 Hello and good morning. I'm Shane Allsop, the Community Engagement Assistant to Elife and it's my pleasure to welcome you today to May's ECR Wednesday webinar. Now if you're unfamiliar with the series, it aims to give early career research as a platform to discuss issues important to you and your research career. Now you can follow us on Twitter at Elife Community and with the hashtag ECR Wednesday. And for reference, this session is being recorded and will be made available on YouTube in the near future. So without further ado, it's my pleasure to invite Fukundo Romani, a postdoctoral researcher at University of Cambridge, United Kingdom and member of the Elife Early Career Advisory Group to introduce today's session and our panelists. Thank you Shane and welcome everyone. This is the first time in a while that we are not doing this kind of webinars, just to give some context. These webinars are an initiative by the Early Career Advisory Group at Elife, and today we have two amazing panelists and it's going to be a very interesting discussion about the history of science publishing. My name is Fukundo, and I'm a member of the ECR as I mentioned, so I will moderate this webinar. Elife is a non-profit organization that is operating a platform to improve aspects of research communication by encouraging and recognizing the most responsible behaviors in research. The role of the Early Career Advisory Group is to influence and support E-Life work to catalyze broad reform in the evaluation and communication of science, and in particular to represent the needs and aspiration of researchers at early career stages. And to change the, and to create a culture that is more healthy for the science and scientists. The ECR is an extremely diverse group, I'm very proud of that. Thanks for all the work that every ECR member do and also the past ECR that have worked at E-Life. So today, panelists, we talk about how shown us have changed through the history and how this affect the day-to-day lives of scientists. Following the panelists, presentations, and discussion, we will invite questions and comments from the audience. So let me start with some housekeeping things. The webinars please be respectful, honest, inclusive, accommodating, appreciative, and open to learning from everyone else. Do not attack, deem, disrupt, harsh, or threaten others or encourage such behavior. If you're feeling comfortable or unwelcome on any of those aspects during the webinar, please contact E-Life by email at elifesafeteamprotonmail.com, the email's in the slide. And we accept the right to ask anyone to leave or to deny access to subsequent webinars. As Shane mentioned, the session is being recorded and it will be made available on YouTube just a couple of days after this. So to make the kickstart to this webinar, remember that the question will be after the presentation of the true speaker. If you want to ask a question, at any point of the webinar, you can just type your question in the chat box of Zoom or tweet to E-Life community using the ECR webinar hashtag. I will read out the questions during the question and answer section of the seminar. So now welcome to our speakers. And first, welcome to Eileen Five, a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom. Eileen is a historian of science, technology and publishing with particular interest in the construction and communication of knowledge and the way in which scholarly communities operate. Her current research investigates the history of academic publishing from the 17th century to the present days, including the financial models underpinning scientific journals, the editorial and review process of journals and the role of learned societies publisher. So we invite Eileen to share the screen. Thank you for showing us today. Thank you very much. I will just get that screen going. It's lovely to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me. And I'm going to talk a bit about my research on the history of scientific journals because that's what I've been working on for the last social eight years now. I started my graduate career in the natural sciences, but I turned into a historian of science instead. And I've always been interested in questions about the publishing of science, the popularization, the communication of science. It's about how people get no things who aren't themselves in doing scientific research. And so for the last, oh, yes, for the last eight years I've been working on history of the Royal Society of London, and its transactions, the philosophical transactions, it's the world's oldest, longest running scientific journal. The only thing for me as a historian is that the Royal Society is a kind of organization that keeps archives, it keeps records. So it's possible for us to know things about this journal that we wouldn't necessarily know about other journals. And we can learn about the behind the scenes story of this journal. When papers get published in print in journals, those journals live on library shelves and so it's, you can go and see what has been published that's relatively straightforward as a historian if you want to know who published what, and when you just go to the library and consult the old volumes, you're trying to understand, for instance, who didn't get published, or why those decisions were made about what should get published, or who funded the journals, and who bought them, and how widely did the circulate those kinds of questions you can't do that just by looking at the bound copies of the library need the archive. And that's what we've got with the Royal Society, because they have this fantastic archive that I have spent. And my team has spent quite a long time looking at this is just to give you a sense of the sorts of materials we're looking at, but it does include referee reports peer review reports from the 1830s onwards. But I will just in case any of you are wondering they are handwritten so anyone who's imagining doing great data analysis on these first you have to read handwriting, which slows down some of the things we might wish to do. Anyway, so I've been working on this I'm just coming to the end of writing a book project that will publish later this year on the history of Royal Society publishing over the last 350 years will be coming out open access in October. Please do I would say please do buy it but it's open access please don't read it is what I mean. What I thought I do today is just take you quickly through the, what has changed over the last 350 years. I'm going to address three specific questions that I hope might be of interest to you. But the very fact that things have changed is probably the one thing I really want you all to take away, because