Been warning about this for over a decade. Recently had to dig out an old blog post in this context. Most in academia are still oblivious to this fact.

khufkens.com/posts/publons-pee…

On reviewing, publons and privacy – Morning musings

the current state of academic publishing

^{Morning musings}

@koen_hufkens

So true! I up your post from 2017 with one of mine from 2013:

blogarchive.brembs.net/comment…

🤣

It looks like assuming the worst from these corporations is a really good way to predict the future. 😆

I did try to change the system in 2012 though, but failed.

elsevier.com/en-in/connect/pee…

Peer Review Challenge

Winners unveiled

^Elsevier

This was basically what Hypothes.is does. Linking annotations to documents, and gathering those for peer-review reports. The AGU journals now use this. But I've not come across any others.

web.hypothes.is/

Collaborate & Annotate with Hypothesis | Online Annotation Tool

Engage students with Hypothesis, the leading online annotation tool. Create a free account or explore education solutions today!

^Hypothesis

@koen_hufkens

None I know use anything like this! It should be implemented in a way such that I as an author can, e.g., just click on "accept" if I want to write what the reviewer suggested.

@koen_hufkens

There is now a project at Imperial in the UK that is running an implementation with similar functionality. We just need to get rid of journals at it'll be one of the first things the replacement will have...

@RoedigerRG @koen_hufkens

WRT #Zotero and #OpenAlex, yes, absolutely, I'd say. However, we already have many tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journals (check OpenAlex for number of sources!). I don't think more journals will give us a solution.

Instead, we have proposed to replace journals with a modern, federated infrastructure:
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi…

This is also what the EU science ministers have concluded:
consilium.europa.eu/en/press/p…

and the cOAlition S funders:
coalition-s.org/towards-respon…

Towards Responsible Publishing

Seeking input from the research community to establish a community-based scholarly communication system Why discussing Responsible Publishing is important In the five years that have elapsed since the publication of the Plan S principles, the move…

^{www.coalition-s.org}

@RoedigerRG @koen_hufkens

Once again, a proposal that takes no consideration whatsoever for the vital intellectual role journals play in the humanities and social sciences. Seeking to bureaucratically impose (bad) solutions to these disciplines is not a very democratic move.

@NBarreyre @RoedigerRG @koen_hufkens

Not sure I understand. Please point out where we write that we wish to impose our proposal on everyone and where we forbid (as if we even could!) anybody from investing more than necessary into their part of the system?

@NBarreyre @RoedigerRG @koen_hufkens

No, of course, we propose to replace parasitic corporations with a scholar-led alternative. Do you propose we stayed with the parasites instead?

The argument (already long before this article) is commonly that most of the money goes to parasites and most parasites publish journals in STEM fields. So some of the money we save there can go back to fields that have historically been drained by the parasites indirectly: because of shrinking budgets.

@RoedigerRG @koen_hufkens

Ok. Stepping back. I am all for getting rid of the parasite for-profit publishers. They are a major problem. What I reacted to is the proposal, to quote you, « to replace journals with other systems », because in the social and human sciences journals do more than just peer-review and publish, and they play an important intellectual role. Maybe they could do that again in the experimental sciences but I have no idea.

@NBarreyre @RoedigerRG @koen_hufkens

Good that we agree on getting rid of the parasites 👍 Common gorund!

In our companion paper:

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi…

we describe (maybe more like 'suggest', lol) how modern social technologies could be leveraged much more effectively than journals to support some of the other functions jhournals have served historically.

@NBarreyre @RoedigerRG @koen_hufkens

I'm a biologist based in Germany and this article was co-written by a chemist from the UK, a geoscientist from the US and a humanities scholar from Canada 😜

The roole model we use as an example in the paper is @hcommons.social Humanities Commons who to us seem really an examplar of how we think all fields of academia ought to approach social technologies.

@NBarreyre @RoedigerRG @koen_hufkens @hcommons.social

From the ten authors on the "replacing journals" article, about ojne third are humanities scholars.

@NBarreyre @RoedigerRG @koen_hufkens @hcommons.social

Last year, I talked with @tdverstynen about the labor that goes into humanities publishing. I don't see any obstacles for the humanities, only opportrunities. E.g., wouldn't the people doing all this labor, be happy to work with a functional infrastructure that makes their work easier? You know, so they don't have to struggle on remembering which button to klick or where to submit what, but actually focus on their job?

@UlrikeHahn @koen_hufkens @NBarreyre @RoedigerRG @hcommons.social @tdverstynen @elduvelle

Most areas in my research fields need extramural funding just to keep the lights in the lab on, so while the UK is indeed somewhat special with their national assessment exercises, in manby places PIs can justify their GlamHumping by pointing to the people in their labs.

@UlrikeHahn @koen_hufkens @NBarreyre @RoedigerRG @hcommons.social @tdverstynen @elduvelle

WRT the UK REF specifically, I vividly remember the first year REF explicitly banning journal rank from being used for evaluations in 2015:

svpow.com/2015/07/10/how-can-n…

By @mike

At the time, this demonstrated to me why the journals really must be phased out. Today, I look at Germany and see the exact same thing:

bjoern.brembs.net/2024/11/rese…

#assessmentreform #researchassessment

Research assessment: new panels, new luck?

For 14 years, the main research funding agency in Germany, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has stated in its guidelines that submitted grant proposals will be assessed primarily on the basis o…

^{bjoern.brembs.blog}