Abstract
Communicating new scientific discoveries is key to human progress. Yet, this endeavor has been increasingly hindered by monetary restrictions that restrain scientists from publishing their findings and accessing other scientists’ reports. This process is further exacerbated by a large portion of publishing media owned by private companies that, in contrast with journals from scientific societies, do not reinject academic publishing benefits into the scientific community. As the academic world is not exempt from economic crises and funding restrictions, new alternatives are necessary to support a fair and economically sustainable publishing system for scientists and society as a whole. After summarizing major shortcomings of academic publishing today, we present several solutions that span the levels of the individual scientist, the scientific community, and the publisher to initiate a transformative change towards more sustainable scientific publishing. By providing a voice to the many scientists who are fundamental protagonists, yet often powerless witnesses, of the academic publishing system, as well as a roadmap for implementing solutions, we hope this initiative will go beyond sparking increased awareness and promote a shift towards more sustainable scientific publishing practices.
Highlights
Since the dawn of humanity, knowledge has been a most precious and path-determining asset of mankind
As with other valuable commons, access to knowledge is vulnerable to unsustainable exclusion and needs to be regulated to guaranty equity and sustainability, away from the “tragedy of the public knowledge commons” (Hardin 1968, David 2000)
Academic publishing is the predominant medium scientists use to describe and communicate their findings. It is the main metric by which scientists are evaluated throughout their career, when it comes to accessing jobs and grants, with frequency of publications and journal prestige as a gauge of scientific achievements
Summary
Publication of, and to the readers for access to, scientific content, with some allowing higher publication fees to offset the access fee (a.k.a. open access; Smith 2006, Minet 2017, Zhang 2019) and vice versa These publishers depend on continued input of scientific research that is funded largely by government agencies, and rely heavily on the scientific community for the skilled and uncompensated tasks of manuscript selection and evaluation (i.e. editorship and peer review), on a volunteer basis (Odlyzko 1997, Smith 2006, Aarssen and Lortie 2010, Van Noorden 2013, Schmitt 2014, Buranyi 2017, Huang and Huang 2018, Zhang 2019). These initiatives have so far had limited impacts on the publishing system with no significant shift to a sustainable alternative (Heyman et al 2016)
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