 Good morning everybody. So it's my pleasure to be here with you and thanks also to the entire organizing committee for inviting me to this workshop, which I think promises to be very stimulating and hopefully also productive and actually as already indicated by Wolfram Horstmann initially It's sort of nice to to see how things evolve over time Actually, I think it's indeed a timely way to progress now and sometimes I feel like an old veteran when coming to these meetings because when I Was it the 2003 Berlin declaration? It was all about open access only and I was one of the few people pushing for for things like Open peer review also. I know that there have been many people already way before that pursuing that But sort of it things are going in cycles, but after all they are progressing and so when actually just as a brief background I'll share share with you some concepts and also lessons learned along the way of this enterprise But one one aspect I wanted to tell upfront is what triggered me in the year 2000 to venture into open peer review Is frustration with the traditional peer review? I'm still mostly a pretty practitioner researcher and university teacher and so that was evident that we need to improve on that side and When we when I approached people in our scientific community back then in the European Geosciences Union or the predecessor and actually it was an Erechter who started a little very little back then Publish a Copernicus which has grown quite a bit with these journals When when we talked about doing this open peer review the term open access didn't even exist yet, right? So what he said I just said let's do something like that and T is the design and he said well if we do it on the internet, let's make it free So that was how people thought about it back then and then this whole open access Motion came up right in the early 2000s, and I think now it's very important To go back also to the things that have been pushing people already actually archive.org was largely inspired also in having something that prepares peer review and and and and fosters it and also subsequent developments and so again, I just want to share with you some of the again concepts and lessons learned and Just very briefly because most of you I guess know this stuff and will probably also agree on most of it But but again this relation between open access and public discussion I think they are all needed for many very good reasons But what drives me most of course are the scholarly advantages and that you really get the full benefit of immediate Access and and efficient and rapid quality control So so I think again many good reasons to to to merge public knowledge and Scientific knowledge and so on which which apply to all forms of open access and recent developments But I think indeed improving peer review is a key thing that we should devote to and again I think I don't need to tell that to you that's why you are here But that has been indeed a confusion for a long time that open access would be detrimental to quality assurance Where indeed the opposite is true that it's really needed to enable more efficient Peer review for the future and what what I mean with this. I'm going to show you soon I guess also as Tony has pointed out in the beginning. There are lots of problems with peer review and Well documented over time but In essence one key thing is there even when classically peer review works very well Which is actually quite often the case in many cases classically peer review works quite well, but even then Information is getting lost right because you don't document how the how the discussion has taken place and So this is really a key thing with the traditional public Pre-publication peer review so you go you you walk from one journal to the next if things get rejected and so on but nobody Can keep trace of what has been the pre-discussion of these manuscripts and again even if the manuscript then gets published Eventually you don't see how people have interacted on it So I think it's really a waste of reviewing capacities and actually reviewing capacities. It's really the referees time Is the most limited resource in in scientific publishing and exchange of course editor's time is also Something that is limited, but but referees is even more important So I think we have to do everything we can to keep things attractive and facilitate good interaction for the reviewers for the referees whatever you want to call it and so there have been actually quite a few trials of Open peer review in one way or the other in in very long ago already So I think the British Medical Journal was one of the first venturing into that into the 1990s But I think most earlier attempts tried to fully replace the classical peer review by only post publication review sort of right And what what we tried from the beginning from the year 2000 and 2001 when we then started And I'll show you the statistics later on is really to to keep the strength of the Traditional peer review and to evolve it and to make it more transparent But not throwing the good things overboard and that's what I mean with really combining and truly Integrating and I'll show you where these crucial points of integration are as opposed to just putting things back to back How you couple things Combine these strengths of traditional review really with the virtues of transparency discussion which is the essence of science and self-regulation also and so again one of the basic Problems in scientific publishing is of course speed versus quality Everybody wants to be fast people are trying hard with various journals and platforms to be fast And on the other hand you want to have thorough review and discussion and usually that takes some time Occasionally it goes quick, but usually it takes some time And so I think in principle the only thing that I found so far to combine these These two aspects is to have one after the other but again integrated So you can go ahead quickly and we call it the discussion paper preprint e-print whatever you call it You put it out there and then you let it undergo review and interactive discussion But then the question is how exactly you do it and I'll come back to that a bit later Whether you make it permanently archived immediately or you let people take it out again That has a lot of to do with how people approach these things right and then whether you really make the review Citable and and traceable or whether you then still do the review separately like archive.org you always Physicists have been putting out preprints for very long But then afterwards they went to a journal and then