 My name is Swasti Amato and today I want to talk to you about the new journal, the new open access journal that the European Society for Cognitive Psychology wants to launch. I'll start with a little bit of background in case you're not familiar with the situation. So the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, SCOP, currently has an academic journal which is called the Journal of Cognitive Psychology. The Journal of Cognitive Psychology requires a subscription to read it. So basically the only people who have a subscription are researchers who work at the university because the university has a subscription or students who study at the university. But normal people who are not academics cannot read the Journal of Cognitive Psychology. Now, SCOP is not happy about that situation because they feel, as many researchers feel, that the research which is publicly funded by taxpayers should be freely available for everyone to read. So if the taxpayer pays for research, then the taxpayer should be able to read the results of that research. That makes a lot of sense. So what SCOP wants to do is create a new journal in which all articles are free to read for everyone. So it's just going to be a website and you can read all the academic papers on the website for free. Now, it still costs a little bit of money, of course, to maintain this website, to maintain this journal. And therefore the people who pay are the authors. So if you're a researcher and you publish a paper in this journal, you pay a small fee to the journal and the journal uses this money to maintain the website and to maintain the journal. And that's the basic idea behind open access, open access publishing. It's a publication system that's a little bit weird, maybe if you're not an academic, but it's quite widely accepted, I would say, within academia. So it's an author's pay kind of system. Now, all of this is very new. SCOP announced only two days ago that they want to create this new journal and that they want to basically break with their current journal of cognitive psychology. That is a very bold move. It is very rare that an academic society like SCOP takes such a radical decision. So I think, first of all, congratulations to them, that they have been so brave and so progressive to take this step, which I really think is a step in the right direction. And right now, what they want is input from the community, from us, essentially, about what this new journal should look like. Because they're going to create a new open access journal, but what exactly this journal is going to look like is still up in the air. And they, we need your opinion to kind of decide these things. So what I want to do here is just go through a few of the ideas that have surfaced on the Internet. Candice Mori, who's going to be the editor-in-chief of this new open access journal, which, by the way, has no name yet. So I just called it the new journal because we haven't decided the name yet or SCOP hasn't decided the name yet. And she put out a call in which she said on Twitter and also on a blog post, as editor of SCOP's new open access journal, I want to know what cognitive psychologists want from us. So tell me. So let's just take a look at all the ideas that she received and I'll try to explain a little bit what these ideas are, what they mean, and bias it a little bit with my own opinion. So the first reply that Candice got was from Frauke Hermens, who says that she wants low or no publication fees. So the publication fee is the fee that the author pays for publishing in the journal, as I explained just a minute ago. And she wants to have those fees either non-existent, which is probably not possible because then there will be no money to run the journal. But if there is a fee, at least it should be as low as possible. And I fully agree with that. I mean, it shouldn't be very expensive to maintain a website with a few PDFs on it, especially because all the work is essentially done by volunteers, academics who do that for free, right? Who edit the papers and write the papers, etc., for free. So it shouldn't be too expensive. And she says, okay, I want low or no publication fees. And I think plus one for Frauke Hermens. And that is going to be really one of the key points, I think, for the new journal to keep those publication fees as low as possible. But I don't think there will be non-existent. There will be some publication fee, probably. Then Jim Grange says, I would like to see open review. What is open review? Well, what is review anyway? If you're an academic and you submit a paper to a journal, then you generally receive feedback from two or three of your colleagues. And they tell you whether they like the paper, maybe they want you to change some things or run an additional experiment, etc. And then based on that comment, those reviews of your colleagues, the paper is published or not. Now, currently, those reviews are always hidden. So if you read a paper, then you know that it has been reviewed, but you don't know what those reviews were. And what Jim Grange means with open review is that the reviews are published alongside the paper. So you can read the paper and you can also read how your colleagues essentially felt about the paper. That is kind of a new idea that's gaining a little bit of traction in the scientific community. It's kind of perceived as a little bit radical, maybe. It is different from the question of whether reviews should be anonymous or not. So right now, if you receive feedback on your paper, it is generally anonymous. So you don't know who the reviewers are. Some people feel that reviews should not be anonymous, that reviewers should sign their name under their reviews. But that's slightly a separate question from open review. So what Jim Grange would like to see is open review and perhaps still anonymous. Now, let me read a little bit more. And then actually Jim Grange clarifies what he means. He says, I think open review doesn't have to mean