Harry Crane and Ryan Martin write:
I’m writing to call your attention to a new peer review and publication platform, called RESEARCHERS.ONE, that I have recently launched with Ryan Martin. The platform can be found at https://www.researchers.one. Given past discussions I’ve seen on your website, I think this new platform might interest you and your readers. We’d also be interested to hear your thoughts about the platform, and would encourage you to submit any of your work that you think could benefit from this new outlet. Some further information is included below for your reference. First, the platform is meant to be entirely open, to all researchers, in all fields. The platform aims to realize the benefits of peer review without suffering its drawbacks by (a) making all communications non-anonymous and (b) putting all publication decisions (including peer review) in the hands of the authors. There is no editorial board or accepting/rejecting of papers. Among other benefits, we believe RESEARCHERS.ONE will enhance transparency and remove publication bias. There are a number of other aspects to the platform, including pre-publication public peer review and a commenting feature to allow for post-publication discussion and peer review. We’ve written about the details of the platform in our mission statement here https://www.researchers.one/article/2018-07-1 And we’ve addressed some basic questions in these videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFAerOjIMGM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD3kd7duAdQ
They describe their new system:
There are no editors, there are no accept-reject decisions or other barriers to publication, and there are no barriers to access. In removing these barriers, the researchers.one au- tonomous publishing model gives authors total control over the publication process from start to finish, which includes selecting the mode of peer review (public access or traditional), choosing the invited reviewers (if traditional peer review is chosen), determining whether and how to address reviewer comments, and deciding whether or not to publish their work. Once published, articles are publicly accessible on the site, with options for other users to provide non-anonymous commentary and post-publication peer review. Ultimately, the quality of published work must stand on its own, without the crutch of impact factors, journal prestige, ‘likes’, ‘thumbs up’, or the artificial stamp of approval signaled by the label ‘peer review’.
Here are some of my many, many posts on related topics:
Post-publication peer review: How it (sometimes) really works
When does peer review make no damn sense?
An efficiency argument for post-publication review
When do we want evidence-based change? Not “after peer review”
Crane and Martin’s system, a kind of super-Arxiv with pre- and post-publication review, seems like a great idea to me. The challenge will be getting people to go to the trouble of submitting their manuscripts to it. As it is, I can’t even get around to submit things to Arxiv most of the time; it just seems like too much trouble. But if people get in the habit of submitting to Researchers.One, maybe it could catch on.
A cautionary tale
I remember, close to 20 years ago, an economist friend of mine was despairing of the inefficiencies of the traditional system of review, and he decided to do something about it: He created his own system of journals. They were all online (a relatively new thing at the time), with an innovative transactional system of reviewing (as I recall, every time you submitted an article you were implicitly agreeing to review three articles by others) and a multi-tier acceptance system, so that very few papers got rejected; instead they were just binned into four quality levels. And all the papers were open-access or something like that.
The system was pretty cool, but for some reason it didn’t catch on—I guess that, like many such systems, it relied a lot on continuing volunteer efforts of its founder, and perhaps he just got tired of running an online publishing empire, and the whole thing kinda fell apart. The journals lost all their innovative aspects and became just one more set of social science publishing outlets. My friend ended up selling his group of journals to a traditional for-profit company, they were no longer free, etc. It was like the whole thing never happened.
A noble experiment, but not self-sustaining. Which was too bad, given that he’d put so much effort into building a self-sustaining structure.
Perhaps one lesson from my friend’s unfortunate experience is that it’s not enough to build a structure; you also need to build a community.
Another lesson is that maybe it can help to lean on some existing institution. This guy built up his whole online publishing company from scratch, which was kinda cool, but then when he no longer felt like running it, it dissolved. Maybe would’ve been better to team up with an economics society, or with some university, governmental body, or public-interest organization.
Anyway, I wish Crane and Martin well in their endeavor. I’ll have to see if it makes sense for us to post our own manuscripts there.