the whole thing went on in a hidden way again And so on so that was the couple and actually I will come back to that But I'll mention it now already because it's so important this there is a very nice I tried to trigger this for a long time and proposed it to a lot of people but Independently of that Jose Sebastian co from the University of Amsterdam now made a big attempt of Putting such interactive publishing on to archive.org and I think we will see and hear a lot more from this initiative which which will be very nice and Well, then you finish it up and you come to a final paper And so here is essentially the concept and everybody who knows peer review The classical standard form in the natural sciences at least there are many variants of classical peer review also But the standard way is outlined up here. There is nothing missing and essentially up here also nothing added And also submit a manuscript an editor does a pre-check consults referees and there are referee comments author replies There is this exchange everything can be gone going in cycles upon demand and then in the end the editor Decides again in exchange with the author possibly again with the referees Where the final paper will be published and the only thing we changed here initially was to make this box Transparent and to open it up to contributions from the public community So it's two steps, but nothing lost from the traditional way And to integrate and that's what I mean with integrative So here we really and that's the big difference to many other attempts that have been made that we really Integrate the classical review and the classical interaction between referees editors and authors with the comments from the public and the reason why I consider this integration so important is actually That you that the referees have an incentive to contribute to the formation of a strong paper Let me maybe go back here. If you do only post commenting back here, which is possible also in traditional journals But doesn't happen so often It's simply you are sort of hitting the other one from behind right people have published their paper And now you are commenting on it Of course you can make nice little comments and add-ons, but somehow if you want to make a substantial critique it's not going into the process of Improving that one study right and if you do it early enough you can do that And that's what we see people like it and again I'll show you the statistics that they can enter here and really contribute to the final product in a very constructive way And so the reason one of the key reasons why our initiative has been Flying very quickly after we started it in 2001 indeed within a few years It went to the top of the ranks of journals in the atmospheric and climate sciences Passing a lot of traditional journals on the way Is simply that it is an all-win situation if you look at it carefully We offer something to everybody involved in the first place to the authors. They have free speech rapid publication We offer something to the reviewers they get recognition for what they say We let them stay anonymous if they wish now our community. That's a key feature It's optional many of them sign their comments, but most actually don't sign still the majority does not sign the comments and again we have 15 years of statistics now with a big journal and But even if they don't sign the comment what they say is being heard and archived forever And there's a scientist you want your stuff to be used heard seen and used right That's the incentive for being a scientist And so that's the same thing for these referee comments and that you achieve by the transparency Whether it's anonymous or not is secondary in that sense, right? And then so for the entire community the key thing is saving reviewing capacities by low rejection rates I get back to that you can achieve very low rejection rates to self-selection Because authors the only ones who don't gain from this procedure are authors who want to push through very quickly Some crappy publication because if you are caught in public with with negative comments on this week quickly pushing through something It's not so nice So they don't anyhow come to our journal and that's why we have very low rejection rates even though It's a very visible journal and one thing here also just to make it explicit, right? It's not only maximizing quality assurance by this integrative process here It's also that the final revised paper essentially already contains the essence from these comments If you do only post commenting rather than integrated commenting The information density here doesn't get as high right and as a scientist those who of you who are like me working In science and researching usually you read the title Then you decide whether you look at the abstract and you look the abstract When then you decide whether you look at the whole paper and you don't have time to read everything The whole ballpark around it But so you go step by step and then you start to read also the comments reviewer comments or post comments But you can't read everything upfront So information density is really key especially nowadays in the internet that we have much more information than Anybody else except Google can process essentially and hopefully it will not be a monopoly any more in the future But currently nobody reads everything in the future when it's all of Max's very soon Hopefully actually every garage company will be able to read and process everything and so just I What what we have lots of examples So I would recommend to you if you are really interested go to our online library Obviously everything is freely accessible It's most commented papers. There is a tap in the library here. It's already one example There's the link up here, and I'll be happy to make the slides available afterwards also And we had very recently actually one really controversial paper that was sort of in the wake of the Paris Negotiations about climate and so on so that attracted Indeed a lot of comments 110 comments on that one paper And that was really also at the edge of the scope of our journal and the nice thing was even there There was self-regulation in the discussion We were not flooded by comments from climate deniers Some climate change deniers right some of these comments were popping up but the community went against it and so on and so it was highly self-regulating even in this case at the Very edge of the topic and even with with much less visibility in the broad scale But within the meteorological community also there were a couple of papers about how things evolve Why we have thunderstorms