named review. So as I said, you can have open reviews, but it can still be anonymous. And then James Bartlett again says, open review would be great, but perhaps it would be great to have the author details hidden. Seeing this increase female minority acceptance. So what he means is that right now, if a reviewer receives a paper to review, he or she can always see who the authors of the paper are. Now this can bias your opinion, of course. So if you get a paper to review and you know that the author is a very good famous scientist, you may be more inclined to have a positive opinion about the paper. And that can bias against young researchers. It can bias against minorities. It can bias against women. It can bias essentially against everyone except white males like me. So it might be good. It might be fair to remove the author details from a manuscript when it is reviewed. Because then you can give a truly unbiased review of the manuscript. The downside of this is mostly practical because it is not easy to make a manuscript anonymous. Because even if the author names are not above it, most scientific fields are very small. So you can kind of guess based on the content of the paper who wrote it. Most authors also tend to cite themselves quite often. So if you see that if you get an anonymous paper that cites Mato 12 times, then you know that probably it was me who wrote it. Because I'm my own biggest fan, so to say. So I think that anonymous author, anonymous reviewing is in principle, I think it's a good idea and I think that James Bartlett is right and that it would make it more fair for minorities and women. But it is practically very difficult to implement, I think. Now then we scroll down a little bit further and then Chris Hartgerink says, please opt for CC buy, this gets technical. I'll explain what he means. He says please opt for CC buy or CC zero licensing only CC buy and C or MD are horrible. Now what does he mean? He's talking about the license that is attached to the open access articles. So if you publish an article and it's free to read for everyone, there's always a license that tells you what you are and are not allowed to do with the article. The most common license is the CC buy license that allows you to basically do everything you want with the article as long as you provide credit to the original authors. That is why many people perceived as the most fair open access license. Then you have the CC zero license, that's a public domain license. That means that you are basically allowed to do everything with the paper and you don't even need to provide credit. I think most people will provide credit because it's kind of the nice thing to do, but you're not legally obliged to do so. So that is the most, I would say the most free license, but it's quite uncommon. So he is a favor of the CC buy, the open access license or the public domain license. According to Chris, those are the best ones and I kind of agree. And he says that CC buy and C or MD are horrible. Now those are licenses that put additional restrictions on what you can do with an open access paper. So NC stands for non-commercial and it means that you can do everything with a paper as long as you don't use it for commercial purposes. I think that's an unnecessary restriction because why wouldn't you be allowed to make money? If you have a clever way to make money out of someone else's research, why not? And MD means no derivatives, means that you can do everything with the paper that you want but you are not allowed to modify it. So for example, imagine that you're writing a review article and you want to extract a figure from a paper, but you're not entirely happy with the figure as it is and you want to change it a little bit, the colors or the title on the x-axis or anything. Hopefully not the actual data, but just some aesthetic things. You would not be allowed to do so with this MD, no derivatives clause. So it's also unnecessarily restrictive. So that's what Chris says. Then we scroll down and then we get another kind of technical point. I think a lot of the concerns, a lot of the questions that people have about the new journal are kind of practical. They want things to be easy and user-friendly. And this is also the core of Tom Falkenberry's point, who says, I would wish for allowing or encouraging non-Microsoft Word submission formats such as latex, markdown, etc. Now, plus one for Tom, because if you submit a lot of academic papers, then you know that the submission process can be quite annoying. So for example, I personally write most of my papers in markdown and then once I'm ready to submit a paper, I have a very nice paper, I think, with the nice PDF, nice figures, etc. And then I go to the submission website and I find that I have to submit it in .doc format, which means that I have to go back and convert everything and then I upload it and then they convert it again and I look at it and the result is not nice and I go back and I have to, you know, and it's very annoying and it can take quite a bit of time in order to get it right. So Tom Falkenberry says, OK, let's make things as easy as possible and just accept a wide range of submission formats. Plus one for that. Then we go down and then David Barner, who actually has done some good work in the open access movement himself, but that's a different story, makes a very important point. He says it's a mistake to always package open access with many other innovations such as open review. High quality open access is already a huge advance and I 100% agree with him. So I think the top priority for the new journal should be to create a high quality journal that is free to read for everyone. Once we've established or once Escob has established that, that's already a major advance. Now, we can think of all kinds of innovative publishing things like open review and a very cool manuscript submission system and what have you. And that can be nice, but the core should be the high quality open access. And