Campus Buch talk series: “Scientific Publishing: How to fix a broken system”

This talk is part of a series aimed primarily at scientists, highlighting the challenges facing the traditional model of scientific publishing, the changes already being brought into play, and potential future directions – everything you need to know about a publishing industry in transition

// About the speaker
Björn Brembs is Professor of neurogenetics at the University of Regensburg, studying the neurobiology of behavior, specifically adaptive behavioral choice: how brains initiate spontaneous actions and how experience with the consequences of these actions shapes future behavior. For many years he has also been a very active advocate for open access, describing himself as a "disgruntled user of a dysfunctional scholarly communication system”.

// About the talk
"Every scientist knows the drill: submit, revise, resubmit, repeat. In many cases, the cycle also involves reformatting as resubmission occurs at a different journal. And when this painful process is finally concluded, the resulting paper not only lacks most of the basic functionalities we've come to expect from digital objects outside of academia, most often it is also locked up behind a paywall, instead of actually being 'published'. As if to mock us, corporate publishers charge our libraries, on average, US$5,000 per paper for the questionable service of preventing access to our research. Compared to our text summaries, publishing our data or our software is comparatively easy, but lacks long-term sustainable archiving solutions. I will detail how we could improve the way we treat our intellectual output at no additional cost and potentially with huge savings for the public purse. From the researcher perspective, the solution will entail overcoming the most critical obstacle, journal rank. I will provide evidence that there is currently no objective justification for the standing of so-called 'top journals' such as Cell, Nature or Science." - Björn Brembs

http://brembs.net/about.html