PCI Webinar Series
Upcoming
19th of March 2026 at 4 pm CET (GMT+1, Paris Time, until 5.15 pm) via Zoom
The Drain of Scientific Publishing: why publishing is becoming a burden for science and how to fix it
by Paolo Crosetto (INRAE, Grenoble Applied Economics Laboratory, France)
Online via Zoom
Registration link: https://univ-cotedazur.zoom.us/meeting/register/EdGt3J2cSqKWOs4zxuXZvA
Summary
The scientific publishing market allows dissemination of knowledge and research results around the world. It is also the main source of academic prestige: the signals it produces are used to hire faculty, direct public research funds and rank universities and countries. And a very lucrative business, funneling billions of Euros each year from public agencies into publishers and learned societies. It is foundational to science as it is practiced now – we are what we publish. Yet, the system is nearing a breaking point. Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published, the proliferation of journals and the increase in their charges, and by a scientific publication system that does not seem to have the best interest of science as its priority. This talk, based on the analyses of “The Strain on Scientific Publishing”, presents several data-driven metrics on publisher growth, processing times, marketing strategies and profits, and on author’s citation and publication behaviors, that allow to see the forest of scientific publishing for the trees. It makes the case for reform, highlighting potential paths to take to stop the drain of money, time, control and trust the system is imposing on science.
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What is the PCI webinar series?
-What is it? Seminars on research practices, publication practices, evaluation, scientific integrity, meta-research.
-How does it work? Remote conferences using Zoom with registration.
-For whom is it? For anyone interested in scholarly publication, all PCI users, all PCI recommenders who do preprint evaluations for PCI, authors of articles, etc.
-When is it? Once a quarter
-What is it for? To learn about scholarly publishing, to improve our knowledge about scholarly review, to become better reviewers, to create a sense of community among PCI users.
Past webinars
1st of December 2025
Recognizing and responding to a replication crisis: Lessons from Psychology
by Simine Vazire (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Summary
The last 15 years have been a turbulent period for the field of psychology. Failures to replicate, fraud, and evidence of questionable research practices have all contributed to a crisis of credibility. What has the field done in response to this crisis, and what lessons can be learned from psychology’s crisis? We often hear the self-correcting mechanisms in science invoked as a reason to trust science, but it is not clear what these mechanisms are, or how they could have prevented psychology’s crisis. Some quality control mechanisms, such as peer review for journals, or vetting for textbooks or for public dissemination, did not to provide much of a safeguard against invalid claims in psychology. Instead, I argue that we should look for visible signs of a scientific community’s commitment to self-correction. These signs include transparency in the research and peer review process, investment in error detection and quality control, and an emphasis on calibration rather than popularization. To regain or bolster trust, scientific fields should invest in these hallmarks of credibility.
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18th September 2025
Editors matter: How negligent publishers subvert quality control in scientific publishing
by Dorothy Bishop
Summary:
There has been growing unease among academic publishers about infiltration by bad actors who deposit poor quality or fake articles in journals in order to obtain financial or reputational gains. In some cases, these articles are the product of paper mills, unscrupulous individuals or companies who sell authorship, finding ways to bypass usual scrutiny by editors and/or peer reviewers. The rapid growth of this problem culminated in 2023 in the formation of United2Act, a consortium of stakeholders that aims to tackle the specific problem of paper mills. While this is a welcome development, progress is still limited by reluctance of many publishers to tackle weaknesses in their own systems that allow dishonest editors and peer reviewers to act as gatekeepers of the scientific literature. I will illustrate the problem with examples from publishers who are members of United2Act, and suggest some simple steps that could reduce publication of poor quality and dishonest articles. I focus on a few publishers who have been a particular focus of my investigations, but this should not be taken to imply that other publishers are free from problems: on the contrary, I suspect that the difficulties described, and the solutions that I suggest apply widely to the broad publication landscape.
