In order to help the OpenPub project move forward, we would like to try and crowdfund some of its development. After all, we want our preprint server with discussion experiment to be part of the community! We’ll be whipping up a proposal with all sorts of cool rewards that help you be part of the process of changing the face of scholarly communication.
But first, we need your help. You see, we want *YOU* to be part of our crowdfunding proposal.
How? Simple.
Record yourself answering these two questions:
0) Who are you? What’s your name, position, and institution?
1) When you submit a paper today, how do you feel about the review & publication process?
2) So, I’m part of a group making a preprint server for Ecology, evolution, and the earth and ocean sciences. It’s not just for preprints, but actually will include tools to review and comment on other people’s work in an interactive dialogue. Do you think this would be useful? Why?
And then feel free to say anything else you’d like about the future of scholarly publication.
Once you’ve recorded this to a file, email us with either the video file or a link to the video file.
We’ll post the best responses here, and edit relevant pieces together into our crowdfunding video to show the whole community the need for what we’re doing!
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I think a preprint server with more interactive options would be very useful, one question though: wouldn’t it be possible to set this simply on top of the arXiv? The arXiv allows revisions coded as arXiv_identifier.v1, so it can’t be too difficult to add some comments / reviews e.g. as arXiv_identifier.c1, and link this on the website.
It might not be the perfect thing and give you all the web 2.0 options you want, but the arXiv is well established and has long-term funding as well as a very simple text(or LaTeX)-based submission system that guarantees persistence of our work over decades, which is for me more important than fancy comment functions.
We approached arXiv to see if they’d be interested in hosting, but they don’t have the time, funding, or support infrastructure to fold in a discipline that doesn’t have a large preprint culture at the moment. If this is a success, though, then maybe. There are a some arXiv overlay journals, some of which are even similar in spirit to what we’re doing here. But none have worked yet. We’ve been trying to learn from where things have gone wrong there.
Fair enough, thanks … If you find the time, I would find it interesting to get more information like that about the state of your discussion, also in relation to other initiatives such as POS. Maybe in a separate post?
It would also interest me what you learned from the overlay journals. I know that a few pulled out of the arXiv because it was not viable financially, but I suppose that this doesn’t really apply here because you would have to secure funding anyways.
However, as I said, probably those are more topics for a separate post than for the comment section here.
For a bit more detail, see this post or our meeting notes about OpenPub. And sign up for the mailing list!
But, most importantly, would you be game to record a video of yourself answering those questions? And/or get some colleagues to do the same?