By Yeo Pin Pin, Head, Research Services
A new draft proposal by cOAlition-S was released on 31 October 2023, called Towards responsible publishing and they will be consulting with the research community until April 2024 to gather their feedback on the proposal.
The proposal lays out a vision and a set of principles:
“Our vision is a community-based scholarly communication system fit for open science in the 21st century. This system empowers scholars to share the full range of their research outputs and to participate in new quality control mechanisms and evaluation standards for these outputs. This approach will ensure rapid, transparent dissemination of high-quality scientific knowledge.”
Principle 1: Authors are responsible for the dissemination of their findings
Principle 2: All scholarly outputs are shared immediately and openly
Principle 3: Quality control processes are community-based and open, to ensure trustworthiness of research findings
Principle 4: All scholarly outputs are eligible for consideration in research assessment
Principle 5: Stakeholders commit to supporting the sustainability and diversity of the scholar-led publishing ecosystem
Layla Liverpool (2023) called it the “next big plan to shake up research publishing and bolder than the first. It wants all versions of an article and its associated peer-review reports to be published openly from the outset, without authors paying any fees, and for authors, rather than publishers, to decide when and where to first publish their work.”
As pointed out by the Executive Director of cOAlition S, Bodo Stern (2023) in his post, research is more than just the journal-accepted article which takes time to get published. The proposal encourages researchers to share their work at any stage during their research. This could contribute further to open science and to a “more effective scholarly communication system, ensuring that the pursuit of knowledge benefits society at large.”
References
cOAlition S. (2023). Towards responsible publishing: A proposal from cOAlition S. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8398480
Liverpool, Layla. (2023, October 31). Open-access reformers launch next bold publishing plan. Nature 623, 238-240. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03342-6
Stern, Bodo. (2023, October 31). Introducing the “Towards Responsible Publishing” proposal from cOAlition S. cOAlition S Blog. https://www.coalition-s.org/blog/introducing-the-towards-responsible-publishing-proposal-from-coalition-s/