Thread by @dsquintana

Here’s why national grant funding agencies should launch their own open access journals and how they can get researchers behind the idea

[THREAD]

We’ve gotten ourselves into a hot mess when it comes to reproducibility and this is largely due to publication practices that have become entrenched over the last few decades

There have been some impressive examples of individual, group, journal and institution-driven reforms of publications practices, but unless you get almost everyone on board you’ll find yourself in a Red Queen dilemma en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen…

That is, people are hesitant to change publications practices (e.g., pledging not to publish in for-profit journals, publishing open datasets) if they feel that others who don’t change their practices will get ahead career-wise

The quickest way to change publication practices is to change policy from the grant funding agency level. If agencies make funding contingent on reporting your results regardless of results, open data sets, pre-registration etc... then researchers will have to change

I like the idea of Plan S, it’s a gutsy move from the funding agencies that have signed on. But the main worry voiced by (some) researchers is that Plan S will mean that they can’t publish in prestige journals, which will affect their careers

This is a legit concern, regardless of what you think about journal prestige. I also imagine this is part of the reason that some grant funding agencies haven’t signed on—they want to avoid blow back from researchers who want publication choice due to career pressures

So how do we solve this prestige problem?

By creating a NEW journal adhering to good publications practices with instant ‘prestige’

We create instant prestige by ONLY allowing authors who have grant support from the funding agency to publish there, and when I say allow, I mean REQUIRE authors with grant support to publish in the journal

Given that a publication in this journal signals that that you’ve won funding from the agency (i.e., prestige), scholars should have no problem publishing there.

You don’t need an impact factor (i.e., a journal that’s been established for a few years) for prestige—just look at eLIFE when it first launched or Nature Human Behavior at the moment.

If you’re doing hypothesis driven work, your grant application would essentially be a Registered Report cos.io/rr/ Grant success would mean in-principle acceptance of your paper (or series of papers) in the Grant Funding Agency Journal

This would ensure publication regardless of result, appropriately powered studies, pre-registration of hypothesis etc..

Of course, exploratory research would also be published in the Grant Funding Agency Journal. But importantly, this would have to be labeled as exploratory and not gussied up to *appear* as hypothesis-driven

It know it sounds odd to replace prestige with prestige but this is because we’ve conflated impact factor (or a predicted future impact factor) with prestige. What I’m suggesting here is to replace a fuzzy measure of prestige/quality with a much better alternative

The current system encourages researches to aim for high impact journals. This new system would encourage them to publish in a journal with good publication practices that help ensure quality science

The Wellcome Trust has launched a journal similar to this idea, except Wellcome-funded researchers aren’t mandated to publish there wellcomeopenresearch.org

One limitation with this idea is that this might disadvantage researchers from countries with less prestigious grant funding agencies, as you could only publish in your ‘country’ journal. But then again, this won’t matter too much as you would still have intra-national prestige

If funding is to be contingent on adherence to good publication practice (e.g., open data), then having the journal ‘in house’ would make it easier to track that this is actually done.

It’s pretty much standard now for applicants to include a budget line for open access article processing charges. These agencies are *already* putting money into publishing - why not put this into their own journal for a low cost?

Having an open access Grant Funding Agency Journal would also ensure that tax payers could access ALL the research that they’re paying for. The money saved from having an in-house journal could go back into funding more research