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RE: A new way to publish research findings. The Fair Journal pay scientists what is fair, and publish cartoon versions of the articles for kids

in #science5 years ago

Some good points, we've debated a few times before actually but I'll repeat here a little: though many are open access, during my active days writing on Steem I found the vast majority of papers I needed to access were behind a wall of subscription fees and other high-priced gateways. It was often a struggle.

There may be plenty out there open access, particularly in some fields such as your own, but this doesn't remove the fact that there are plenty that are not.

I totally agree with the latter part of the comment though, this initiative needs to be much more open to what it is and who's behind it all, but I guess this shouldn't be something that takes more than a few hours to sort out, if thefairjournal agrees with the sentiment

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The open access issue is a field dependent stuff. In my field, the entire community is behind open-access (and open source on different matters). This is of course not a general case, although in principle it should be. Whether other fields will follow... this the future will tell us. But in any case, the motivation must come from the inside on a given community, or it won't work.

Hi Mobbs, sorry I missed your comment. I think it came while I was busy answering lemouth.

I will for sure work on making the information about the actual full manuscript submission more complete and transparent. I guess it has been neglected a bit, due to focus on the outreach part. And maybe I have been a scientist so long, that I thought instructions to authors were a bit unnecessary (I'm in my 8th year as a postdoc). It does say under the submission page which sections a manuscript should contain, but not more than that: https://thefairjournal.com/submit-your-full-research-manuscript/

Regarding an editorial board, I think it will be difficult to gather one at the moment without having had success with the outreach. Also because we are for now aiming very broad and accepting manuscripts/layman summaries from any field. But since many scientists see journals by the value of their editors it is perhaps a necessity to have a board in place before any scientist would consider submitting. But for now, I could put myself down at least, and then start to ask around if anyone else would be interested in helping out. So if anyone that reads this think they are capable, please get in touch! :)

Cheers,
Jonas

Hi Jonas,

For the reasons you mentioned, I would focus on the outreach part only. There is nothing with this respect on the market (at least to my knowledge) and I really think the idea is good. When you get there, you should then consider diversifying. But before that, you would need to make your brand known and recognised. It is easier to do so through a domain (outreach) where the competition is less fierce.

Consequently, I would remove any mention of "regular" publications from the website.

Cheers!