we should be especially cautious of innovating too much and scaring off potential authors. There's a small group of people on Twitter and on blogs, et cetera, who have all kinds of radical ideas of what publishing should look like. I think often those ideas kind of make sense, but not everyone agrees with them or many people kind of feel uncomfortable with them. And if we with the new journal become too radical, the risk is that it scares off a lot of the potential authors and even maybe a lot of the potential readers. So again, plus one for David Barnard saying that let's focus on high quality open access for now. And then add those innovations perhaps if they are accepted and if they actually make sense. But it's not the main goal. Well, let's go. And Candice actually replies to him and she seems to kind of agree with that. She says the top priority is launching and accepting submissions and stuff incidental to journal policy such as having all kinds of innovations will require longer. So essentially I think the idea of Escob and Candice Moray is to just get this high quality open access journal out there and then maybe add innovations later along the way if they are sufficiently supported by the community. I hope that's what she needs. I think that's what she needs. And then we have another important point by Fernando Blanco. And he says that he would like decision to publish not to be based on subjective criteria such as the foreseen impact novelty ellipses. I guess you know what I mean. Now, I do know what he means because there are two, there are basically two streams of thought when it comes to peer review. You have people who feel that basically the only thing that you should review is the methodological quality of a paper. And if you've conducted an experiment that was done correctly and you've analyzed it correctly, etc. Then it should be published regardless of whether it's interesting or new or whatever. So the only thing that matters for publication is whether it is good solid science. And then you have another stream of thought of people who feel that things should be published only if they are important enough so that novelty or perceived impact etc. has also a criteria for publication. Now, personally I tend to agree with Fernando Blanco that it's best to review only the things about a paper that you can really objectively review, which is basically the methodological side of a paper. But I think my gut feeling at the moment is that the consensus is going in the other direction and that many people feel that also things such as novelty and perceived impact are an important publication criteria. And I suspect that the new Open Access Journal will actually use those kind of subjective criteria for acceptance as well. We'll see, but I think I'm afraid that Fernando Blanco will not get what he wants, but he nevertheless gets a plus one from me. Well, then we have some references to John Barron, an apparently mythical figure who has created an Open Access Judgment and Decision Making Journal that has been free for at least 10 years. I actually didn't know about this journal, but it seems pretty cool and it seems like something that could be a model for the new escort journal. So I think people are definitely going to take a look at that. Daniel Larkins agrees, he says, that this, meaning John Barron's journal, is by far the best example of the future of scientific publishing. Okay, and then we have someone, Michael Cain of the Cain WMC Lab, Working Memory Lab, I suppose, says something I also agree with. I actually find myself agreeing with a lot of the things that are said here, perhaps meaning that I'm very malleable, perhaps meaning that people who are engaged in this discussion are reasonable people. He says, regarding content, perhaps room for review articles and opinion pieces would be nice to have an open outlet for these, an open access outlet for these. And I agree because right now most open access journals are focused on empirical papers, meaning that papers that describe experiments. But every once in a while you also want to write a review article, right, to kind of summarize the state of the literature or sort of review your own research over a certain period. And it would be nice to have an open access, a high quality open access outlet for these review articles, and right now that doesn't really exist. There's the Frontiers, there are the Frontiers journals, it's never clear to me whether Frontiers is one journal or a whole bunch of journals, and they actually do publish review articles, but Frontiers is perceived by many people to be kind of dodgy and not really a very good outlet. I cautiously agree with that, I don't like Frontiers very much either, because it is commercial, it has a very strong commercial aspect to it. So yes, plus one for the idea of accepting article literature reviews and opinion pieces. Then we scroll down a little bit, what do we find? We have some very valuable input from Alex Holcombe who offers, he's a very famous, well he's a moderately well-known guy within the open access field, and he offers to help with the practical side of things, and I think he could be a very valuable person to have on board personally. Scroll down. Yeah, that's kind of it what people have been saying on Twitter. Now let's move to Candice Murray's blog post, because she also wrote a blog post in which she asked people for feedback. And I was reading the comments on her blog post and one kind of stood out, and I think it's an important comment by Catherine Tevinot from Lausanne in Switzerland, and she says she's critical, most people are not critical, and that's dangerous, right? If you don't get criticism, you're not going to make the optimal decision, but she is critical. And she says, I really do not think that paying to publish our own paper will allow us to gain in transparency and fairness during the review process. Now what she means, I think, is that she's afraid that because a journalist