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18th June 2025
Elevating Scientific Standards: Community-Driven Assessment on PubPeer
by Brandon Stell (CNRS, Paris, France)
Summary:
PubPeer was created in 2012 to facilitate the correction of science and accelerate the convergence of ideas through open, public discussion. By focusing on the substance of scientific publications, PubPeer combats the notion that publication is a definitive event establishing the truth of a result and counters the damaging over-reliance on indirect metrics such as journal name, impact factor, or H-index as indicators of correctness and quality. The use of these unreliable indicators has opened the door to gaming of research reputations through questionable and even fraudulent practices; recent years have even seen the arrival of the organised production of fake papers and citations, by so-called papermills. Since its launch, PubPeer has grown to become the reference platform for exposing low-quality research, particularly in cases where the integrity of a publication is in question. Its essential characteristics include the ability to discuss any scientific article, speed, simplicity, a permanent right of reply for authors, the availability of anonymity, and rigorous content moderation. In parallel, we have witnessed the emergence of a community of dedicated and expert analysts who have exposed unsuspected volumes of questionable and fraudulent research. These volunteers are at the forefront of the fight against the subversion of the principles of scientific research. In this talk, I will share insights and observations from over a decade of running this platform, highlighting its impact on the scientific community and its potential to transform how research is evaluated and rewarded.
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20th March 2025
When Open Publishing Is Not Fair
by Sabina Leonelli (Technical University of Munich)
Summary:
There are obvious ways in which Open Access has augmented inequity rather than mitigating it, for instance in relation to Author Publishing Costs and the differential access that researchers based in academic institutions around the world may have to publishing deals and packages. Less obvious but equally fundamental are inequities in the access to infrastructures, skills and information fostering an effective use of online resources ranging from Open Access journals to Open Data infrastructures. Most importantly, openness as a paradigm of “sharing” is predicated on a model of research practice that does not fit well with most domains and methods of research, and particularly with science done in low-resourced environments. I reflect on these issues and draw on examples and cases emerging from the PHIL_OS project (“A Philosophy of Open Science for Diverse Research Environments”; www.opensciencestudies.eu), as well as my experiences as Open Science advocate and participant in Open Access debates over the last ten years.
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5th December 2024
How much is too much? Estimating APCs and questioning sustainability
by Leigh-Ann Butler (Scholarly Communication Librarian, University of Ottawa)
Summary:
First, the serials crisis strained academic budgets; now it’s article processing charges (APCs). It is time to learn from the past and focus on the data: APCs are neither sustainable nor equitable. Studies consistently show that APCs place a financial burden on scholarly publishing, and a drain on library budgets. The lack of transparency and decentralized payments of APCs further complicate the collection of reliable data for informed decision-making. In this talk, I will examine the APC model and its challenges. I will also share findings from studies estimating APC expenditures and present an open dataset of APCs from six scholarly publishers, which can help libraries, researchers, and policymakers investigate the open access landscape.
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19th September 2024
Reimagining scholarly publishing to promote credible and trustworthy research
by Brian Nosek (Center of Open Science)
Summary:
The purpose of scholarly publishing is to facilitate the communication and interrogation of evidence and claims to advance knowledge production. The business of scholarly publishing interferes with this purpose. Research is inhibited by a scholarly publishing system that [1] is slow, incomplete, opaque, and static, [2] treats the paper as the only meaningful scholarly output, [3] offers dysfunctional, simplistic rewards based on publication and journal status, and [4] is calcified in legacy, commercial business models and infrastructure. Lifecycle Journals is an alternative approach to scholarly publishing intended to address these weaknesses and align the practice of scholarly publishing with its purpose. Lifecycle Journals is complementary to the PCI model of peer review and creates the opportunity for experimentation and collective action of community-based evaluation services to shift control of scholarly communication and reward systems to the community itself.
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21st June 2024
Towards Responsible Publishing
by Johan Rooryck (cOAlition S)
Summary:
In this talk, I will discuss the Towards Responsible Publishing (TRP) initiative initiated by cOAlition S. I will discuss the 5 guiding principles of this proposal, and the process that we have developed to consult the worldwide scholarly community in collaboration with CWTS Leiden and Research Consulting. I will also discuss some of the outcomes of this consultation process, and more specifically present the measures of implementation that cOAlition S funders could put in place if they decide to fully adopt TRP in the Fall of 2024.
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19th March 2024
Preprints as the central pillar of the PRC model
by Jonny Coates (ASAPBio, USA)
Summary:
Over the past 10 years preprints have become more accepted within the life sciences, with traditional publishers incorporating preprints into their workflows and amazing initiatives arising such as preprint peer review services. This is beginning to demonstrate the potential of a new way of scientific communication. In the next 10 years, the challenge will be to increase the adoption of this publish-review-curate model of publishing which places preprints at the heart of scientific communication. This talk will discuss the role of preprints in this model and the importance of detangling traditional publishing.
