When the community is overburdened by peer review, it’s everybody’s problem. As of today, Nature Neuroscience has become part of the solution by joining the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium, a flexible system that allows voluntary participation by authors, referees and editors. Here are more details, from our April editorial:
The most striking news for me at the®evolution in Scientific Publishing session yesterday was that fewer than 100 people showed up, even though prominent posters advertising the discussion greeted all attendees on their way into the meeting. I guess neuroscience journal editors are going to have to figure out how to navigate the brave new world of scientific publishing without much help from readers.
For those of you who haven’t been following the debate, there are a couple of linked hot-button issues that publishers have been dealing with over the last few years. One is whether journal content should be available to anyone (open access) or only to subscribers or site license users. Another is how journals should make the transition from print to web publication, which includes the question of who’s going to pay for our work once journals move away from print subscriptions as a major revenue source. (If you doubt that journal editors add value by publishing your work, ask yourself why you don’t just post a description of the experiment on your own website and skip all that pesky peer review hassle.) Like the rest of us, the editors of the Journal of Neuroscience are trying to figure out how to keep the community happy and the journal sustainable at the same time, and this session was their attempt to bring society members into the conversation.
The panel included people from the American Physical Society, the librarian organization SPARC, Science magazine, Highwire Press, Elsevier and PNAS. We heard some cautionary tales – when PNAS tried making their content freely available after one month in 2000, they had an 11% drop in subscriptions, and when the APS tried asking high-energy physicists to pay for publication in the early 1990s, many of them stopped submitting their work to the journal. But there were also some success stories, including several journals at which authors or third parties can pay to make articles free online at publication. At PNAS, about 20% of authors take this option. Donald Kennedy of Science emphasized that his journal is available to virtually all scientists through site licenses, though Andrew Watson, who edits the open-access Journal of Vision, challenged that view in the question period, calling the discussion “too nice”. He had a point: I’m not sure that someone unfamiliar with the debate would have been able to determine which panelists disagreed with each other on what issues.