Neuroscience publishing is too important to leave to publishers

Shaun Yon-Seng Khoo

doi:10.35430/nab.2019.e7

Abstract

Almost every open access neuroscience journal is pay-to-publish. This leaves neuroscientists with a choice of submitting to journals that not all of our colleagues can legitimately access and choosing to pay large sums of money to publish open access. Neuroanatomy and Behaviour is a new platinum open access journal published by a non-profit association of scientists. Since we do not charge fees, we will focus entirely on the quality of submitted articles and encourage the adoption of reproducibility-enhancing practices, like open data, preregistration, and data quality checks. We hope that our colleagues will join us in this endeavour so that we can support good neuroscience no matter where it comes from.

Highlights

We have previously had the choice of submitting to a subscription journal that not all of our colleagues can legitimately access and choosing to hand over a large sum of money to publish in a journal that is open access
While open access was proposed, in part, as a solution to the hyperinflation of journal subscription fees, known as the serials crisis [4,5,6], article processing charges at open access journals are rising much faster than inflation, underwritten by the price insensitivity of academics [7]. Changes to this system have not been forthcoming despite decades of advocacy [8]
It has become clear that we cannot and should not wait for academic, institutional, or funder leadership to implement a system of scholarly communication that is relatively free of perverse incentives and business models

Summary

Introduction

We have previously had the choice of submitting to a subscription journal that not all of our colleagues can legitimately access and choosing to hand over a large sum of money to publish in a journal that is open access. Subscription limits our audience and the vanity press of pay-topublish open access creates perverse incentives that undermine research quality [1,2,3]. The amount that libraries and authors are paying is rising much faster than inflation.

Results

Conclusion