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7th December 2023
Interventional Research on Research to improve the peer-review process
by Isabelle Boutron (APHP, France)
Summary:
The peer-review process is considered a cornerstone for ensuring the dissemination of trustful research results. The presentation will focus on the existing evidence of the impact of the peer-review process on the quality of scholarly publications as well as how Interventional Research on Research could question and improve the process.
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21st September 2023
Registered Reports 2.0:
Introducing the Peer Community in Registered Reports
by Chris Chambers (Cardiff University, UK)
Summary:
Registered Reports are a form of empirical publication, offered by over 350 journals, in which study proposals are peer-reviewed and pre-accepted before research is undertaken. By deciding which articles are published based on the question, theory, and methods, Registered Reports offer a remedy for a range of reporting and publication biases. In this talk, I will introduce a relatively new platform for supporting Registered Reports called the Peer Community in Registered Reports (PCI RR). PCI RR is a non-profit, non-commercial platform that, like the many other PCIs, coordinates the peer-review of preprints (https://rr.peercommunityin.org/about/about) but in this specifically for RRs. PCI RR is also joined by a growing fleet of “PCI RR-friendly” journals that agree to endorse the recommendations of PCI RR without further review (https://rr.peercommunityin.org/about/pci_rr_friendly_journals), giving the authors the power to choose which journal, if any, will publish their manuscript. By reclaiming control of the peer review process from academic publishers, PCI RR offers a promising avenue for ensuring that Registered Reports are made as open, accessible, and rigorous as possible, while also moving toward a future in which journals themselves become obsolete. Background: https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/psychology/2021/07/26/registered-reports-free-for-authors-and-readers/
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15th June 2023
Publication bias in ecology and evolutionary biology
by Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar (Department of Evolutionary Biology, Bielefeld University, Germany)
Summary:
Recently, several worldwide multi-lab replication attempts in the social sciences and medicine have exposed alarmingly low rates of replicability of scientific findings. This ‘Replication Crisis’ – perhaps better named ‘Credibility revolution’, has been the catalysts of a movement towards more open, reliable and transparent science. Although the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology currently lack multi-lab replication projects of similar magnitude to those in the social sciences and medicine, we can obtain indirect but key information about replicability by studying publication bias. Publication bias occurs when a subset of research findings, such as statistically non-significant results, are less likely to appear (or appear earlier) in the scientific literature, leading to a distorted view of the overall evidence for a hypothesis. In this talk, I will introduce (1) what publication bias is and the most commonly observed types of publication bias, (2) briefly explain how we can study publication bias, and (3) showcase some of the most outstanding and worrying examples of publication bias (past and present) in ecology and evolutionary biology. I will finish off my talk by introducing and discussing a few procedure that can help researchers actively combat publication bias and, thus, lead to a less distorted understanding of the natural world.
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16th and 20th March 2023
Ethical publishing: how do we get there?
by Fernando Racimo (Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen)
Summary:
The academic journal publishing model is deeply unethical: today, a few major, for-profit conglomerates control more than 50% of all articles in the natural sciences and social sciences, driving subscription and open-access publishing fees above levels that can be sustainably maintained by publicly funded universities, libraries, and research institutions worldwide. About a third of the costs paid for publishing papers is profit for these dominant publishers’ shareholders, and about half of them covers costs to keep the system running, including lobbying, marketing fees, and paywalls. The paywalls in turn restrict access of scientific outputs, preventing them from being freely shared with the public and other researchers. Thus, money that the public is told goes into science is actually being funneled away from it, or used to limit access to it. Alternatives to this model exist and have increased in popularity in recent years, including diamond open-access journals and community-driven recommendation models. Here, we give a brief overview of the current state of the academic publishing system, including its most important systemic problems. We then describe alternative systems. We explain the reasons why the move toward them can be perceived as costly to individual researchers, and we demystify common roadblocks to change. Finally, in view of the above, we provide a set of guidelines and recommendations that academics at all levels can implement, in order to enable a more rapid and effective transition toward ethical publishing.