I wish I could make the world a better place. I would like to prevent climate change and wars; but that’s not so easy on a personal level. What I can try to do more modestly as a scientist, is to make the scientific world a better place. We have all heard the phrase “publish or perish”. We all complain that careers are made by publishing in “high-impact” journals who favor story-telling and grand claims, and generally select papers arbitrarily (let alone that they do not even predict the impact of papers they publish); a trend that has been increasingly strong and has very negative impact on how research is done, including serious ethical problems. But what do we do concretely about it? For most of us including myself, not much. We keep on submitting to those journals, and we say we have no choice because that is how we are evaluated (for positions or grants). But who evaluates us? Surely there are some political aspects to it (mostly for funding), but the truth is, we are evaluated by peers. In brief, we are inflicting this madness on ourselves.

So: let us stop complaining and try to change the situation. I have previously exposed a vision of how the academic publishing system could look like without journals (by the way, this is not an original thought, fortunately). How to make it happen?

Where we are now

We should be hopeful, because many good things are happening:

• Preprint servers are getting more and more attention. In biology, a number of journals are now accepting direct submissions from biorxiv, including all the PLoS journals, PNAS, eLife, the Journal of Neuroscience. This ought to boost submissions of preprints.
• A few journals have started publishing the reviews along with the accepted paper, for example eLife, eNeuro and Nature Communications.
• More generally, open access to both paper and data is getting more and more common and enforced.
• A new journal, F1000 Research, now practices post-publication review. The paper is indexed in pubmed once two reviewers have approved it.
• Very significantly, the Wellcome Trust has opened a journal for its grantees, Wellcome Open Research, based on post-publication review (in partnership with F1000), with this statement “The expectation is that this, and other similar funder platforms that are expected to emerge, will ultimately combine into one central platform that ensures that assessment can only be done at the article level”.
• Finally: Pubpeer, started just a few years ago. A simple idea: to let anyone comment on any paper, anonymously or not, and let the authors know and respond. You should install their browser plugin. This is an individual initiative but it has already made a big impact, in particular by showing that the “big journals” are not better than the other ones in preventing flaws or frauds. It also addresses the concern that open reviews would be too nice: anyone who finds serious flaws can spot them anonymously and the authors will have to consider them. Pubmed commons is similar, but with signed comments.

What we can do now on a personal level

1. Put every single paper you write on a “preprint” server before you submit to a journal.
2. Put all your data online, see eg OpenAIRE.
3. Remove journal names from the publications in your website. People who care about them will find out anyway.
4. Start a literature search routine that does not involve looking at tables of contents; a few ideas in this Twitter thread; you could also have an author alert on Google Scholar.
5. Write comments on Pubpeer; including on “pre-prints”.
6. Send your papers to a journal with open post-publication review. I know this one is difficult, because the community still cares about impact factors. But at least you can favor those with public reviews (eg eLife, Nature Communications; I would prefer the former as it is non-profit). Instead of sending your papers to Frontiers, send them to F1000 Research; or at least eNeuro.

At the local community level, we can advocate for post-publication review. For example, the INCF has opened a channel on F1000 Research. Maybe we could have a computational neuroscience channel there, sponsored by the OCNS. It is too bad that F1000 Research is for-profit rather than institutional, but currently I do not know of other options.

What we can do on a more global scale

Open post-publication review potentially addresses the issue of recognition, but it does not address the issue of visibility. One concern I have by submitting in F1000 Research (for example), is that my intended readership will not know about it. There are so many papers published each year, one does not even have the time to read the title of all of them. This is one role journals have fulfilled: to select papers worthy of interest for a given community. But since we do not need journals anymore to publish anything, editorial selection and publication need not be coupled anymore. So here is my proposition. We make an independent website which lets any scientist, or possibly any group of scientists, be their own journal. That is, make a selection of papers they find interesting (including preprints). We provide a number of tools to make this as simple as possible: linking to pubpeer and pubmed commons, searching/browsing, alerting authors whose work is selected, email alerts and RSS feeds, etc. Papers are preferentially linked to the preprint if it exists, so as to completely bypass the journals. We could also let authors suggest their own paper for editorial selection. Basically, we provide all the services a journal typically has. This will be made increasingly easier as public open reviews become more widespread. These new “journals” could be run by an individual scientist, or a lab (eg linked to a journal club), or possibly a scientific society or group of scientists. Let us call any of these an “editor”. I would be happy for example to follow the selections of a few authors I respect, and that would be probably more valuable to me that the selection made by any journal, of which very few typically catch my attention in a given table of contents.

I am hoping that it goes as follows:

1. People start using these individual journals, because it provides relevant information to them.
2. As a result, papers in less well-known journals and preprints start getting more attention, and more citations.
3. People take the habit of putting their papers on preprint servers because they get immediate attention.
4. Editors progressively stop selecting papers published in journals because they have already selected them when they were preprints.
5. As editors are also committee members, journal names start to matter less in evaluating research.
6. Traditional journals disappear; instead, we have direct publication (formerly known as preprints) + open public reviews, both anonymous and signed.

How to get it started?

One simple idea to get it started is to make automatic channels for the actual conventional journals. For each journal, we list the table of contents, linked to preprint versions instead of the journal website, and to pubpeer, etc. If it’s convenient, people might start to use it, especially if it allows free access to the papers (legally, since we would use preprints). Then to get people to use the non-conventional channels, we provide suggestions based on content similarity (ie “you may also like...”).

How about this resolution?