push comes to shove, making a living is more important than access to your research.

But why not both? You can give yourself that career boost and support open access. Here’s how.

Let your research work for you

Open access proponents like to point out the purported citation advantage enjoyed by research that is made freely available. Unfortunately, though, journal name often still trumps the number of citations in terms of the career benefit it can bring you. Publishing your research in a reputable journal lends credibility to your research.

The reverse is true as well, however: your quality research lends credibility to the journal it is published in. So why not let it do the same for you?

I am happy to announce that as of today, Flockademic helps you do exactly that. In addition to submitting your research to a journal, you can now publish your manuscripts to your personal academic profile on Flockademic. It’s really easy, too: sign in, and all research that is already linked to your ORCID will be there, waiting for you. All that remains for you to do is to share the relevant PDFs.

By making all your research available in one place, readers interested in your work can easily follow what you’re up to —resulting in higher visibility of your research! And to top it off, you’ll also be contributing to a world in which publicly funded research is publicly available.

So what are you waiting for? Start crafting your academic profile today.

What’s in store

As of today, Flockademic is a great place to publicise your work. It’s only going to get better, though. A few of the planned improvements that you’ll automatically benefit from:

• Increased discoverability: e.g. getting your work indexed by Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search.
• Audience building: e.g. allowing readers to receive email notifications when you publish new work.
• Rights checks: automatically informing you what versions of your work you can share.
• Sharing existing work: when your work is already freely available elsewhere, e.g. on arXiv, Flockademic can automatically make them available on your personal profile as well.

Give your work that extra visibility boost; sign in to Flockademic now and start sharing your work!

(And be sure to let me know what you think and how it could better suit your needs: Vincent@Flockademic.com or @Flockademic on Twitter.)

The holy grail in Open Access: sharing that benefits authors was originally published in Flockademic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sometimes it’s easiest to understand a project by comparing it to others. So with that in mind: let’s do a comparison.

Some caveats

Before embarking on the comparison, it would be good to get some disclaimers out of the way.

The first is that Flockademic is only a week old and hence still very simple. In other words: at the time of writing, if you need specific features (e.g. support for peer review, minting DOIs, etc.), you are likely to be better off with one of the other projects. Do share what features those are, though, so their implementation can be prioritised for Flockademic.

What this means for this comparison is that I will focus on the main philosophical differences, i.e. in which areas will these projects continue to differ in the future.

Secondly, this comparison is not exhaustive. It is restricted to a few large and similar projects, but if you feel that an important one is missing: let me know.

And finally, although I will try hard to focus on objective facts, I’m obviously viewing the world through the glasses of the founder of Flockademic, so take it with a grain of salt.

With that out of the way, let’s begin.

Open Journal Systems

Open Journal Systems is software that supports the publishing of scholarly journals. There are many reasons to use OJS when considering starting a journal:

• You want full control over the journal software, its servers, etc.
• You have experience with OJS, which you want to leverage.
• You prefer a tried and tested solution that has stood the test of time, with many features that are sure to support exactly the workflow you prefer.

In other words: it’s a great choice with which it’s hard to go wrong. That said, if the following are true for you, you might want to consider giving Flockademic a try:

• You do not have the time and/or expertise to set up and maintain an instance of OJS, nor the money to pay someone else to do it.
• You would like to keep it simple: you want to have something set up without needing assistance.
• You want to automatically take advantage of future updates without extra effort on your part.

(The above comparison also largely applies to most other open source, self-hosted publishing platforms, such as Janeway, PubPub, PubSweet, and Ambra.)

Try Open Journal Systems | Try Flockademic

OSF Preprints

Philosophically, OSF Preprints is probably closest to Flockademic: it tries to transfer the success of arXiv to other disciplines by providing them with preprint servers, and supposedly is working on facilitating peer review as well. It is the driving force behind most of the recently launched preprint servers, so I’m a fan. Using OSF Preprints is a no-brainer if:

• You want to tailor the preprint server’s brand to your field.
• You need personal support in setting it up.
• Research in your field is typically associated with many other artefacts that you would like to make public, such as data or code.

In other words, it’s fantastic for ambitious, broad-scoped initiatives to introduce preprint workflows to a discipline.

Flockademic, on the other hand, aims to support you when:

• You are looking to start an experimental initiative with low up-front investment of effort.
• You prefer to be able to set everything up by yourself.

