Taking the Impact Factor seriously is similar to taking creationism, homeopathy or divining seriously

There is no evidence that journal rank has any persuasive predictive property for any measure of scientific quality. Every scientist who is not aware of the unscientific nature of the Impact Factor should ask themselves if they are in the right profession, writes Bjoern Brembs

There is a pathetic lack of functionality in scholarly publishing. We must end for-profit publishing and allow libraries to make available the works of their scholars for all

Publicly-funded science is suffering but academia must embrace technology before it can deliver its full potential to scientists, policy-makers and the public. Björn Brembs argues that the sum made by for-profit publishers would be more than enough to establish a freely accessible infrastructure that would ensure scholarly knowledge and research remain in the hands of libraries, and the public

By replacing journal rank with an institution-based reputation system, the looming crisis in science can be averted.

The broken incentive structure in science can be blamed for much of the alarming trends of the past decades, such as the replicability crisis and dwindling research budgets. Björn Brembs argues that by reforming the scholarly publishing structure, we can solve several current issues at once. One solution is to use the already existing infrastructure and know-how in our scholarly institutions. An institution-based publishing system like SciELO could also support a reputation system that aligns the incentives for the researcher with science and the public

The scholarly commons must be developed on public standards

Access to scholarship is becoming ever more dependent on one's (or one's institution's) financial means. Björn Brembs and Guy Geltner argue that one solution to these growing problems is for scholarship to have open, public standards; both for its Web 1.0 tasks, like reading, writing, and citing, but also, crucially, for its Web 2.0 functionalities too. Scholarship is a social endeavour and open, public standards would allow scholars to share, discuss, and reuse knowledge efficiently without being beholden to the whims of the tycoons or startups currently running the most prominent social media platforms. ScholarlyHub aims to make this vision a reality

RELX referral to EU competition authority

We believe that Elsevier and other major publishers are continuing to engage in anti-competitive practices, which are continuously worsening, and that information gained in the last 15 years urges immediate investigation and intervention into this unregulated market space. This could be, for example, through an empirical analysis of the scholarly publishing market; by having an independent regulatory body monitoring and overseeing the digital services provided by Elsevier and others within the industry; banning the use of non-disclosure clauses in licensing contracts; requiring transparency into the production costs of research articles and publishing operations; banning the use of inappropriate journal-level metrics in hiring, granting, and promotion decisions; abolishing copyright on journal articles; and encouraging the wider establishment of library consortia to increase buyer power (and therefore simultaneously potentially reduce the monopoly power of publishers). It is our view that action of this sort is clearly required in order to transform the present scholarly publishing sector into one characterised by sustainable service-based competitive market conditions, and this cannot be achieved without taking explicit measures against the business practices of Elsevier and other large publishers. We finish by noting that Plan S is a small and welcome step in this direction, but requires substantially more conviction if it is to lead to the functionality of a truly competitive scholarly publishing market

Assessing the size of the affordability problem in scholarly publishing

For many decades, the hyperinflation of subscription prices for scholarly journals have concerned scholarly institutions. After years of fruitless efforts to solve this “serials crisis”, open access has been proposed as the latest potential solution. However, also the prices for open access publishing are high and are rising well beyond inflation. What has been missing from the public discussion so far is a quantitative approach to determine the actual costs of efficiently publishing a scholarly article using state-of-the-art technologies, such that informed decisions can be made as to appropriate price levels. Here we provide a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving. We find that these costs range from less than US$200 per article in modern, large scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review, to about US$1,000 per article in prestigious journals with rejection rates exceeding 90%. The publication costs for a representative scholarly article today come to lie at around US$400. We discuss the additional non-publication items that make up the difference between publication costs and final price