paid for every article that they publish, they have a very strong incentive to basically publish everything regardless of quality, so that they're also going to accept very poor manuscripts for publication. Well, she makes a good point, and this is actually a real problem with open access. And Frontiers, which I just mentioned, is an example of that. Frontiers is a commercial organization, it's owned by Springer, and they publish, at least that's perceived by many people to be the case, they publish everything regardless of quality because they just make a lot of money doing so. And that's of course not the way that sign should be done, right? Paper should be vetted on their quality, at least their methodological quality, before they are published. And she's afraid that they will not... Catherine Thévenot seems to think that that is a general property of open access. That's what I read in her comment. But it's not, right? Because Escob is a non-profit organization that wants to create this open access journal to publish the best signs for free, freely available for everyone. They have no financial incentive, they don't want to make money. If they don't like a paper, they will not publish it, regardless of whether that costs them a little bit of money, because they're not in it for the money. So I think that's why these academic societies such as Escob are so important, because they can kind of stand above these financial incentives, right? They can really maintain, guarantee a level of quality, I think. That's at least the hope, and I really know the people in Escob, and I really believe that they will do that. And I know that Candice More will be an excellent editor, who will be like a guard dog maintaining the quality of the journal. So I don't agree, actually, with Catherine Thévenot, but I do think there are important points that a lot of people will be asking. Then she continues, she says, Moreover, the suggestion to commit the reviewers to give their name is the best way to subvert the system even more. So she's talking about an anonymous review, right, where reviewers sign their name below their reviews. We are not living in Alice in Wonderland, and if one is strongly positive about one of our papers, it will be almost impossible to avoid a positive bias when it will be time to judge his or her paper. And she, again, she has a point, and actually I do agree with this. The problem is that what she means, I think, is that if reviewers sign their review, they know that their name is out there, and it will be very difficult to give a negative comment, right? A negative review. Especially if you know that the people you are giving the negative review to are going to review your paper later on. So you could create kind of a dynamic in which authors give, you know, I give you a good review, and you give me a good review, right, tit for tat kind of. And that is a real risk. And even without the tit for tat component, I know that if you sign your name under a review, I always sign my reviews, at least when I'm allowed to, but I have to admit that it makes me probably more positive. I try to be critical when I find that it is difficult to be very critical if your name is out there. It's a downside of non-anonymous reviews. So the question is, what is worse? Is it worse that if reviewers are anonymous, that they can be very negative and very nasty in the comments, which is a bad thing, or is it worse if reviewers are not anonymous, that they tend to be overly positive about indoor reviews and maybe even create kind of a tit for tat economy in, you know, I give you a good review. You give me a good review. You know, those are two real downsides, I think, and the debate, what the scientists are currently debating is what is worse or what is best, you could say, to frame it a little bit more positively. But I think it is by no means a fact that this new ESCOP journal will have named reviews, right? It might very well be that most people in a society and in a community prefer reviews to be anonymous. And if that's the case, then that's the way it will be probably. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this video, open review is not the same as a named review, right? You can have open reviews that are still anonymous. So one of the things that ESCOP and Kenneth Morrie and everyone in the community has to decide is what we feel is the best way to implement the review process for this new journal, right? Because this new journal is going to be us. We decide the rules. We decide how we want to interact with each other. But I think that Catherine Tevenot, her comment is important because if you look on Twitter and on blogs, et cetera, you see and you hear a very vocal subset of academics who are very progressive and who want all kinds of radical change in publishing, but they are not representative for the average scientist. And this new ESCOP journal should be acceptable for and accepted by everyone in our community, including people who may not be the most, you know, strongest proponents of reform of academic publishing, et cetera. It's really a community journal and its success will depend on how well it is accepted by the entire community. So I encourage everyone, also people who are critical about these kinds of initiatives to give their opinion and tell Candice and tell ESCOP what they are afraid of and their concerns with open access, their concerns with open review, et cetera, et cetera. Well, that's it. That's what I wanted to share with you. And finally, I want to again congratulate ESCOP for taking this courageous step in the right direction. And I want to call on everyone who's been with me, if you're still watching, to give your go to Candice Maury's website or Twitter, give your opinion, tell her and tell ESCOP, tell everyone what you would like to see in this new open access journal. And in this way, you can help to make the journal the way you want it to be, and you can also help to make it a success. Thank you.