Scholarly publishing and peer-reviewing in open access

This is an article I wrote for DG Research, Science and Innovation of the European Commission as member of RISE (Research Innovation and Science policy Experts). In this text, I argue that articles written and peer-reviewed by scholars should not be merchandises to trade, but knowledge commons to share with everyone and to preserve for future generations. Today, electronic publishing allows this change of paradigm, but most scientific publishers prefer to keep the business model of printing which benefits them. I explain how the 'gold open access' model (where publishers charge fees to publish in open access) is inadequate for researchers and should be replaced by the 'diamond open access' model, where no fees are required since researchers use the publishing platforms that funding agencies offer them as research infrastructures. I then come up with the following recommendations:

- researchers should own the journals they create, for which they produce and peer-review the articles,

- researchers need publicly-owned and open source publishing platforms to publish their peer-reviewed articles,

- open peer-reviewing should be developed to improve the reproducibility of published results.

Researchers should get control of electronic publishing as soon as possible. In the meantime, the 'green open access' model (where one version of a published article is available for free from a repository) remains the best solution to guarantee a smooth transition towards open access for all scholarly publications.