These days, academic journals serve two purposes: to organize peer review, and to make an editorial selection. With internet and in particular “preprint” servers (eg biorxiv), journals are no longer necessary for distributing academic papers. It is also worth reminding that the peer review system has not always been organized in the way it is currently organized, ie with several external reviewers, multiple revision rounds, etc. For example, Nature only introduced formal peer review in 1967. Before that, the selection would be done internally by the editor.

These two missions, organizing peer review and making an editorial selection, are currently coupled. But this is neither necessary, nor a good thing. It is obvious that this coupling is not necessary. One could easily imagine a system where papers are submitted to a mega-journal (e.g. PLoS ONE, PeerJ, F1000 Research), which organizes the peer review, and then journals (e.g. Nature or Cell) make their editorial selection based on perceived “impact”, possibly using the reviews. Instead, authors must submit to each journal separately until their paper is accepted, and reviewers are asked both to check the scientific standards, which is the alleged purpose of peer review, and to judge the perceived importance of papers, which is an editorial task. This results in frustration for the authors, unnecessary delays and tremendous waste of resources. Thus, it is not a good thing.

Once a peer review system is organized (eg by mega-journals), the remaining role of journals is then editorial selection, and this could be done separately. Once we realize that, it becomes clear that very little infrastructure should be needed to run a journal. A journal issue is then just a list of papers selected by an editor, put online with the appropriate links and editorial comments. I propose that every scientist, or lab, or possibly group of interest, starts their own journal, which I will call “free journal” (see my related posts here and there). Free journals are not tied to any commercial interest; they are self-managed academic journals. Crucially, the editor makes a personal selection based on her readings, papers that she personally thinks are interesting. This means in particular that, in contrast with most journals, the editor is highly qualified. The selection is meaningful, not a collection of thumbs up/down made by disparate reviewers based on vague criteria (“impact”). It also implies that it is totally acceptable for the editorial selection to include “preprints”: the editor is a peer and therefore any featured paper is by definition peer reviewed (ie, as in Nature before 1967). I have made my own free journal of theoretical neuroscience in this spirit. I have collected some technical advice on how to make one, and I would be happy to receive any suggestion.

The bottomline is: it is very easy to make a free journal. On the technical side, one essentially needs to use a blogging system, eg WordPress. This automatically generates an RSS feed (eg one post per issue). I also put all the comments associated to the selected papers on PubPeer, with a link to the journal; this way, anyone using their plugin automatically sees that the papers have been selected in the journal when looking at them on pubmed, for example. On the editorial side, it actually represents little work, and I believe that this little amount is actually quite interesting work to do. Every scientist reads and annotates papers. All that is required to run a free journal then, is to set half a day in the month to put your notes together into a post. This helps organizing your bibliographical notes, and it is helpful for your colleagues and your students. One could also imagine coupling this writing with the lab’s journal club.

Please leave me a note if you are making your own free journal and I would be happy to link it from my journal.

My free journal: Brette’s free journal of theoretical neuroscience