I think we're living at the moment, through a time when we're thinking about how should scientific publishing how should scientific communication change. And sometimes in these discussions, I hear people saying, Oh, well, journals do this. This is what journals are for. This is how it works, or sometimes this is how it works. It's how it has always worked. This is just how it is. And as a historian, my perspective and that is, no, it's not how it is journals have done different things at different points in time. They have performed different functions they've operated in different ways. They have been adapted to their environment if you will but it's not a natural selection process it's very definitely one where people are shaping this particular technology to serve a function in the context in which people are living that context is partly about the technologies that are available. It's partly about what other forms of communication are available and what does the journal do other forms of communication don't do. And it's also very much about the people that are involved because one of the things you'll gather from what I've got to say is that the nature of the people who use journals who read them and who write for them and who edit them was very different in the 17th century than it is now. It's also a transition from leisure, gentlemanly amateur scholars to professional academics who are striving for career prestige reputation jobs promotion. That's not the context in which early journals started, but it is the context in which they're now operating. We need to think about those things. So, these are the three questions that I thought I'd touch on. I can say much more about any of these. If you'd like to ask me about them later. I'll answer them quite quickly because I really want to talk about the other two about peer review and about money. But let's, I want to just start by giving you a little sense of what I mean about things have changed, because if we imagine the gentlemen of learned societies in the late 17th century, we're talking about men, white men, well educated white men, we're talking about our societies in Paris depending where we're talking about. We're not talking about people who had jobs in universities, and who were striving for careers we're talking about people who are interested in the sciences. But doing science wasn't a job, it was something you did, because you were interested in it, not for any hope of a career, so they please do remember that. When the philosophical transaction was founded, it was founded in that context. It was created by this man on screen that right now Henry Oldenburg, and he created a periodical that would bring news to people in London from all over Europe, because he knew that there were individual scholars and little groups of scholars all across the learned world, which at that point in time largely means continental Europe. But they didn't really have a way of talking to each other, you know, but a few people wrote letters to each other if they knew each, if they knew each other. But how would you in London know about what was going on in Chilean or St Petersburg or Stockholm. Maybe there's books coming out there that you'd like to know about maybe there's research being done by someone. So his, his transactions was that a news sheet. Didn't involve people sending research papers to Oldenburg and him thinking will I publish this will I not publish this. You must think of Oldenburg as an editor, more like a magazine or a newspaper editor who's going out there to try and find content to put into his news sheet to say look there's a new book been published in Madrid. Oh look, there's been some interesting work reported by this person in Heidelberg. I put it all in there. Some of it is extract some of his book reviews of news. It does not look like a modern academic journal at all. It served a very different purpose. But it's important now because it became something different. Also note at that point in time, there were other periodicals and existence but no other ones that focus just on the natural sciences. So something very special about transactions at that point in time. So what we get though to 1800. It's not special in that sense anymore. There are many other journals out there now. And in fact, transactions had changed. It's remit by now because it was now focusing on original research papers that were sent in by their authors to be published and all the newsy stuff, the book reviews, the news of meetings of the Paris Academy of Sciences and what was going on in St. Petersburg. That doesn't appear in the transactions anymore. Other journals do that now. So you can you see there's sort of an ecosystem of journals developing, some of which focus on original research and the transactions as an example of that. But there are other ones doing other things. So the transactions has become quite slow and stately and very much lengthy, well thought out research papers that look a little bit like the ones we're familiar with now. And that continues through the into the next century. So by 1900, we've now got lots of research journals, and lots of other sorts of journals, journals that do abstract journals that do news journals that do book reviews. So something's now changing about what these research journals do. Although the philosophical transaction still looks quite similar to what it did 100 years ago. It's now operating in an environment where the people writing the papers and reading them are academics, not leisure gentlemen. We're now talking about university lecturers university professors, we're hoping to get jobs, we're hoping to get recognized in their scholarly community, and publication has come to matter in that context, in a way that was not true in the 17th century, or the 17th century. And so being published in some journals counts for something. And that's where I'll talk about that a little bit when I talk about peer review, but something like the transactions is the sort of journal that carries a bit more prestige than being mentioned briefly in this new fangled thing called nature, which I know you probably would know about nature, but back then it was a very newsy journal think the front half of nature. And yes you might get mentioned in it but it's no big deal. So, again, different sorts of journals playing different roles. Notice we're still in paper we're still no technological changes here. In the 17th century, there were various technological changes microfilm didn't do very much CD roms didn't do very much. But by the time we get to the 1990s of course we have the internet, we do get some major changes there. But it's the first time that technology is releasing