The Journal That Publishes No Papers

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section as having “herded goats”. PUBLISHING The concept has been developed by collaborating publishers, research funders and software firms (which have used digital badges for a few years as a visual sign The journal that of achievement). Several other publishers have expressed interest in implementing them, Kenall says, and initial feedback from publishes no papers researchers has been positive. The 14 categories come from a related ‘digital taxonomies’ project, which last year Mathematics journal ‘overlays’ arXiv preprint server. brought together journal editors, funders and researchers to classify authors’ contri- BY PHILIP BALL Three years ago, a blogpost announcing Gowers’ butions as a set of standard roles (see L. Allen personal boycott of the Dutch publishing giant et al. Nature 508, 312–313; 2014). ew journals spring up with overwhelm- Elsevier helped to spark the ‘Cost of Knowledge’ “We think it’s timely to have a bit more ing and almost tiresome frequency movement, which has seen more than 15,000 granularity around contributions to schol- these days. But Discrete Analysis is researchers variously pledging not to publish arly published work,” says Liz Allen, a co- Ndifferent. This journal is online-only — but it with, referee for or do editorial work for Elsevier. founder of the digital taxonomies project. will contain no papers. Rather, it will provide And in 2013, Gowers announced his involve- Accurately determining co-authors’ roles links to mathematics papers hosted on the ment with an initiative called the Episciences might also help with grant-funding applica- preprint server arXiv. Researchers submit their project, in which mathematicians decided to tions, she adds, because applicants could be papers directly from arXiv to the journal, which launch a series of overlay journals (see Nature more explicit about research contributions. evaluates them using conventional peer review. http://doi.org/kwg; 2013). That uses the multi- The taxonomy is still in a rough format, With no charges for contributors or readers, disciplinary archive HAL, a preprint server that but the badges project is not alone in Discrete Analysis will avoid the commercial mirrors arXiv and is hosted in Lyons, France. implementing it, Allen adds. Cell Press, for pressures that some feel are distorting the One of its leaders, mathematician Jean-Pierre instance, now offers researchers the option scientific literature, in part by reducing its Demailly of the University of Grenoble in to use the taxonomy when submitting accessibility, says the journal’s managing edi- France, admits that progress has been sluggish. papers; so far, it has published two papers tor Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the “The technical development of the Episciences that do so — although without the badges. University of Cambridge, UK, and a winner of platform took about a year and a half longer But contributions to scholarly products the prestigious Fields Medal. than initially envisioned,” he says. “However, may be too varied to be captured with a “Part of the motivation for starting the journal things are now coming along nicely.” The initia- 14-part taxonomy, says Melissa Haendel, is, of course, to challenge existing models of tive now has five or six staff, Demailly says, and who develops systems for querying and academic publishing and to contribute in a operates three computer-sciences journals and classifying biological data at Oregon Health small way to creating an alternative and much one in maths, which charge nothing to publish. & Science University in Portland. Haendel cheaper system,” he explained in a 10 Septem- Episciences would have been a suitable plat- co-chairs a working group as part of ber blogpost announcing the journal. “If you form to support Discrete Analysis too, Gowers FORCE11, a community-driven initiative trust authors to do their own typesetting and says, but he happened to have sufficient funds to that aims to improve scholarly communica- copy-editing to a satisfactory standard, with use the Scholastica software, and opted for that tion technologies and policies. The group is the help of suggestions from referees, then the instead. “I hope that in due course, people will mapping out author roles, in part by using cost of running a mathematics journal can be get used to this publication model,” he adds, and computer programs to search the text of at least two orders of magnitude lower than the that “the main interest in the journal will be the author-contributions sections on papers. cost incurred by traditional publishers.” mathematics it contains”. A temporary website A January workshop in Oxford, UK, listed The cost to the journal is only US$10 per on the Scholastica platform will receive submis- more than 500 tasks that authors might want submitted paper, Gowers says; money required sions before the journal launches early next year. to be credited for, she says; examples include to make use of Scholastica, software that was Gowers says that the model could be developing experimental protocols, taking developed at the University of Chicago in Illi- extended to other fields. The question, perhaps, photographs, developing validated surveys nois for managing peer review and for setting is how readily researchers will embrace it. “Apart or providing lab reagents. up journal websites. (The journal also relies on from being an arXiv overlay journal, our journal The badges that a researcher might collect the continued existence of arXiv, whose run- is very conventional, which I think is important could easily be extended, Kenall notes; extra ning costs amount to less than $10 per paper). so that mathematicians won’t feel it is too risky categories could credit peer reviewers, for A grant from the University of Cambridge will to publish in it,” says Gowers. “But if the model example. But for now, BioMed Central is cover the cost of the first 500 or so submissions, becomes widespread, then I personally would focusing on collecting data about how often after which Gowers hopes to find additional very much like to see more-radical ideas tried people click on the badges, before advancing funding or ask researchers for a submission fee. out as well” — for example, post-publication conversations with funders, publishers and review and non-anonymous referees. ■ researchers about their practicality, and roll- OVERLAY JOURNALS ing out the badges to other journals. The idea of an ‘overlay’ journal that links to “Unlike a CV or author-contributions papers hosted on a preprint server is not new. CORRECTION section, badges provide a method of credit There are arXiv overlay journals in maths The story ‘See how they run’ (Nature 525, and transparency around contribution fit for already, such as SIGMA (Symmetry, Integrability 145–146; 2015) omitted the full name and purpose for a digital world,” Kenall says. ■ and Geometry: Methods and Applications) and affiliation for Elizabeth Brainerd, who is at Logical Methods in Computer Science. Brown University. It also wrongly stated that Editor’s note: Dalmeet Singh Chawla worked But Gowers’ announcement is likely to widen Katherine Steele worked on cystic fibrosis at BioMed Central until June 2014, but had interest in the idea because of his influence in instead of cerebral palsy. no involvement with the badges project. the mathematics community — and outside it.