or not out in the atmosphere also heavily discussed with very fundamental Aspects and you're welcome to read these and then we have a lot of comments when it's really fundamental controversy Most papers actually only trigger a few comments That's the statistics here, and you don't need more for a standard article that just advances science Substantially even but just advances it some bit You don't need a lot of comments You have nice referee comments critically once and Response from the authors and that's it. So one key thing so the overall statistics are here And I will be happy to get back to it later on if you're interested in details But the key thing is we have very low rejection rates already prior to the discussion forum And then evil even lower rejection rates prior to the final journal other journals in our field Reject 70% of manuscripts 50% right even though they have a much lower impact and visibility They have to reject a lot more We have to reject fairly little because people think twice indeed whether they submit to an open discussion forum Right, but people with controversial stuff again. That's the thing if you do it in a careful way Those people got rejected in 2008. They only had a discussion paper So after the discussion was stopped did not enter the final journal Still they came back with the same thing to defend it again, and then it was indeed accepted So you can see science at work Openly and transparently and I really invite you to look at these manuscripts if you are interested in more details and just one thing Also that sort of additional comments from the community on top of the classical referee comments There is only one in five papers roughly one in four one in five one in six that gets such additional comments So that may sound little, but it isn't actually we don't even want much more because scientists also don't want to go for Nonsensically useless comments all the time right you want to focus on really relevant comments And mostly the relevant stuff is already set by the reviewers. So there's no need for other comments But one in four the volume actually is is is big It's 50% of the total volume because the comments do say a lot They are substantial, but the number is actually not so big so five in total per paper and only One in four papers attracts an additional comment, but from traditional papers you get an additional comment only in one in a hundred papers So in relation we have a lot more interaction, right? So again, I don't want to lose you by going too far into the details here But we do know our statistics very well and we can discuss it so all the claims I'm making I can also support with proper data and Essentially we are up to publishing a thousand papers and it gets it's a mainstream journal It's not a small niche about one thousand papers every year And the interesting thing is sort of a unique combination and that's this all-win situation, right? It's top speed. We just need about one week from submission to publication in a discussion forum Like archive.org you just even need one day maybe but we can also do it with on within one week Even though through it goes through a more formal publishing process. So it's top speed We do have top impact and visibility with all the problems of the journal impact factor We do have top values there sometimes it's number one it depends on how you count it It's whether it's one number one two or three doesn't matter, but it's top impact and visibility It's large volume. It's it's one of the largest by now. I think the largest journal in our field of Atmospheric and Geosciences invent my mental sciences out of these ISI index classes it's it's one of the big classes there and It has low rejection rates and this combination of top impact normally low rejection low rejection rates people associate with low quality whatever but no if you make things Transparent low rejection rates can be achieved together with large will you end top speed and again to my knowledge This is up to now fairly unique across the board But I hope that this will actually by this site post It's called that be at the physics journal of the future building on archive.org I hope that they will sort of do that at even larger scale and go ahead in this direction And so it's all fully fine Financial and so on so this is anyhow a discussion of the past and it works very well We can get back to it later if you wish so the conclusions are yes after these 15 years We can combine the strength of traditional publishing and peer review with new ways of doing it This public review and discussion can be flexibly adjusted and I will go to this now Quickly for some minutes to show you how What we did what worked very well for our community other communities will be different But you can adjust the same concept To I would claim almost any scientific or even scholarly community, right? And did you just need to adjust the checks and balances and how you do it? And I'll I'll dwell on that a bit more And then yeah, yes transparency does enhance self regulation Of course, it would be unimaginable how it would not do so, right? How do you get decent politics in a society? It's only by transparency, right? And it's the same thing in in in science policy and everywhere of course, right? So transparency is a prerequisite for efficient Progress progress and self-regulation also and yes, it does work well and also one key thing is There was always the concern well scientific societies depend on their income from their traditional journals and it's also hard No, this has been shown here in the year 2001 and following years that a classical scholarly society which is each you each is Was was the old name European Geosciences Union can do these things we converted also a traditional well several traditional journals There were three traditional journals They were converted from subscription to open access and from traditional peer review to this Interactive peer review and it worked very well for all the three traditional journals We had and we started some 12 13 new ones and all of them worked well also So it is all feasible and much more can be done. Of course, there are a lot of other nice initiatives out there also Quick thing on alternative concepts again. I think there is a lot of Nice and exciting stuff out there, but it really it's important I think to be really successful and to cater for the needs of your community You need to look at the details and subtleties So whether whether you allow people to withdraw things to delete things or not whether you allow people to maintain Anonymity to choose whether they remain