to make a huge difference to publishing. And again it changes what the wider ecosystem looks like. And that I think we can talk about later but that has implications for what role journals still play when that wider ecosystem shifts. The transactions itself, it's now a thematic collection. It's no longer an open research journal. It's a different journal that does that. The transactions has found a different niche doing them thematic topics. So let me now look as quickly as I can at my other two questions. So peer review right is one of the things that we talk about quite a lot. How important is peer review to journals. Is that why publishing in journals is more important than publishing preprint or publishing on your web page. So why you might like to know do journals use peer review. So my first point, as I said earlier is, is not always been like this. I'm a Ngram viewer, which there are various caveats with it there are various issues, but nonetheless it nicely makes the point that the term peer review was not widely used before the 1970s. Now partly that's a terminological thing that was a different word that was used for the same practice, but it also reflects the fact that it wasn't widely used, even when it was known as refereeing. Nowadays you say peer review is fundamental to the practice of science peer who has always been essential. That is just not true. So bear that in mind when you think about where you want to go forward. I do think it serves useful purposes, but it hasn't always been around Oldenburg. You might have realized did not do peer review or anything like it because he was not that sort of editor he was news gathering as much as possible. He was in charge. He made decisions. He didn't have to ask anybody. It was his journal. He did what he wanted. That's that. And that is of course the common model for most periodicals. There's something very strange about academic research journals, and it's this thing called peer review that does make them different editorially from most other periodicals. The origins of that strangeness come from the learned societies, not just the Royal Society but other organizations like it. These are communities of scholars for publishing something that represents them. By 1800, the Royal Society and some others had developed basically a form of collective editing, not one man says I will do this, but a group of people still men who decide together, we will make these choices, because these choices published represent us as a group. So what is published in the transactions represents the Royal Society's activity, and therefore the Royal Society is concerned for its reputation and prestige about what gets published. You don't want to get a reputation as a society for publishing trivial anecdotal material you want to publish the significant original material. So how do you make sure that you can do that an individual editor was a bit risky, they might be incompetent, they might be biased, or they might just get long term ill and not do anything has happened in one case. So some kind of collective committee structure is important. That gives the impression notice that that collective decision is some sort of approval by the society. And that's significant as well that if you get, if you successfully get through this process. I think this means that the community of scholars approves of your work because you, they all said yes let's publish it. So that impression of collective approval is significant for that one in mind too. By the time we get to 1900 that collective committee based system has got another thing, which is called refereeing, that's the bit that looks like your review. You can get where individual experts read the papers in detail and write a report on it. And we've got those reports in the archive that we can go and read some of them have been digitized and you can find them on the Royal Society website if you want to browse these ones all come from there. So this now means that we've got collective decision making backed up by some form of expertise. So you might be thinking that means that these papers really are worth publishing. It's not just an interpretation. Also though consider position from the Royal Society's perspective, where they're getting more and more papers coming in. And they've got side. What, what should we as a prestigious historic organization publish what we think is suitable and appropriate for us, but also, what are we going to spend our money on publishing. We're going to spend our money. Money is my, my third point is, so the refereeing is part of accountability process to protect the reputation of the institution, the community, but also to protect his resources, because choosing to publish a paper by some unknown scholar is also an investment of actual cash. And so that is significant to Yeah, we can skip through that one. What changed in the 1970s is basically that this collective decision making became more widely used, because for most of the 19th century, independent editor journals did not bother with this. So for instance when nature was set up, it was run by an independent editor, he did what he wanted, much like Oldenburg had, and didn't learn to do this peer review thing, which slows things down. All the reasons you know that there are problems of peer review. So in this 1960s 70s, a new generation of journals emerged, and they began to use peer review or they called it peer review as well, which is a new thing. But they started to use the same processes as the learners societies. Part of this I think has to do with competition in academia, but there are some other things going on, we can talk about later, if you want. So when we get to the late 20th century peer reviews been pretty much accepted in the English speaking world across a whole range of disciplines as being an important thing that distinguishes science scholarly knowledge claims from news gossip opinion self published stuff. It conveys community approbation, and it helps to build careers, but it's a really recent thing. It's the late 20th century. So that becomes mainstream. You don't have to race through the money thing. Again, we might want to talk about this one later. But my key point here is to say that if you think scientific journal publishing is profitable and money making. It's only been so very recently. That's also a new late 20th century thing, because although Henry Oldenburg would have loved to have made money. And that's why he started it. He wasn't very successful at doing so, because there weren't that many people who wanted to buy his periodical because it is quite a specialist interest after all the science stuff, if you're in the late 17th century. One of the later