Try OSF Preprints | Try Flockademic

arXiv.org

arXiv is the wildly successful preprint server for disciplines such as physics and mathematics. One question I’ve received is: why would I use Flockademic if I can simply use arXiv? The answer is simple: you don’t!

If there are successful initiatives in your discipline, by all means: use them, support them, promote them. Tell your fellow researchers about them, stimulate them to submit their preprints there.

However, if nothing like arXiv exists for your discipline, that’s where Flockademic comes in. Be the change you want to see: start your own! There’s no need for you to convince a discipline as broad as physics that everyone should publish their preprints. You can start a preprint journal with as limited a scope as you want. If you can convince just a few of your colleagues to publish their preprints there — or even: if only you yourself post your preprints — you are already contributing to the greater movement to make more research openly available.

Try arXiv | Try Flockademic

Scholastica

There are many services that let you start your own journal: Scholastica, Veruscript, Science.ai, Uniquity Press, Copernicus, Highwire Press, …

They all have their own strengths and weaknesses. Reasons to use one of them might include:

• You want to earn money with your journal.
• You want to provide typesetting services / print editions / proofreading services / etc.
• You need personal support.

If those are your requirements, you will surely be able to find a service that satisfies your wishes. You might want to consider Flockademic, however, if the below statements hold true:

• You want to be able to set up the journal completely independently.
• You want its infrastructure to be open source, and run by a non-profit.
• You do not want to charge publication fees.

Try Scholastica | Try Flockademic

Final words

It’s important to stress that the projects above are all great initiatives that all have their place. In fact, most of them have similar ideas about what they want the world to look like; they are merely taking different routes to get us there. Thus, I prefer to look at all these projects as complimentary, rather than as competitive.

Furthermore, I firmly believe that it does not hurt to have multiple projects striving to achieve similar goals. So while comparing them to each other helps in understanding them, there is an infinite number of ways in which projects can be executed, and just as many ways to succeed (or not).

Flockademic is merely giving us another shot at achieving Fair Open Access, and I hope you will support it as such.

Flockademic is an effort to support researchers in opening up access to academic articles. And you can join!

• Sign up for the mailinglist
• Follow @Flockademic on Twitter
• Give it a try

I want to create alternatives to traditional publishers. What platform do I use? was originally published in Flockademic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We need alternatives to the traditional scholarly publishers. And as I wrote in my previous post, these alternatives are most likely to be adopted by academics when they are led by their peers. It is these academic frontrunners that I want to support: starting alternative journals should be as easy as starting a blog. You should be up and running in a matter of minutes, ready to invite contributors and to spread the word, without having to worry about funding models or infrastructure.

To that end, I present: Flockademic.

Today marks the release of the first step towards that goal. Right now, you can trivially start a preprint journal on Flockademic.com. Its functionality is still limited, and that’s intentional: by releasing Flockademic as early as possible, your feedback can shape it at an early stage. Nevertheless, today’s release gives you the tools needed to put your work out there: be it preprints, lab notes, conference posters or something else, you can share them through Flockademic.

But this is just the beginning. In the long term, the goal is to make journal subscriptions and publication fees superfluous, by supporting viable alternatives to publishers that do not have researchers’ best interests in mind. And this is where you come in!

To make this project a success, it could use your help. Firstly: give it a try and share your thoughts. What do you think of the idea? Would you be interested to try your hand at starting a preprint journal, and how can Flockademic support you? Your feedback will help shaping the future of Flockademic.

And secondly: spread the word! Share it on social media, tell people you know who are toying with the idea of starting their own journal, and bring it to the attention of anyone you know who might be interested. And if people have questions, let them know they’re free to contact me.

Finally, for those of you excited enough to want to get involved: reach out! There’s plenty to do, and given the early stage of the project, a lot of opportunity to make an impact and shape the future of Flockademic.

I am excited about this next milestone in the Flockademic journey, and I hope that you see its promise as well. I am committed to making this a success, and invite you to follow along by subscribing to the newsletter or following Flockademic on Twitter. And of course, if you have comments, questions or remarks, let me know: Vincent@Flockademic.com.

Announcing Flockademic: academic-led publishing was originally published in Flockademic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In October 2003, one of the original creators of Elsevier’s Journal of Algorithms — Donald Knuth — sent a long letter to its editorial board lamenting over its risen costs and Elsevier’s unwillingness to discuss them. The next January, the editorial board resigned and went on to found ACM Transactions on Algorithms. In 2010, Elsevier discontinued the original Journal of Algorithms.

