323 - Research Marketplace
When multiple "Call for paper" emails appear (unsolicited) in your inbox, the word "spam" probably comes to mind. This is only becoming more true with each passing month.
Many researchers have noted the absurdity of academic publishing, having to pay for publishing and/or access, reviewing papers for free, the plummeting quality of editing and published materials thanks largely to AI, and those publishers laughing their way to the bank. What is less often noted within this sense of outrage is what can and should be done, not just to fix this particular set of problems, but to fix the process as a whole.
What is needed to solve the full spread of these problems isn't just to replace academic publishers as they exist today, it requires the creation of a platform where publishers must compete directly with one another for the rights to publish papers. Marketplaces offer a particular kind of Collective Intelligence (Malone, T.W.) and the ability to compare options jointly itself also reduces cognitive biases (Kahneman, D.). Monetary benefits are always nice, but in this case the potential UX benefit to Researchers is what towers above all else. For example, picture a platform where:
- Researchers publish their preprints, marking those papers as "available for publishing".
- Academic publishers must then make offers on all of the papers that they'd like to publish, directly competing with all other publishers. All of the impact, quartile, and other metrics for these journals are displayed as part of each offer.
- Researchers may choose from any of the offers, knowing at a glance all of the metrics of each journal, as well as any monetary benefits. The publishers could also be reviewed and rated by those choosing to accept their offers.
The reasons why researchers could be HIGHLY motivated to adopt this and never look back are that it means no more wasting time on:
- The email spam "Call for papers", where journal data is unknown.
- Figuring out if a paper meets the page limits and other requirements of a journal.
- Finding the often well-hidden costs of publishing
- All of the other random BS that publishers can only cook up and serve in non-competitive environments.
Even with at least one paper that I should publish this year, I've ignored every "Call for papers" email received in the past 6 months. Those of us not subject to "Publish or Perish" have very little incentive to waste such time. The solution is clear, so I hope that someone builds it.
