 This session is now open for questions from the audience. The question is, do you see one first step that is implementable, that the community can come together and how, and to actually make, you know, like do some progress in the publishing or possibly with a preprint or maybe more largely. Do you see one, because there's a lot of thinking and brainstorming and criticism of how things work and how they should and so on, but what is the implementable first step or first steps? Okay, thank you. I've actually got a short and a long answer to that. The long answer is if you want a first step, I think you need to think about what the end goal is and the end goal I think is to get nerdy about research evaluation because the reason I gave that talk is because the individual incentives do not align with the collective incentives and that's a problem. And so if you really want these things to change, whether it's research, whether it's RRIDs, whether it's sharing data, whether it's preprinting or whatever it is, you have to get to that. So the first step I'd say for that is like to think about how you might change that in your own situation with your institution and with your granting agency. And in order to do that, I think if you've ever tried to talk to policymakers, you know why they should change, so I think you need to try it. Whatever it is that you're interested in, try it. Start to measure it, think about the impact it's had and think about whether it's positive or negative to you and to science. And if you can start to build that evidence, then you can go to the policymaker and say, this is the change I want and this is the change that we need in order to make these things happen. So I'd say the first step is just to try. However you can take that one small step. Trying, meaning designing an experiment, designing some data collection, designing some, and then actually doing some research, doing some meta-research. Well I don't think we're all meta-researchers, so I'm super hesitant to give you one first thing because everyone in this room is different and has a different context. If we're talking about preprints, I'd say try to preprint your next manuscript or at least try to talk to your PI and co-author about the possibility that the next project might be preprinted. That might be very simple and easy for some people in this room and then for them I'd say well try thinking about when you preprint, try and send it to someone to say, hey I've just done this, can I have your reflections on this because I want some first public reviews on this. That's very, very like far along. So I actually don't really want to give you a one small step. I want you to look internally and think, what's the next thing I can do to push this in the direction I'd like to see it? I'm happy to talk to anyone individually about that if they want. That'd be great. Thank you. So for probably all of scientific history, the best way to find out what's exciting to do, what tools should you use, what should you be thinking about has been to come to scientific meetings, right? And you learn about all these things. You say, oh I can't believe I didn't know about that. I'm going to make a note and I'll go and check out it when I get home and then you do it and it's great. Where and you don't know why you couldn't find it before. So when you go to a tool, like some of the tool, like RIDs for example, let's say I were to go and I were to go to search for that, I wouldn't necessarily know it's not as good of an exploratory tool as it is an identifying tool. And so for journals, there's now like better machine learning and better tagging, there's like recommendation services where you can sign up and get papers that are like the thing that you should be looking at based on your interests. So can we do the same thing for tools based on advances that have been made lately by some of the people who spoke here but better tagging, better algorithms to say, okay here's some tools they use, make me some recommendations. Is that, could that happen? So let me take the first pass at that. We have an open data set, you know, and if you ask us for more data, we're very happy to provide it and this is a call out to anyone in this room. The RID data set is now getting to be interesting enough to actually study in its own right for just those kinds of things. What do I use with this tool? We have sort of a first pass at that and it goes along the bottom of each tool. There's like the most frequently used tools along with it. That's a first pass. It's a single algorithm and it was done once. I would love to see a lot of, you know, the interesting people in this room who want to promote a lot of these tools actually start to build up tool communities. We're starting to just sort of get to kind of a first pass at that. A lot of the genomic tools tend to show up together. A lot of the neuroimaging tools tend to show up together. You know, ours everywhere, Python's everywhere. But, you know, there are some really interesting things that we're starting to see kind of in the tool space and I think that as we move forward there will be much, much more. And I won't say that machine learning is yet going to solve anything because the open access percentage, you know, there are 2 million open access papers and I just, you know, I jump up and down and I scream and I get very excited about that but there are 26 million papers and so it's still a small fraction and I'd love to, you know, make sure that that keeps getting pushed and I think Europe is really pushing on that right now and so are others. So that's one of the other things like machine learning. Great! But you got to see the paper to mine it and you still can't. So I think we're still, there's still a lot of challenges there. I could add to that a little bit. I mean there are, there is software, there are software repositories like GitHub or, you know, similar things that actually, that community, the open source software communities several years ahead of the open data community but there's also standardization efforts whether for the tools or for the data that are, that like groups like INCFR so pivotal for our, for our, that's like the bridge between the computer programmers and the neuroscientists where they can, you know, we can have provenance and tags and all these things that we can more easily find some of the tools and know what they do and be able to group them. So there's already some out there and we're building a lot more. So that's coming. Unfortunately, Samir will not be able to answer because I can't ask him now. So the question to the rest, in ten years, what do you see? Will, okay, in how many years you think Utopia will arrive that there will be no need in actual commercial publishers of any kind and actually preprints with all kinds of community elements on top of it, reviews because that's what we need, right, peer reviewing all of that, dynamic systems of some kind. They are there to foster, you know, our communication and there is no journals or it will never arrive. So we'll just take who has some kind of notebook to write it down. Okay, so as a commercial publisher, I'm going to be