Academic publishing is supposed to be about the sharing and mobilization of knowledge for the greater good. But the dominant commercial models in scientific journal publishing aren’t serving the academy or humanity well. At the same time, the coronavirus pandemic is changing scientific publishing before our eyes, presenting a rare chance to course-correct and move to a system that’s more open, more flexible, and more resistant to the corporatization of knowledge. Preprints, once common in only a few disciplines, are now flourishing in traditionally resistant fields—even in medicine. And researchers across fields and around the globe are demanding shorter and shorter review times, and in many cases, making do with informal and rapid evaluations of preprints conducted independently of a traditional journal submission process. At the same time, rapidly shared research is being picked up by journalists and news outlets in their mission to inform an increasingly concerned and curious public, demonstrating the value and impact of open science like never before. This emergent model, known as Publish, Review, Curate (PRC), is shifting the Overton window on what constitutes a valuable contribution to knowledge. The rareness and importance of the moment behooves us to act boldly to bring lasting change to the academic publishing industry that allows it to better serve researchers, institutions, and the public. We can do this by leveraging the growing need for alternative models like PRC to create a beachhead from which we can build infrastructure and demonstrative exemplars that drive bottom-up behavior change, rather than compete head-on with entrenched, traditional models.
https://www.knowledgefutures.org/https://rapidreviewscovid19.mitpress.mit.edu/