editors has said to have a lot spent 15,000 pounds of his own money and that's older, I remember conversion horrendous in today's terms can't remember the conversion but it's a huge amount of money in today's terms. By the time we get 1800 the Royal Society took over the transactions they owned it managed it and paid for it, rather than leaving the editors to pay for it themselves. And once the society is paying all the bills, which they are from this point onwards. You can do something slightly different with the journal for instance you give it to the members of society as a members perk, but you can also give it to people or organizations that you're trying to thank or impress. And you can set up a very early form of free knowledge circulation by exchanging copies with other similar organizations across Europe. So the 1765 map at the moment shows the beginnings of this system of gifting and exchanging gifts to university libraries exchanges with other publishing organizations. It meant that copies of the transactions were circulated across Europe, not through commercial channels. This is all being paid for by the Royal Society and the other societies around Europe, not by customers and not by not by libraries either. So it means that for the Royal Society, this was a cost. Okay, so sales income never came near to the cost of publishing throughout the 1819 or early 20th century is not until the 1950s that that changes. So publishing was a cost for the scholarly community, but it was a cost worth bearing for the sake of circulating knowledge. It was becoming really difficult by the time we get to about 1900 is look how many more dots are on my map now. There's more research being published, which is more expensive to print that paper, all the ink thing all the time settings really expensive to publish more research. And you're trying to circulate more institutions around the world, you're sending free copies to universities all across Britain and Ireland, and some of the ones across Europe and North America. You're sending copies to museums in South America and Australia, and you're exchanging copies with some of them too. That's huge global scale makes it really expensive. It was becoming unsustainable I would suggest. But nonetheless, everyone assume this was what you had to do, because there was no possibility of making money out of scientific journals, because they're really expensive to produce. So that changes in the 1950s and 60s when a new group of publishers come into play and approach journal publishing a different way. They turn university libraries into customers, not gift recipients. And that is possible because of the expansion of higher education and the funding situation of science and higher education in the Cold War. There was enough money in the system for all those university libraries to buy these journals when they stop getting given them. They're all society and others benefited from that as well, which we skip past. So, I think one point, it hasn't always been like this. Things do change, things change when the community changes, things change when the technologies change, things change when the landscape around changes. So peer review still operates in broadly the same way as it did, but it means something different now because community has changed. And as for the commercial model of big business science publishing. Well, it actually worked quite well in the Cold War, I would say it did do quite a good job of providing new specialist niche journals and emerging fields and marketing them internationally. But ever since the money dropped out of the higher education system in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. It's been struggling. And we can talk more about why that is later, if you want. But I think we're ripe for a change in the publishing model and probably overdue for one. I think that's my cue to stop and hand over to Stefano. Thank you. Thanks to you, Eileen, very amazing and talk to kick off the kind of debates that we will have in the question and answer part. Now, I would like to introduce a Stefano Biennialo Stefano recently obtained a PhD degree in developmental and cell stem cell biology. And in the Sheila Marine research station in Taiwan, key work in the incident metamorphosis in clownfish. But Stefano, right, recently, very interesting pieces about how preps could be the actual end product in terms of prefugitive printing. So he has very interesting ideas and he will bring the perfect the perspective of early career researches to this talk. So welcome, Stefano, and please show your screen. Thank you for having me. Okay, so thank you for the introduction. I like that I'm following a lean talk because it really showed, you know, the historical background of scientific publishing and how that in many way explains how we got to the current situation right now to the current publishing landscape, and how many of what we have now are is the result of, I mean, specific decisions that need to have been made like that and possibly can change. And now they led to the current situation in which us, you know, PhD students, postdoc early career researchers are now stepping in as we try to navigate our way through academia or way through scientific publishing. And we find ourselves in a landscape that is toxic in some way extremely toxic. I don't know how much of this resonates with any of you, but it's a, it's a scientific space where we feel uncomfortable, we're very, you know, coercive, we feel we have to play a game, you know, to succeed to proceed. That we don't want to play that we would have not played and, you know, in other ways, even if not to this level it's a it's a publishing space that is auto, you know, not fit for the time or not fit for our needs in many ways. So in my talk I want to share my experience and seeing whether in the current system, we can pick here and there and mix and match and, you know, craft ourselves a path through publication is more aligned to how we envision how publication should be and how it should reflect how we want to publish rather than contributing to the traditional journal publishing system. And to go straight to the point I had published some kind of essay manifesto that was called the pre in my preprint is for pre figurative in which I was sharing exactly this my experience of posting my main PhD research output as a preprint, but not just that posting as a preprint with no intention of further submitting to a journal. And maybe you had the similar experience but what you realize everyone around you asking you, you know, okay, you post it, you posted it as a preprint but where are you going to publish it now, you know, with a journal you're going to send it