RE: A new way to publish research findings. The Fair Journal pay scientists what is fair, and publish cartoon versions of the articles for kids
I really like the outreach part of the project. Really. This is a bit what I personally try to do here on Steem (making my field of research more understandable to everyone), and we should habe more of such initiatives.
However, what you say with respect to the publishing system is not entirely true. There are many very good open access initiatives (where also referee reports are sometimes open). Moreover, the arxiv is also a great initiative for having all articles available even before being submitted to a journal. All of this is free, open access, etc.
In order to satisfy and impress the journal editors, scientific articles are written in a very sophisticated manner with lots of abbreviations and jargon from specific fields. Therefore, science articles have become impossible to understand for non-scholarly educated people, and are even very difficult to understand for scientists from another field.
In my opinion, the articles are hard to understand because they are written for peers (and not to impress the editors at all, who are by the way also peers). Peer-review is what assesses the quality of the articles (and not the editor alone). Moreover, non-scholarly people are not those people supposed to read these published scientific articles. For them, blogs may be better options to get an essence of what is going on (and some, although not enough, exist).
Personally, and this is maybe the most important part for your initiative, I won’t submit any article to the Fair Journal. The reason is that I cannot find any information about the editorial team, the referral system that is used, guidelines for authors, etc. In other words, I cannot find the ‘step 0’ that will allow me to start building some trust to the initiative.
PS: just to be clear, I am all in favor of the outreach part but much more skeptical for the scientific journal part.
Some good points, we've debated a few times before actually but I'll repeat here a little: though many are open access, during my active days writing on Steem I found the vast majority of papers I needed to access were behind a wall of subscription fees and other high-priced gateways. It was often a struggle.
There may be plenty out there open access, particularly in some fields such as your own, but this doesn't remove the fact that there are plenty that are not.
I totally agree with the latter part of the comment though, this initiative needs to be much more open to what it is and who's behind it all, but I guess this shouldn't be something that takes more than a few hours to sort out, if thefairjournal agrees with the sentiment
The open access issue is a field dependent stuff. In my field, the entire community is behind open-access (and open source on different matters). This is of course not a general case, although in principle it should be. Whether other fields will follow... this the future will tell us. But in any case, the motivation must come from the inside on a given community, or it won't work.
Hi Mobbs, sorry I missed your comment. I think it came while I was busy answering lemouth.
I will for sure work on making the information about the actual full manuscript submission more complete and transparent. I guess it has been neglected a bit, due to focus on the outreach part. And maybe I have been a scientist so long, that I thought instructions to authors were a bit unnecessary (I'm in my 8th year as a postdoc). It does say under the submission page which sections a manuscript should contain, but not more than that: https://thefairjournal.com/submit-your-full-research-manuscript/
Regarding an editorial board, I think it will be difficult to gather one at the moment without having had success with the outreach. Also because we are for now aiming very broad and accepting manuscripts/layman summaries from any field. But since many scientists see journals by the value of their editors it is perhaps a necessity to have a board in place before any scientist would consider submitting. But for now, I could put myself down at least, and then start to ask around if anyone else would be interested in helping out. So if anyone that reads this think they are capable, please get in touch! :)
Cheers,
Jonas
Hi Jonas,
For the reasons you mentioned, I would focus on the outreach part only. There is nothing with this respect on the market (at least to my knowledge) and I really think the idea is good. When you get there, you should then consider diversifying. But before that, you would need to make your brand known and recognised. It is easier to do so through a domain (outreach) where the competition is less fierce.
Consequently, I would remove any mention of "regular" publications from the website.
Cheers!
Hi lemouth, thank you for your feedback! I also appreciate what you do on Steem :)
I agree that there are more and more good options for scientists to get their research out without paying anything. I really like what bioRxiv and arXiv are doing! And it is great that more and more scientists are using this. There has also previously been at least one attempt to pay scientists for their articles. But they failed due to not being viable in the long run (sorry I don't find the reference for it right now). In my opinion it will only be viable if a lot of people are interested, hence, it is not enough that only scientists find it interesting. And that is what I try to circumvent with the cartoons. The journal that attempted this before were paying a flat rate, whereas we would pay a percentage. So in that sense it will never lead to a deficit, and could therefore be more viable than with a flat rate. It would of course also mean that if it goes really well for an article, the scientists would be paid much more than they would have been from a flat rate :)
I understand what you mean about articles being difficult to understand because they are written specifically for peers. But I have seen many times that scientists use very fancy words in order to sound sophisticated. For instance the example I give in the intro cartoon: Instead of writing "the protein was located next to the nucleus" some would write "the protein occupied a juxtanuclear position". This means completely the same thing, but many would not understand the latter. And it is this type of language use I would like to minimize.
I also realize that the major caveat right now is getting full research manuscripts, as we do not have the normal things in place that a scientist usually looks for. Such as editorial board, author guidelines, etc. I think what most other scientist are asking for has been database indexing, ISSN etc, but those things are not possible to get until some articles has been published. So it's a bit of an evil circle that scientists will not submit until those things are in place, and we cannot get those things in place before scientists start to submit. We did try to circumvent this by allowing scientists to just submit layman versions of articles published elsewhere (and still pay them part of the revenue for that). That would of course still not allow indexing and ISSN, but at least it would get the ball rolling and create more awareness of the concept.
But thanks again for your feedback, and I'm happy to discuss more!
Cheers,
Jonas (creator of the Fair Journal)
Please see my reply above ;)