In October 2015, the editorial board of Elsevier’s Lingua resigned after being unable to come to an agreement with Elsevier about fair Open Access, and went on to start Glossa. Glossa is now the leading journal of general linguistics, whereas Lingua lingers on as a zombie journal.

(More examples can be found in Peter Suber’s list.)

These journals have managed to successfully break free from Elsevier’s shackles. What‘s the secret to their success? How did they manage to transfer their author and reader base to the new journals?

The key factor, in my view, is that these were bottom-up initiatives by academics themselves. All these transitions were led by academics who were influential in their respective communities. This meant that they were able to effectively spread the word of the new journals to the relevant researchers. And more importantly: it meant that they were able to break an important link in the vicious cycle of scholarly publishing: the stranglehold of the Impact Factor.

They showed that, although the Impact Factor is often used as a proxy for the quality of a journal, its the people running it that actually determine the journal’s quality. Thus, when researchers in a field are aware that those people are focusing their efforts on a new journal, the Impact Factor of the old one becomes meaningless. And that, in turn, means that it can no longer hold researchers hostage: they can submit their manuscripts to the new journal and, if accepted, still get the recognition and career benefits of having published in a top-tier journal.

This is the main lesson for advocates of a future not held back by the traditional academic publishers: for alternatives to be successful, they need to be spearheaded by members of the academic community. Luckily, these academics themselves also stand to gain by that: being a driving force behind successful new alternatives can be a boon to your academic reputation and, hence, career prospects.

These insights have largely shaped my current thoughts on how best to open up access to academic articles. If bottom-up initiatives are easier to launch, enough viable alternatives to the traditional publishers might finally arise, and libraries might be able to actually start cancelling their subscriptions. And I’m almost ready to unveil a project to achieve just that. If you’re excited about challenging the positions of the dominant academic publishers, please follow along: subscribe to the newsletter or follow @Flockademic on Twitter.

Update

I’ve launched Flockademic! Read all about it, give it a try, and let me know what you think!

• Announcing Flockademic: academic-led publishing
• Vincent Tunru (@Flockademic) | Twitter
• Flockademic updates by Vincent Tunru

Escaping Elsevier was originally published in Flockademic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s been about two decades since the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and many would say that much has been accomplished in that time. There are many examples of successful Open Access journals, there has been a strong push from both governments and private funders, and even the legacy publishers have embraced it, boasting about the number of Open Access articles they publish. And whether through the Open Access Button or Unpaywall, or through Sci-Hub, most scientific and scholarly articles are now accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

However, Open Access is merely a means to an end. And if we consider that end, there unfortunately is less reason for optimism.

Why Open Access?

The reason I quit my job to join the Open Access movement is because I wanted to help accelerating the scientific process. By lowering the barrier to entry and making publishing more inclusive, we can take advantage of a larger and more diverse set of brains to expand the body of human knowledge.

So with more people now able to access research than ever before, has the barrier to entry been lowered?

Well… Somewhat. It is good that researchers at less-wealthy institutions, researchers in industry, and citizen scientists are now able to read more research that might be relevant to their work. However, properly participating in the scientific process entails more than just reading other research — it means sharing your own results as well.

And that’s where the rub is.

Rather than bringing about new funding models and publishing systems that bring down the price of sharing scientific work, the costs have been allowed to continue to rise, and have been merely been transferred from readers to authors. As one of the original signatories of the Budapest Open Access Initiative was disappointed to conclude:

Instead of local, small-scale and underfunded research institutions being unable to access material, they are becoming unable to publish because they can’t afford the “Open Access” fees!

It’s about the money

In the end, it comes down to money: researchers with fewer funds have fewer opportunities to contribute to the scientific process, so if the costs can be brought down, the barriers to contribute will be lowered. As an added bonus, those with deeper pockets will be able to spend more of their budgets on actual research as well.

Of course, both research and publishing will always have costs associated with them. There are two reasons to believe that the costs of publishing can and should be much lower, though.

First: technology. Academic publishing hasn’t yet seen the massive drop in costs that have been observed for other types of media with the advance of the internet. Whereas academic journals traditionally were the result of many hours of labour involved with e.g. typesetting and printing paper copies, modern tools have greatly simplified the process of authoring and distributing academic articles. Nevertheless, this has so far hardly translated into lower prices.