to where is it going to be. And I realized that really the concept of the preprint as the final destination of your research is not a concept that is expected or normalized, and it's really the preprint as a pre of a print as something you do before sending it to print. And so calling it pre figurative printing was a way for me to reclaim, you know, this term in some way, and changing the, the framing around preprint as something that is not, you know, waiting for the printing in a journal, but is, you know, the future that we want, we want. And prefigurative is prefigurative politics. So it's a much complex, you know, way, a strategy of social change. I'm not really, I mean, there's better people to talk about it. But in practice, it's, you know, that future that we strive to, you know, strive to fight for and vision to reach it by enacting it in the present. So I like this quote. You know, it's the building this better world here and now, through ongoing experimentation. And I love, and we can go over this, you know, as PhD students, as sort of activists, we are in this duality of needing these changes that we're fighting for this institutional level changes, system level changes, but we need them urgently, you know, as if you couldn't live otherwise, because we don't have three or four years, because in four years where we leave academia, if the situation didn't change, because I don't have a, for example, my paper in a journal. But at the same time, you have to do it peacefully as if you will be there to witness this long term changes. So in practice, what does it mean? What does it mean, you know, doing this prefigurative publishing in practical terms? It means that if we do see the future as being journal less, you know, without paywalls, without article processing charges, without this commercialization, without this global north, you know, focus, world building, that journal are, I mean, all main journals are involved in without impact factor or this. Then let's now, even though the system is not designed for it, experiment on this. Let's see if we can do it now, this future and through that actually influence policy and reaching that future. So if we add now, you know, the first step of prefigurative publication is publication. And of course, if we are asking ourselves now, how can I publish my thing without involving journals, without having to go to a journal. I mean, we're so lucky because to us now the answer is clear, because we have preprints, right? We joined this academic space when preprints became a thing. So the same way as people just before that would have told you, no, you cannot publish without a journal. Well, now we can. We can and I think we should publish all our research, our best research or normal research, publish it on a preprint servers and I put here, I mean, I publish it on Bioarca, where's there many others. And I find that in many ways, this output is arguably better than what you would get by publishing in a journal, because my preprint, I put it there with the number of figures I wanted with the length of the section I wanted with the bibliography, I wanted that I needed, you know, for this specific case with the language that best reflects how I would communicate science. And then if someone tells me about, you know, why you're not submitting it to a journal now, it's, you know, if my goal is publication, why would I submit to a journal publisher that is going to put a paywall is going to ask people to read it. It's going to ask me $1000, 3000 pounds to prevent them from preventing others from reading it through article processing charges. So, you see, there's less and less incentive for, in this case, if our goal in the aim of publication itself to send it or to use a journal. And, and we're so lucky in this case to preprint servers. But still you publish on the preprint, I will tell you, well, you still need to send to a journal because you don't have a period, you know, we want to peer review. Well, luckily, we don't need journal to do peer review, either. Because now we have this flourishing number of services, I use review common that probably a lot of you are familiar with, but there's a lot of different entities services group of people organizing new way of, of, of carrying out or providing journal independent peer review. I found that this kind of peer review is better than the model peer review that currently gets offered by journals. This peer review, for example, review common is open, you know, it's transparent, it will be next to your research for everyone to read your replies will be openly available. The reader can use them to inform and to form their own opinion on the research that they're reading and the reader access a peer to so while you know you might get a comment. reviewer doesn't see the value of this kind of research in a journal peer review this means that your research will never be seen because it's a rejection in an open post publication peer review. It's just that it's just the opinion of a peer this expert didn't see the value in this kind of research, and the reader can use that as an information can still see the research. And more importantly can see your reply the author replies saying okay, you might not see the value because of this, this is how why we see the value for example, and the conversation now you're applying to both the peer reviewer is a much more productive and enriching for for all people involved form a peer review. And again, we didn't need to send it to a journal to obtain this if we need and if we feel we need peer review or if we're told that we need peer review. But still, I mean we are a point where we can have our research public to everyone we can have our peer review public and rich and strong. And still, we feel like this is not a legitimate way because we still need to send to the journal, because if this is not in the journal. You won't get that I mean, you won't get a post dog, you will not get that fellowship you will not progress in the career because it needs to be in a journal. And when I wrote the essay, I was stealing my PhD so I, you know was writing we shouldn't use journals without having actually to face the, I mean, the consequence in terms of looking for a job. And now I had and it's true how many times do we see, for example in post dog fellowship applications, you know the last step of career progression how can we have a career progression that is journal independent. How many times do we see this kind of wording like in the eligibility criteria of a fellowship application. I mean, not not to get the fellowship to even your research to be considered to be able to be evaluated for a fellowship. You need the first authorship and