PCI Webinar Series

We are pleased to announce the 1st seminar of the PCI webinar series

16 March 2023 at 4pm CET (until 5.15 pm)

Online via Zoom

Please register using this link: https://univ-cotedazur.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAkf-upqzsoHNEB6on35_Z9sFzOAkSTrtTc

Ethical publishing: how do we get there?

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.

Fernando Racimo is an associate professor at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen. His research lies at the intersection of evolutionary genetics, ecological dynamics and paleo-genomics. He also works on exploring the contradictions and ethical challenges of academia in the 21st century, with a focus on academic publishing and academic activism.

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
-Why 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. 

Please register using this link: https://univ-cotedazur.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAkf-upqzsoHNEB6on35_Z9sFzOAkSTrtTc

Webinars to come:

16th March – Fernando Racimo – Ethical publishing: how do we get there?

15th June 2023 – Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar – Publication bias in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

21st Sept 2023 – Chris Chambers – Registered Reports 2.0: rigorous open science beyond journals and publishers