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Category: Project

Description: Taxpayers pay our salaries and fund universities and grants to allow us researchers to conduct and review important research addressing urgent global challenges. Yet, once research projects are completed what we end up doing is handing over our work to journals run by for-profit companies that take that research and put it behind a paywall charging everyone money to access the research they already funded. Ironically, researchers can only access their own research through a solution by which university libraries, funded by taxpayers, pay the publishers billions every year. The APC fee open-access policy was suggested as a solution yet is no better, often worse, charging authors unreasonable fees to make research publicly available. Both resulted in the for-profit publishing industry reporting some of the highest profit margins across all industries.   We cannot escape the sad truth: this model makes no sense. We have created and keep feeding and promoting a profit hungry monster. We have much better and free solutions, yet we do not use them. For-profit journals nowadays offer little to no added value other than the reputation that we have over the years bestowed upon them. Researchers are unable to break away from this vicious cycle given that hiring, promotion, and funding decisions commonly depend on researcher’s work being accepted to high reputation journals. This is just one of the critical challenges we face with the current publication system, there are many others.   I will discuss the growing challenges with the current science publication system, yet will also review proven tested solutions. I will introduce Peer Community In, Peer Community Journal, and Peer Community in Registered Reports and the hope that they represent, and share our CORE team experience with PCIRR, with concrete examples showing how this new model is beneficial to both authors, universities, the academic community, and the general public.