primary research paper in a peer review. This is an international recognize English language journal this is usually the requirement for career progression. And I mean, every single this criteria for me is problematic of course and and should be challenged. One is that to this day, the concept of a peer review preprint is not a thing that is valued or conceived, even though it's a possibility, and you're facing funding agencies that tell you that we're sorry it's true you have a peer reviewed primary preprint is not in a journal so they and so it counts zero you have to transfer to a journal for unknown reason at this point for it to be count as a real thing even though there is less and less explanation. And this was the most difficult thing you know how can we have a career, and then at the same time, it was an advantage because I realize how misguided, you know, we're, you know, we will play the game to progress and succeed in this career. In a space, you know, in a career that requires you to do things that you don't want to do to progress you know why would you want to do everything to go through in a system that clearly is not the system that you would want to have a career in. And so it closes a lot of door but also it redirects you to maybe a more, you know, to find the spaces that may be a bit more aligned to what you would want to do. And I mean, on a positive note. Actually, not only a career progression is possible because you will find those places that where you want to progress in your career because they're aligned so the people that reject you because it's not on a journal is not the lab where you will want to go in the first place so it acts for you as a self selection in some way. But now so very recently, actually funding agencies are starting to apply these changes that are aligned to this future that you that that you're imagine so they will, for example, and both now in a trial will accept the preferred preprints as I mean as an equivalent, you know, it seems that they realize the paradox of wanting a journal with a peer review but not a preprint with a peer review. I want to, you know, launch a kind of a provocation. These changes in the system, for example, let's take the, you know, funding agency changing the requirement. Do you think this change will come from all as PhD students, while playing along and indeed submitting to a journal, for example, to be able to be eligible for this fellowship and so just pass through smoothly or do these changes will come when single PhD students or ideally entire cohorts of PhD students will refuse, you know, to play along with the system and, you know, and tell them, look, I have my preprint it has a peer review. Why are you asking me to just for the same thing to be in a journal. And so, you know, the prefigurative practice gives you a lot of vulnerability but the leverage to confront the current system and highlight the inconsistency and how different they are from what ideally they would be. So, I hope I didn't go too fast, but I think at the moment of history in which we are now. We, we can make, you know, pick here and there services platform technologies group of people that allow us to achieve our goal so I mean, make my research completely public, have a peer review if I want, and actually also get a career profession in a way that doesn't require you to participate in the historical contingency that we happen to live in and that we don't agree with right with the commercialization of knowledge or even just a time of peer review or this, and you know, different issues with the journal ecosystem. The last thing I want to say is that at the moment it's still true that every single of these, let's say, initiatives or services does redirect you or favor, a shunt you toward the journal. The review common expects you to get the peer review and then send it to a journal. You have to again, actively decide not to do that. The bio archive will facilitate your transfer to a journal. So we, we have to be intentional about these and the system will change and can be independent from a journal and we have to also while we do the alternative not keep feeding the model, the current model that we don't want, you know, to exist in the future in that and I think I will close with that, hoping that I didn't take too much time. Thank you very much Stefano, we are pretty much on time and we still have around 15 minutes to keep the discussion. Thanks both for the very interesting presentations. And after both presentations clear that publishing is an historical product, but it is also a generational problem so every generation could change and what publishing actually is. So we invite now to everyone to type the question in the chat, we already have a couple of questions to start with, or you can also tweet to E-Life Community or ECR Wednesday hashtag. I almost tell in the chat, she would like to talk about the history of preprints. I think that will be very interesting. I would like to expand that question to when the journals start asking for exclusivity. And if at some point it was common to do multiple publication of the same research. Yeah, so in answer to that one, it's that the expectation of originality, I think, is how it would have been phrased rather than exclusivity. And it depends what sort of journal you are, if you are the transactions of the Royal Society of London, for instance, and they've been insisting on originality on being the place of first publication from the late 18th century. And that is partly to do with reputation and to do with finances, but if they're going to include this research in their journal and pay money to have it published, they want to make sure that it's, they get the credit of being the place of first publication. But they don't insist on exclusivity after that in terms of reprinting, translation, abstracting and reportage. That's fine when there was actually no copyright on periodical articles at that point in time in Britain and there's no international copyright at that point in time either. Yeah, so it's absolutely normal to see reprinting, resharing reuse, if you use the modern terms. But the thing that was being insisted on was, or at place of first publication. But not all journals would have insisted on that if you were some of the newsy journals, they wouldn't mind because they would report on other things. And on that the thing about journals, you know, our modern journals, some of them insisting copyright transfer forms, though I know they're becoming less common now that actually comes in after the US Copyright Act of 1988 and the UK Copyright Act of 1990 and not quite sure what the European one that's equivalent. But there was a set of changes