trade careful. Samir wanted to be a rock star, right? Yeah, so I'm Vicky Hallow and I work for F1000 so we're an open publishing platform. I think what's interesting is this kind of often people kind of associate commercial with bad which I completely understand why and I think Elsevier is kind of the most guilty of that but I think often people hear about F1000 and I like to think we do some really cool stuff and people automatically assume we're nonprofit because we're doing kind of cool stuff so I think that's a kind of separate discussion in itself. I think in terms of kind of how many years till we kind of rid ourselves of the journals it's hard to kind of put an estimate on it, it's a very challenging question but I would say I think there is progress and it is moving slowly and slowly if we think about open access that started kind of early 2000 so we're almost kind of 20 years into that and it's slow progress but it's moving slowly and I think particularly the funders have been very kind of effective in pushing that change. I think in terms of kind of what researchers want out of the system I think there's really power in the collective if researchers don't want to use journals they don't have to use journals if you will turn around tomorrow the whole research community and said I don't want to publish in nature anymore that's the end of nature so I think yeah there's kind of a circle where kind of you would turn around and say oh but for my career and for my grants I need a nature paper and we just end up in this loop of who's to blame and we're blaming the institutions because they're kind of putting limits on where researchers can publish or do we actually kind of put a mirror back to the research and say you also kind of have power as collective to change I'm not really going to put a kind of year on it but I think it's up to you in terms of a timeline and how you want to work together for that so just pushing all the blame back to you rather than the publishers I'd like to add to that so my name is Agathe and I'm working for Frontiers which she's also a publisher in open access fully one thing that I think though is that at this point of the publishing landscape there are some new tools I mean of any kind that makes any publisher being challenged on any aspect basically so we're trying I think to get more and more community driven which means again back to what you just said that we sure hope that the publishing landscape is going to evolve into a situation that you know works for the scientific community and the power is getting more and more in your hands I think at this point we do see an evolution over the past few years and increasingly here and persistent that the landscape needs to change and the models needs to change so I think we're on this road together and can I add a final or like maybe not find another point and then Francis as well okay I'd like to refine your question to say that commercial is not the indicator I think I used the word in my talk but I actually really love F1000 research they start with pre-prints they take a little bit longer to get online because they check data and code links of course it doesn't mean the stuff's reusable but that's so much more than other people do and their process is fantastic and actually what we need to recognise is that all these things cost money like you've just said all these extra things the amount of time and effort that goes into good journal production having worked in a publisher is insane right so all this costs money and if you think about science you have to take grants to then do your science if everyone's going to be reliant on grant funded infrastructure they're also going to have to spend a lot of time convincing these funders who are just rich people who had like legacies to give them money to continue to work and there is another model that the world works on and I'm not like particularly aligned with it but actually in order to generate profit in order to keep running to do all these expensive things there's an ethical way forward there and then there's a I'm going to put profit before everything else which is where I think that's really where your question is and I think that's a whole capitalism issue that we may not be able to solve as scientists so sorry I just wanted to make yeah sort of because that question sort of sorry the elephant in the room as far as I'm concerned I really came through in Carl's talk earlier like I mean you know there's the there's the love the money you know the fame and so the nudge and so it's really exciting here what is our strategy in terms of how to change things because it's not just what the publishing in the journals like I mean I talked to where we are oh sorry should I say what I said I said earlier that it's really like I mean Carl's talk where she talked about those four aspects of love you know why we're doing you know we love the science we're very excited you're passionate when you're student and then there's a reality of you know fame money nudge and so the way to change is like the nudge part so that our we can't change a person but if you have things that make people change their behavior in a certain way so that's the publishing is all the same thing right so it's sort of trying to change it a little bit but the elephant in the room is this 24 hours in a day and we're all too busy to do everything so that's you know we have to sort of you know survive you know systems you know was getting evaluated in certain ways and I have talked to an institution about you know let's you know we have to evaluate in some way but let's sort of be about high impact paper you know high impact paper we have sort of a more good but things take time you need a metric so sorry that's what I'm going to say the elephant did you have another question? I have a question okay so thank you so did you have another question on this topic JB? on the commercial versus non-commercial the commercialization aspect I mean sometimes when we speak with Marianne I mean there's a sensation that I'm against commercialization I wonder why that is JB that's not the case I mean I think the problem of the community is that those commercial entities have locked in the community I mean if the problem is that there is there is some sort of like a non-competition somehow when you are a journal with a high impact factor and you own the platform and you own the brand name and there's absolutely no way the whole editorial board may resign and go and do the lingua move which is well known but that's no problem the name of the journal will still remain there will be enough interest by good editors to actually join that new editorial board set up by your commercial entity because when they are on the stock market their mission is to make profit and they can be sure if they don't make profit I mean if they make some move to have a less profit and more ethical aspect so that's the problem and that's the problem that as a community we need to so I'm all in favor of companies when they compete and they say okay community you have your and we're going and please contractors for doing this and that that is fantastic that's where