anonymous or go eponymous to sign their reviews and so on That's really critical and I think this this integration sort of is out there. So this is just a quick Brainstorming from my side right what to look at so so don't take that Negative or exclusive or whatever these are just some thoughts were how maybe some initiatives that have been out there We're not quite as successful in their field as far as I can tell as we have been fortunate to be successful in our field And partly it maybe these little These little tuning effects right that make the full difference And so we had in our board from the very beginning all the way from a Nobel laureate to postdocs We had all the people on board to have all the different views And that's why we could design the right thing from the beginning and didn't have to adjust along the way very much We just improved a few things and I think that this mighty stage open peer review with this Flexibility integrating everything really combines all the advantages that are not there necessarily in other concepts Although we'll see which ones flies best. So experimentation is definitely needed in all directions So again, here is this side post archive. There is an article where all this is described at Great detail. This is a flow chart, but actually coming here on the train So one I'll not dwell into these details that you can't read But I think for the future it will be important to combine and integrate also with repositive So this old dream and wish of combining this thing with archive.org is just coming true Side post has opened its door for submissions now in June. So have a look at this if you like Then there are living reviews concept rents ranking and fears, of course article level metrics are essential And in the end where we want to go is sort of an epistemic web, right? That doesn't only tell you what we know already now the web is pretty good and when open access has been established very soon It will be very good at telling you all we do know But then we should also know why and how we know it, right? And so that's the key thing for this making also the review and the discussion transparent and going towards what could be called an epistemic web and this Chart it's again incomplete again. This is sort of a side job. So I apologize if I left things out here But what came to my mind? I made it on that on the train this morning is Essentially showing you how you can see this mighty stage process also in the beginning You have an author with a manuscript then the author can just shuffle it onto a pre-print server with essentially no Evaluation or very little technically evaluation or you can go with a little more evaluation That's how I haven't used it yet For example f1000 research, which I consider also a very nice initiative very similar to to what we are doing actually Or you can go for a discussion paper, which is already pretty formalized with a clear pre-screening And we call it access review. So that's the first stage of review Then you can go for public review and discussion. You can simply go from article version one to two or you go from specifically Manuscript discussion paper to the journal article That's what we have been doing for a long time and also an economics journal and Side post will do the same thing going from pre-print all the way to the journal article with this public review Then you have and all this is already existing then you can go from the regular journal article to highlight selections within a journal or Maybe that might be the future for science and nature to become assessment houses rather than publishing venues But we'll see how that evolves that was up in the discussion in 2003 already at the Berlin conference But there is also this side post select will have across the board of physics some highlight magazine section and so on and again all that is at work already and then of course That's also already at work highly cited ranked used work where you do the post analysis, but that takes more time So we have the quality assurance Intensity or level on the y-axis here and on the axis axis effort and time And so you have to wait of course for some time to tell afterwards how good the article was and I just want to emphasize again how important open axis is Here to make this really work well and inclusive and comprehensive And not depend on a monopoly or oligopoly of citation counters, right? So that's actually the one from a researcher's perspective one of the key things why we need open access quickly and fully to all the articles and To the final versions also and in particular is really to get away from this oligopoly of citation counting But to do really Context weighted citation counting and even better metrics right better usage metrics and so on And I think that's essential for scientific evaluation and large and so that's a big arrow all of these are already going on and I think now it's really time to optimize swiftly not just to I Think we don't need to reinvent many wheels a lot of wheels have been out there for for several decades already And we can put them together to have a nice Train that goes on so again. Why do we do all that? I guess we all agree We want to promote scientific and societal progress through these ways We need access not only to information, but to high quality Information, I think it's a value in itself to document the scientific discourse And also again Transparency and rationalism if we want to have that in society and we are not able to deliver it in science That we then we are on the wrong boat I think so we need to that need to do that and this is my last slide I won't go through all the specific Propositions, but I think well again continue and promote experiments all along the way open access Review, I think one specific thing that could come out of this workshop possibly Is really to go for and demand access to article reviews and Pre-publication history and a lot of journals have been doing that already This you can also do without the interactive process just afterwards if it's accepted also show the reviews to show Whether it has been reviewed at all and how it has been reviewed So I think that's really key for the future development also to go against this predatory open access Publishing and so on that's one of the key ways to go and to tackle this issue I think it's an issue not really a problem, but before it becomes a problem We should tackle it and get rid of it. So Yeah, new metrics are urgently needed and I think also again in order to be efficient up there We need open access soon and fully and with that I thank you for your attention