to Copyright Act around about the time when electronic technologies were coming in. It was actually databases, but at that point it wasn't the internet yet. And publishers were trying to protect their investment and started making people sign copyright transfer over, which included the exclusivity. So it's actually quite recent and in response to a particular technological change. I was listening to Stefano and thinking I wonder Stefano why you're still calling them pre print, because there are different words historically used and there must be other languages to for the thing you're talking about. And in the 18th century they call them separate copies. So just separate copies of individual papers. And then they became known as off prints. And in the 20th century we call them pre prints. When we call them pre print we're thinking that they come before print. But if you want to make the point that they're coming instead of print, then we need another word, so that there isn't the expectation going on. The early examples of these things were identical to the printed published version, because they were the extra copies of the printer produced at the same time they were printing the issue of the journal. And they would make some extra copies, some extra separate copies for the authors. And they were known as separate copies most of the time, but they could be known as extra copies worked off. In some cases they circulate ahead of time. So the Royal Society, for instance, gave the authors their separate copies as soon as they were available before the publication of the issue. So they circulate in advance. But not all publishers did that some of them wouldn't give them out till afterwards. So they weren't necessarily pre prints, but sometimes they were. They were the same text. So it was a copy of this circulation, not an early draft version. The way that things came out in early draft was orderly, because they would have been presented to society meetings or they would have been discussed out loud. So there's a long history of early versions coming out, but done orderly to a small audience. And there's also a history of copies circulating separately. So there's a lot of communication cracks. By the way, a big problem that you could work out, but we have solutions to that nowadays. And it's not a problem now. Sorry, Stefano, you're going to come in a moment ago. No, no. So, I mean, that's why I couldn't use the word pre, I mean, the pre print name is correct because most people do see it as that as the pre or the print. Because I don't like that notion at all. And it was not the use I was making of it. That's why it's like when I say pre print, I mean, not pre print, I mean a pre figurative print. So it just, you know, I mean, it's the same thing. That's the name, but it was my way to, to, to change the framing around it. And really me use the same word because, you know, why not? Because this is the object, but to show, you know, a complete different vision on the use of this. So someone in the comments said that in archive, they call it E E print. Yeah, this print, this pub, I say I publish on bio archive, apparently many people, you know, publish is literally making public, but it's not. And some people argue that it's not public. So a complete mindset that needs to be changed, regardless of, you know, the word you actually use but it's reflected in this word and that's why I like to, you know, to change the meaning of the word in some way. Yeah, it does strike me that we have so many ways now to make your work public. If you think of publication as meaning make your work public. There's loads of ways of doing that. But what I think is not quite maybe so clear is how you make sure it's findable sightable and do if we think peer review matters then how does that happen. Anyway, so I can see that there are loads of questions, maybe I should. So you can follow up with, and I will try to show into questions about how, and during the history, prestige and quality was associated with journals, and when peer review becomes a scene on a synonym of scientific quality. So if you can comment something on that. It was because of the community because of the editors was because of kind of product of the real quality of the research. Sure. And it's the sort of two different versions of an answer to that so the one one version is that the prestige comes I think from the, the sponsoring organization. I'm being slightly big on that because in the most of the work I do it's the Royal Society, but it's the same if you're talking about the Paris Academy of Sciences, but it could be an individual editor and if an individual editor is respected and well regarded, then getting his approval to be in his journal. And that will be true of some of the chemistry journals in the early 19th century, for instance, and there's also examples in the late 19th century, in particular fields where there is a, an eminent figure who runs a journal and because he has his eminence is that gives certain status, usually the examples where we have prestige is community based organizations institutional based organizations, such as the geological society, the London society, the Academy DC also that those sorts of organizations where it's a group of scholars with some kind of credentials who are responsible for this journal. I think when we move into the 20th century, when we get batch of new publishers coming on board with Elsevier and Pergamon and others in the middle of the 20th century. They, they have editor run journals, but they're very careful about how to try and make sure those journals will be seen as having prestige. One of the things they do is they get international editorial boards, because they, they're not at that point convinced that one person can have enough prestige to back a journal it might even possible 100 years early doesn't seem so in the 20th century. And if you're not a society for this or an association for that or whatever if you if you don't have that structure to back your journal, then the next best thing seems to be to get a group of scholars who will back the journal, and their elective prestige gives the journal some prestige. And if you can negotiate to their publishing processes and get published by them, then your paper has passed at some level, or other. But notice that that I'm not seeing anything here about the quality of paper or the truth quality of a paper. One of the very intriguing things that happens in the late 20th century in the 1990s I'd say is that we start to see in public discourse and insistence on peer review is the thing that guarantees the quality of science papers that have been are apparently reliable, replicable, true for some