The second reason: the enormous profit margins made by the legacy publishers. The reason these publishers can maintain such margins is not because it is so difficult to be a publisher, but because they own brand names that are highly influential in the scholarly publishing process.

Given those two reasons, the obvious conclusion is that cost savings provided by modern technology should be used to accelerate the scientific process, rather than for growing the profit margins of the legacy publishers.

Time to refocus

It is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect the legacy publisher’s shareholders to voluntarily forgo their projected profits. The interests of the legacy publishers cannot co‑exist with the ideals of many of us in the Open Access movement.

The way forward for Open Access, therefore, can not be guided by the legacy publishers.

Without their excessive profit margins and with new funding models, we can move to a world in which everybody who has something to contribute, can contribute. That’s the ideal I’m working for, and that’s what I judge the movement’s success by. And although much has been accomplished already, as long as the amount of public money spent on scholarly publishing hasn’t been significantly reduced, there still is a long way to go.

If you care about this ideal too, I invite you to subscribe to the Flockademic newsletter, and to let me know your thoughts on how to get there.

Update January 2018

I’ve launched my initiative to support emerging alternatives to the traditional publishers! Read all about it, give it a try, and let me know what you think!

• Announcing Flockademic: academic-led publishing
• Dear scientists: Help me help you. Help me fix academic publishing.

I’m finding out how best to open up access to academic articles. Sign up for the mailinglist or follow Flockademic on Twitter to join me on the journey.

The future of Open Access should not be left to the legacy publishers was originally published in Flockademic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The large legacy publishers are one of the key actors in the vicious cycle of scholarly publishing, so as Open Access advocates understanding them is imperative. In my quest to help the Open Access movement, however, I quickly learned that the usual terminology has a different meaning when used by these publishers. There is a lot of implied context that is not top-of-mind for your average Open Access advocate, and that can thus hamper communication.

Let us therefore consider their context. They often exist by the grace of their shareholders, and have thus far primarily been dependent on journal subscriptions to achieve the hefty profit margins those shareholders have come to expect. Most of their reasoning therefore occurs in the context of having to maintain those margins in an environment that is demanding the obsolescence of journal subscriptions.

In an attempt to better understand the traditional publishers, I considered some commonly-used terms and evaluated them from their context. The result is a short mini-dictionary that should be of help when interpreting their statements and strategies.

Of course, if there’s still publisher-speak that I’ve missed, send me an email or a Tweet if you encounter terms that you would like me to add.

So without further ado, let’s get to it.

“Gold” Open Access

Usually, Gold Open Access refers to a published article being made openly available. When legacy publishers use the term, however, they often restrict it to only denote such articles funded using the only funding model known so far that allows them to maintain or even grow their profit margins: charging the author for publication. These Article Processing Charges are the reason that the International Association of STM Publishers insists that Gold Open Access will be more expensive: those who account for a large number of published articles (i.e. academia) would bear a larger share of the costs than those who mainly account for subscriptions (i.e. industry).

Of course, this disregards alternative funding models, especially those that are not too concerned with maintaining the legacy publishers’ profits. Some people have therefore opted to speak of Diamond Open Access to refer to free-to-publish Gold Open Access, which further justifies the use of the term “Gold” to only refer to pay-to-publish Open Access.

“Green” Open Access

Likewise, Green Open Access commonly means that an article’s authors openly share a version of the article outside of its publication venue, e.g. on their personal website, in a repository provided by their research institution, or on a preprint server. For legacy publishers, however, it also implies that this way of sharing is only allowed after an embargo period that varies from six months to multiple years in which the article cannot be freely shared yet. This form of delayed Open Access, they believe, makes the articles inaccessible enough to allow them to keep selling journal subscriptions and thus maintain their current profit margins.

“No double dipping”

When the author of an article pays a fee to make that article openly available, one would expect the cost of a subscription to the journal it is in to be lowered. After all, that subscription now buys you access to one fewer article. When a publisher collects fees for both publication of an article and for accessing it, that is often referred to as double dipping.

Many publishers have opted to avoid double-dipping through offsetting deals: those who pay publication fees receive discounts on their subscription costs. Elsevier, however, does not provide offsetting deals, insisting instead that it does not do double dipping. How come? Well, rather than giving individual discounts, it passes on the discount to everyone by incorporating it in their journal prices.

