@mike @marind
With the direct link bypassing the
https://www.ouvrirlascience.fr/retrospective-and-prospective-study-of-the-evolution-of-apc-costs-and-electronic-subscriptions-for-french-institutions-2/

Below the corresponding poster, the 30M€ has to be compared with 88M€ subscription cost (75% papers have no APC)

@mike @marind

This being said, what government/institutional support can we expect so that alternative ways are developed?

Early 2022 #CNRS urged us to publish in #DiamondOA before admitting that it needed investment to be a genuine alternative.

British IOP and German DPG have launched the New Journal of Physics e.g, one could envision a development of it into a diamond journal if properly supported by public policies. What are the initiatives in France?

@jocelyn_etienne
There's CRAFT OA https://operas.hypotheses.org/6016 , the DIAMAS project, and probably others, but those were just open in my browser at the moment :) There are also thousands and thousands of existing, hardworking #diamondOA journals (>12k listed in https://doaj.org/) who would love the support of researchers just using them. Lots of math and other diciplines at FJN https://freejournals.org/current-member-journals/

@wendympatterson
@mike

In DOAJ listing, 90% have APCs, haven't they? Then 1.2k don't, among which 442 meet the criteria for the "DOAJ seal", https://doaj.org/apply/seal/

That's 16 in Physics and 9 in Biology. Among them, most are acutely specialised, apart of the "Comptes Rendus Physique" and "Comptes Rendus Biologie" (French acad of sciences). That's already a good thing, but let's not pretend there's a good coverage already.

@jocelyn_etienne
About DOAJ:
- >12,900 Js listed do NOT have APCs (i.e. approx. 70% are DOA)
- the Seal - it doesn't mean that those without it don't qualify. Loads of great journals in there w/o it. Bureaucracy, time, mostly to blame.
- The categories and categorization of Js in DOAJ is well known to be, well, terrible at best 😂 A sore point IMO.
- But overall, an amazing resource

@jocelyn_etienne Thank you. Lots of interesting nuggets here, not least that the hoped-for end goal only has 10% of articles going to Diamond journals!

Encouraging that most growth is in true Gold journals, at least, rather than paying hybrid fees to barrier-based journals.

@jocelyn_etienne @marind I think there is now a widespread and growing consensus that, having shifted the world pretty irrevocably from subscriptions to Gold OA, the next step is Diamond. It needs funders with a broad vision. My big bugbear right now is that (for example) the Gates and Wellcome journals will only publish works created by their own grantees. Think bigger!

@mike @jocelyn_etienne IMO it's not about the lack of existing DOA Js out there or the support of semi-diamond platforms. There are (so, so) many DOA Js (very good ones too), but researchers don't use them. At my foundation we'd love to open up even more Js and support diamond more widely but not until researchers are ready. Or should I say, the problem with the evaluation systems is "fixed".

@wendympatterson @jocelyn_etienne I think the issue is scaling. I myself use primarily diamond journals, but if everyone switched (as we want them to) they won't be able to keep running on volunteer effort, as at present. The question is how we can fund they increased usage.

@wendympatterson BTW, I am so impatient with the evaluation system and the excuses made about out. Pretty much everyone says "Of course *I* am not fooling enough to think that a Science or Nature paper tells you anything useful about a researcher; but we have to deep with so many *other people* who do".

@mike I wish more researchers would become impatient too! :D Just waiting it out and hoping the scale tips at some point!

@wendympatterson I am less optimistic about reaching the tipping point soon than I used to be. I am seeing a lot of mid-career researchers who used to think they needed S&N papers for their careers, now running their own labs, saying they need S&N papers for their students. When are we going to just walk away from these objectively bad journals?

@wendympatterson (Not just those two, of course: the whole structure of striving to get into high-IF journals rather than journals that do a good job of the work of publication.)

@mike Oh and my favorite one:

PI: I would publish in your DOA journal but my students need the Science/Nature pub

Students: I would publish in your DOA journal but my PI needs the Science/Nature pub

🤷‍♀️ 😅

@wendympatterson @mike

The scientific community itself is of course partly responsible for the situation -- I love the way the Guardian tells the story of Cell in particular (although I don't have other accounts of that time, so maybe there are oversimplifications I don't see).

1/2

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science

@wendympatterson @mike

But it's been shown it's possible to launch new journals independently and encounter success, in my field @PLOS and @eLife did that within the past 20 years. If institutions would embark in such endeavours in a #DiamondOA framework, that could change the game.

2/2

@jocelyn_etienne @wendympatterson @PLOS @eLife The best journal in my field at the moment in @thePeerJ@twitter.com but it launched privately in the wake of PLOS, intending to break even and make a profit on membership payments and later APCs. It would be interesting to see something new of that quality launched with the intention of being diamond from the ground up.

@wendympatterson Ah, we crossed in the post. Yes, exactly! And all the more frustrating when yesterday's student is today's PI, teaching today's students how to be when they are PIs themselves.

Partially agree with you, @mike
I do see it as partially a scaling issue (not right now), but we'd be happy to invest more in the scaling issue if researchers would just use the journals. Also, at least the journals I work with (our own and those with the Free Journal Netowrk) would HAPPILY see at least double submissions without issue. Granted this is just a small portion of the DOA journals out there. And finally, many DOA journals are already fully funded and not run on 100% volunteer.

@wendympatterson I admit I see the world of Diamond OA from the perspective of my own field, vertebrate palaeontology, where most of the Diamond journals are volunteer-run. It's encouraging to think that this is less true in other fields.