we all want to be and I have a lot of commercial activity around that that's fantastic at the moment that's not where we are and that's what to me is the problem and the thing we should resolve so I know Tom has something to say but that's also something again through force 11 and other places where one comes into contact with the publishing industry very good people working in publishing who feel that they do a service for science and they do the problem we have is the problem Anita said right now and I think it's very relevant to this particular audience we can easily get to 2.5 million full text papers for text mining biomedicine is scattered across 29 million of those we cannot get to them and I do not think biomedicine can afford any system which locks away our content like that so at the end of the union took their stand against Elsevier because it's not the services they provide it's it is non competition is one but in my view the fractionization of the biomedical corpus and the effort it takes for any individual group to go through all those licensing agreements that is the thing that I think is holding science back now and I think therefore a code of ethics for scientific publishers that says I am going to manage this process on behalf of the community and put those things out there in a way that they can be universally mined I don't think that there is any way biomedicine can continue without that ability I think the commercial publishers just are going to have to deal with it the problem is because I agree with you whose fault this is I go walking down the street I go to my congressman I go to anybody else who is forcing me to publish in these closed access high impact journals they don't care they don't care right researchers staff funding agencies researchers staff everything they all come through the academy so I think at some point you just got to look at your own behavior and say what am I doing here none of us I think as Francis said is we're not immune to the allure or as Eve Martyr said of these high impact journals but if you're going to do that then you better negotiate for it to be open access at time with a license that is compatible with text mining I don't think we can afford that okay I just couldn't take any more good side in this little forum that's nice that doesn't happen always I mean I I very much agree with you JB in one sense but I think that one of the points that was brought up earlier from after Yerick's question is it is us in a sense that you're telling the supply side story right there's a demand side story too which is we are generating the demand for publishing in that our 10 year promotion and so the question there to the panel would be is this a kind of long term generational change that we have to start working towards one point if I could just quickly say something and then I'll leave it to the actual publishers but I think that many few years ago we didn't really even have the means in a lot of ways to do this right we didn't have standardization we didn't have technology that was really effective in working and now we're kind of we're maturing right so this is a good time for the publishers to embrace that and I think those that do will succeed hugely and as JB said it's nobody hears I don't think we're not against the idea of doing running businesses for profit for service as long as they serve the community so you know I think this is a good time for publishers and for our world to come together to do this nicely so that's my two cents so let me just put in my two cents really quick one more you go you go so one whenever you say ah things are terrible I find that providing mechanism to get them to change is really incredibly useful because you can complain for a long time I'm Polish I complain a lot but in fact that doesn't help anything right so what helps is being able to have a mechanism for change and I think the problem with this whole impact factor driven science is that we don't have currently an alternative to the impact factor to be able to evaluate our work that's actually why we're looking at trying to create a reproducibility index because we want to provide a mechanism maybe it will be flushed down the toilet but at least there will be something else there that we could look at if we wanted to to I want to always be able to come up with a mechanism for change before I say anything else right complaining is great but at one point you need something to actually grab on to and the second thing is open source tools also have a problem and we have to recognize that problem open source tools means that people don't get paid to work on them and as much as you hate the commercial industry no free free open access and what have you if you lose your grant you no longer have support for that tool then you're doing that in your spare time and you can maintain tools in your spare time and it's a labor of love but that is also a risk just like commercial I'm not saying the commercial is better I'm not saying that this is worse or anything like that but there are risks with every kind of model and so it's important to understand those risks I kind of wanted to address the point about kind of generational change in early career researchers I think there's such as emphasis about oh early career researchers are switched on they're kind of doing open science which I think is true to some extent but they're also kind of still publishing in the same system that is run by kind of basically old white PR so I think how are we asking for kind of more diversity and inclusion and people to kind of stay in science and they're working in this very kind of antiquated system so why are you asking early career researchers to kind of publish in journals that perhaps aren't as high impact because you want the system to change whereas actually I think it's the PIs who have the more kind of power to kind of trickle that shift down I think early career researchers are switched on but unless the PIs are kind of emulating this behaviour and not just because they've got tenure that they're then kind of oh I can publish wherever without doing it as soon as you become a PI and kind of talk to your lab about kind of open science practices and support them and kind of point out the benefits to them I think it really it needs that mentor it can't just be early kind of career researchers just kind of doing this on their own and kind of trying to build these open science systems it needs to be throughout kind of yeah throughout the system I wanted to mention one of the excellent alternatives that emerged in the few years touching upon Anita's point about alternatives, low cost and open source tools that's called the Journal of Open Source Software where I really is an editor it's actually an excellent excellent solution to pursue even for non-software ideas too I cost I think just one dollar to publish so we should promote such solutions further thank you this is eating into our break so I want to thank all the speakers and also our additional panelists for an engaging discussion we could go on for another couple hours on this topic but I think it's break time is that correct yes so outside