The problem is that there is no way to tell whether there has actually been a discount and how large it would have been, especially considering that subscription prices have still been rising. Elsevier justifies this by referring to inflation and a growing number of (subscription) journals, but it also incorporates the profit margins Elsevier considers it possible to ask. What Elsevier does not consider to be double dipping can therefore look suspiciously like double dipping to others.

“Copyrighted articles”

In a statement, a coalition of legacy publishers says that the social network ResearchGate is “making (…) copyrighted articles (…) freely available”. They speak of copyrighted articles because copyright law is their primary instrument for being able to charge money for access to the articles they publish, most of the time through the original author transferring their copyright over the article to the publisher.

However, Open Access articles are usually copyrighted as well. Nevertheless, it is perfectly legal (and even encouraged) to make them freely available. This is made possible through their use of a Creative Commons license. By preserving the author’s copyright, such a license enables authors to allow you to share and modify their work, while requiring them to be attributed for the original work.

“Compliance benefits researchers”

In defending the move to pressure ResearchGate into removing the aforementioned articles, the coalition’s spokesperson James Milne said that “there would be a significant benefit to researchers”. Such a statement can count on incredulous looks on the faces of Open Access advocates: how on earth can less access to research be beneficial?

The publishers, however, feel that the free availability of paywalled articles leads to cancelled subscriptions and thus threatens their profits. To accommodate their shareholders, they therefore feel they have to try to sue ResearchGate, possibly leading to them going out of business and thus loss of access to all its content, including non-paywalled articles. So in the view of the publishers, restricting access to a subset of content is less bad (“beneficial”) to researchers than (potentially) restricting access to all of it.

Of course, non-paywalled content should already be available elsewhere, and as Open Access advocates, the entire point is making the rest of it available as well. In other words, there should be no mistake who the targeted benefactor of taking down articles is: the legacy publishers’ shareholders.

Anything else?

Do you have more examples of legacy publishers whose statements do not appear to mean what they are supposed to mean? Or have I in fact wrongly characterised their intentions above? Let me know via email or on Twitter.

Dear scientists: Help me help you. Help me fix academic publishing.

I’m finding out how best to open up access to scientific articles. Sign up for the mailinglist or follow Flockademic on Twitter to join me on the journey.

What legacy publishers mean when they say… was originally published in Flockademic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Scholarly Kitchen recently published an article about Open Source and Open Access, and referenced a 2012 blog post by Scholastica justifying why they did not provide access to the source code of their Open Access publishing platform.

As someone who has been involved with Open Source projects since his early teens, I feel that both articles are based on quite a few misconceptions about Open Source. In fact, I would argue that Open Source and Open Access actually go great together.

“Open Source only works at a large scale”

[A] key element in a successful open source environment is scale — there have to be enough people with enough skill and enough time and enough passion deriving enough benefit from the open source solution for it to remain viable.

Yes, software projects can only survive if there are people willing to work on them. However, it is a misconception to believe that this can only be the case for large-scale projects. Both Scholastica and the Scholarly Kitchen mention a raft of successful, well-known open source projects, but fail to mention the long tail of successful projects that are supported by smaller companies or organisations.

In the end, all it takes is a single entity that wants a solution to exist, and that has the ability to make that happen. If Scholastica would have open sourced their code, that does not mean they would have stopped working on it. While their belief that they would not receive many contributions because “most scholars are not Ruby or Python programmers”, the fact is that they have not received any contributions to their closed source code either. In other words, even with few or zero contributions, their software would not have been worse off than it is today had it been open source.

I think the authors would be surprised by how many contributions small open source projects can receive, but one thing they can be sure of: closed source projects receive none.

“Open Source software is inherently different from/worse than closed source software”

The Scholarly Kitchen seems to suggest that Open Source software might be inherently insecure:

[T]he Equifax breach may have been made possible because of a vulnerability in some open source software the company used.

Scholastica, too, repeatedly insinuates Open Source software to be of lower quality:

User experience and design suffer. (…) Difficult to maintain quality. (…) Troubleshooting tech problems relies on the goodwill of the community. (…) If you don’t have a robust community contributing to the code, the project does not improve.

All these points suffer from the association fallacy where they assume that, just because the provided examples happen to be of open source software, those properties hold for all open source software.

