Mathematicians Aim To Take Publishers Out of Publishing

ananyo writes "Mathematicians plan to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. The project was publicly revealed in a blog post by Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal winner and mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK. The initiative, called the Episciences Project, hopes to show that researchers can organize the peer review and publication of their work at minimal cost, without involving commercial publishers. 'It’s a global vision of how the research community should work: we want to offer an alternative to traditional mathematics journals,' says Jean-Pierre Demailly, a mathematician at the University of Grenoble, France, who is a leader in the effort. Backed by funding from the French government, the initiative may launch as early as April, he says."

Great idea but...

[Anonymous Coward]

you have to convince 1)young scientists they can still get employed and grants publishing there and 2)old faculty who do the highering and grant reviews that these are just as good as normal journals. As an academic myself, I'd prefer to publish in open source journals but the powers that be want high profile journals like science, nature, PNAS, etc. You can't even get an interview unless you have papers in a high profile journal anymore. Until this mindset changes, these 'publishing free' journals are dead in the water.

Re:Great idea but...

[Slippery_Hank]

I agree completely, but I think that 1) follows directly from 2). I am an early career researcher, and I want to be publishing open source. The reason I do not, is because I need to be sure that I can get research grants and tenure positions later in life. I would like to see a high profile institution start a policy that they only hire candidates with at least one open source publication, that could really get the ball rolling.

Re:Disingenious

[Anonymous Coward]

most people won't see the original AC post or your response or this response. I believe the default on slashdot is not to show posts with 0 or negative score. I have to go through extra steps to see posts which have been downvoted, which is the equivalent of purposefully reading bad journal submissions.

A journal will have a "better" mod point system than slashdot. The easiest way is something along the lines of only giving users who are proven/qualified reviewers more mod points or make their mod points weighted more. There will also be more criteria for being able to mod posts in the first place apart from having a /. account.

Then you can even have your own personal "weight" for each reviewer that is active on a journal you frequent.
So there you go. proper selection of comments and it can develop into something better than print journals...yay progress!