definition of true. And it's right at this time we also start to see people taking issue with that saying well it's not true. Look at papers that got published that actually turn out later to have mistakes in them, broad mistakes, genuine errors, whatever it happens to be. Think of what's happening in the 1990s we've got HIV AIDS, we've got BSE, we've got MMR and autism. There's a range of high profile cases in the public sphere where scientific research is quite important to deciding does HIV cause AIDS or doesn't it. Papers get published on both sides of that, which one should we believe, does MMR vaccine cause autism in children or doesn't it. These kinds of things led some of the scientific societies to put a lot of emphasis on you should trust our journals you should trust the scientific research because it is peer reviewed peer review shows that this is the correct answer. And I think personally that they put too much emphasis on how good peer review was at at checking at controlling things I don't think peer review historically ever did that peer review historically check that seemed plausible check that seemed likely that there was no obvious flaws but it didn't promise anything more than that. Whereas in some of those late 20th century discourses started to promise that and that I think has been problematic. We are all looking forward for your book. I have a very curious question is if during your research, you find out too many famous or outstanding paper that were actually rejected by the transactional There were various papers on HIV AIDS that were not published particularly ones that were to do with activist campaigning but there were other papers that were published so you can't say for sure either way. Perhaps the most famous example is actually Edward Jenner's paper on the inoculation against smallpox or other vaccination against smallpox in the 1790s. That was at a point before refereeing before peer review came in, but there were collective decision making processes committees to make decisions. And at that point in time, the President of the Royal Society showed the paper basically to a friend to who was a doctor saying no what do you think of this would you think we should take this forward with the Royal Society. And the answer was well what one person said yes it looks fine. And the other person said it's based on a very small number of cases and I'm not sure about that. And so the Royal Society President at the time said okay well in that case, but we just won't bother. And they didn't. And so Edward Jenner ended up publishing his smallpox vaccination paper as an independent treatise rather than with the transactions. Thanks a lot Eileen. Now I will have a couple of questions for Stefano. And then we might be finishing soon. And what is about what do you think about so many prepping platforms and appearing and what do you think about the effort of people calculating impact factors on different prepping platforms and the other questions about how open access review works in the sense of how long can the community review is there ever a final review or this final version of the paper. Yeah, I'll try to go quick. Yeah, so I, I like that it's full of preprint, you know, other, you know, this alternative preprint platform which are not attorney we just that listen, biological science by archive became the dominant one. And for sure I think it's tied that all these other preprint platform are so called regional and nature so but by archive to is regional because if you look at it like 90% of the preprint are, you know, it's a scientific output of USA and of the UK and no France, you know, so I've, I mean impact factor preprint I mean it's this impact factor doesn't mean anything so we just need you know we need to reject this thing outright like not even entertain this conversation, but it's, it's again trying to find a proxy for the value or something like it's up to you to find the literature that you want to look and if you're just looking on bio archive, then it's your promise your responsibility, you know, to why we have to start developing habits of looking at other preprint servers and looking at actual do do proper and comprehensive, you know, literature searches, and it's the same as saying there's many different journals but, you know, we have to be comprehensive in our in what we consider for the peer review is true that you know I think the question indicated that, for example, in my case, you know, you get the peer review report and then I never apply you know I left the lab so I never uploaded the, the, the new version of the preprint, but this to me made me realize that, you know, do you want the peer review because you want the change version, or do you want the peer review as an evaluation of an actual paper as it is like so mine, for example, will say it would be better to, you know, better to do a light sheet of your organoid. And then that's it that's the evaluation yeah so yeah it would be better and a reader knows that when he's reading this research. You know, a light sheet would give additional information but that that's it. Why do you have to force you know prolonged PhD student for five six year past their deadline just to actually provide someone else will provide it, you know, or, you know, someone else can do it it just a context is really the role peer review as a evaluation of the research as it is and, and yeah, it will be better with that with a light sheet and I mean unfortunately it's not there. It would be better to follow up with a trans gene, whatever but it's that it's, it's an appreciation of the research as you presented it this is something that you know we associate peer review with also the change of the science, but it seems actually most one peer review for, I mean it's claimed to be for the evaluation of the science that you provide them not yeah. So, I like that introduces this aspect and of course with preprint you can upload the new version but I don't know the statistics so how many people do this. Thank you Stefano, it was a very nice example, and I would like to thank everyone for your question and apologize for like having to end the today's session, because of time. And, but everybody is welcome to keep the discussion on Twitter using the life community and user and the hashtag is here Wednesday, so I lean as Twitter do you, Stefano have Twitter too. So, thanks everyone. Again, you can also contact us to events at your life sciences.org. So if you enjoy today's webinar, we invite you to get to keep in touch for the next easier Wednesday webinar. Thanks again everyone. I think the speaker a lot. It was a pleasure and very interesting discussion. I wish you all a very nice day.