However, like Open Access, Open Source is primarily just a license. Software quality is determined more by good project management and development practices than it is by license. Just because your project is open source, that doesn’t mean that you can’t do tech support. It doesn’t mean you should skip UX testing, Quality Assurance, or working on the code. And just like regular software projects, it takes good management to prevent the collision of “egos among the different developers”.

“Open Source is done by volunteers”

[I]ndirect risks around the sustainability of open source efforts are worth considering. A critical factor includes programming person-power, which is dependent on goodwill. Not getting paid while seeing major corporations make hay from your volunteer labor both erode goodwill.

Almost every Open Source project mentioned by either of the two articles has a large number of contributors whose job description includes contributing to open source projects. Even if Scholastica had decided to open source their software, that does not mean their developers would work on their code for free from then on.

There are plenty of examples of successful commercial companies whose primary product is Open Source — for some, this is even their primary selling point. Interestingly, the Scholarly Kitchen mentions GitHub as an example of a successful company that, due to being commercial, “speeds innovation in a more reliable manner”. In fact, however, many of their users found that GitHub had become lacklustre in the innovation department. That is, until they got kicked back into gear by a new company entering its market: GitLab. And most of the code behind GitLab incidentally happens to be open.

So yes, before using a project you have to consider whether a project’s maintainers are able to support it in the long term before adopting it — this holds true for both closed and Open Source software. But an Open Source license does not preclude a project from being backed by a stable and committed organisation.

Why Flockademic is Open Source

There are quite a few other misconceptions in both articles, but since many of them can be debunked along the same lines, I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. However, with no reasons left not to to Open Source an (Open Access) project, what arguments are there in favour of Open Sourcing?

Now, I should first mention that I hadn’t initially given this much thought: given Flockademic’s mission, and being a non-profit, it only felt natural to develop the code in public. If you want more people to be able to contribute to the body of scientific knowledge, then allowing more people to contribute to that cause is a logical corollary. In other words: almost every argument in favour of opening up access to research, also applies to opening up access to software.

In addition to the moral argument, however, there are a few other benefits to open source.

First of all, it spares you a lot of effort that comes with hiding code — and this is not to be underestimated. Compare this with the situation in scholarly publishing. Simply making an article available to everybody is relatively easy. However, adhering to the publishers’ restrictions — in terms of embargoes, license, costs and, if Elsevier gets their way, even geography— can be a lot of work. Likewise, I’ve simply made all Flockademic code openly available on existing infrastructure, rather than having had to set up, pay for, secure, and maintain my own.

Another benefit of open source is that it’s easier to stand on the shoulders of giants — a phrase that most academics will be familiar with. If a problem you have has already been solved by someone else, it saves you time and the repetition of mistakes if you can re-use their solution. And conversely, if you’ve solved a problem for yourself, you can help others solve it as well. For example, Janeway is a publishing platform used for the Open Library of Humanities, but it can be freely used by others to set up similar Open Access publishing efforts. And because Janeway, in turn, makes use of Django, they can benefit from contributions to that project.

And finally, it paves the way to new innovations. There is no way for a single person to predict all of the potential ways in which software can be made useful (which is why I’m constantly asking for input), so I try to keep an open mind towards others improving upon what I do.

The takeaway

I agree that Open Source is not a requirement for Open Access projects. In the end, we’re in this game primarily to lower the barriers to participation in the scientific process.

That said, it makes for a very good ideological fit. There are many benefits and little to no drawbacks, which makes it a logical choice.

The important thing to consider is that simply dumping code online is not a guarantee for success. As an example, although Wordpress is open source, but a large number of users choose not to install and run it themselves. Instead, they have the company behind Wordpress manage it for them.

I concur with Scholastica that to be successful, projects should focus on working well and being easy to use. Time and time again, this was what set apart the projects that managed to make a difference.

But why not do so in the Open?

Update January 2018

I’ve launched Flockademic, and of course it’s open source. Read all about it, give it a try, and let me know what you think!

Announcing Flockademic: academic-led publishing

Let me know whether you consider Open Source important to Open Access. Send me an email or a Tweet.

Dear scientists: Help me help you. Help me fix academic publishing.

I’m finding out how best to open up access to scientific articles. Sign up for the mailinglist or follow Flockademic on Twitter to join me on the journey.

Why Open Source and Open Access go great together was originally published in Flockademic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.