Does vision science need a new open access journal (Pre-discussion for ECVP2015)

PeerJ accepts Word and pdf for the initial submission, but what about the final, accepted, manuscript?

I support most of the comments above. While I'm yet to submit an article there, the PeerJ platform and publishing model seems to be great.

One small complaint I have is that I don't like the single-column pdf formatting. I understand this was done for people who read on handheld screens, but it just doesn't appeal to me. Perhaps once I'm used to it.

I will echo the thoughts above that before the journal launches we want to make sure there is a fairly large and reputable editorial board on hand. Ideally those people would also submit articles for the launch of the new PeerJ section. Perhaps we could start having quiet words to those we know on the boards of JoV and Vis Res about whether there would be interest in "defecting".

Regarding the name: while "Vision" is appealing to me, "Perception" or "Sensation and Perception" are broader, and could encourage submissions from researchers in other sensory modalities (particularly if we had a good auditory or crossmodal person on the board). I feel that the two existing PeerJ versions are very broad (approximately, "biological science" and "computer science") so they might be resistant to creating such a specific section.

Another thing that I think is really important is to encourage open data and code to be an integral part of publishing in the new journal. While I'm not sure that the mandatory route (as for PLoS) is what we want, I would like to have some mechanisms to strongly encourage the open sharing and archiving of data and code. We could integrate the badge system that Alex and others developed to reward people for doing so. A more negative option would be to have articles for which the authors declined to share data / code state this fact in big bold letters prominently at the top of the article ;)

To this end, perhaps while talking with PeerJ about hosting the journal on their platform, we could also be thinking about an integrated archiving service such as http://datadryad.org/ or http://dataverse.org/. Or perhaps PeerJ already has these links?

Ultimately, we should try to streamline as much as possible the process of archiving data and code. When you submit to PeerJ Perception, it's a simple zip file upload (or forking a git repository) to also archive data and code for the paper for all eternity*. Moreover, we strongly encourage authors to do this.

• see Bruce's great comment. This is why I think integrating with a service like one of those linked above will help in this respect – rather than, e.g. relying on an author's university web server.

I strongly support Tom's point about open data and I think this should help with reputation as he suggests. I think a positive rather than a negative encouragement system would be optimal. I think perhaps, with PeerJ, there is less of an incentive to accept rubbish papers because of the different business model ($99 to publish 1 paper a year until you drop off the perch) - so in fact it's less in their interest to publish poor quality articles as it will dilute their impact. But these are all valid and interesting views worth discussing at the forum!

Marco, I agree. The Journal of Eye Movement Research is free both to authors and to readers, and attracts the top people in that rather specialized field. The editor is Rudi Groener, at Bern, Switzerland. The journal provides a template that is relatively easy to use, and doesn't require any additional software from the author's side.

regards,

Bruce Bridgeman
Editor-in-chief, Consciousness and Cognition
Edward A. Dickson 2013 Professor of Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz
106 Social Sciences 2 Tel. (831) 459 4005
Santa Cruz, Ca. 95064 Fax (831) 459 3519
http://people.ucsc.edu/~bruceb/ ( http://people.ucsc.edu/~bruceb/ )

yes.

regards,

Bruce Bridgeman
Editor-in-chief, Consciousness and Cognition
Edward A. Dickson 2013 Professor of Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz
106 Social Sciences 2 Tel. (831) 459 4005
Santa Cruz, Ca. 95064 Fax (831) 459 3519
http://people.ucsc.edu/~bruceb/ ( http://people.ucsc.edu/~bruceb/ )

Tom, thanks for your thoughts. But “Sensation and Perception” has always bothered me. Sensation is leftover 19th-century functionalism - we now know that perception doesn't progress through a stage of experiencing unprocessed sensations. I reviewed a “Sensation and Perception” textbook and recommended that “Sensation” be dropped. They agreed, but when the new edition of the book came out sensation was back. Blame conservative publishers.

regards,

Bruce Bridgeman
Editor-in-chief, Consciousness and Cognition
Edward A. Dickson 2013 Professor of Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz
106 Social Sciences 2 Tel. (831) 459 4005
Santa Cruz, Ca. 95064 Fax (831) 459 3519
http://people.ucsc.edu/~bruceb/ ( http://people.ucsc.edu/~bruceb/ )

I'm seeing two different and potentially conflicting positions emerging here. Some people seem to push for a high quality, rather selective journal. Others seem to have an idea that this journal should accept anything that's technically sound (like PLOS ONE) so that people have a cheap venue to publish their work. Let's be honest here, not every paper we write is grand, yet if this new journal is too selective, where shall I publish my lesser studies? In the traditional journals, of course, and so that's not solving the original problem we had.

A selective journal is important, as others mentioned, as a means to filter stuff. Yet I'd argue that it is not the function of a journal / editors to filter research. I'm all against the file drawer problem. Rather, we need better tools to filter post-publication, something like recommendation systems that Amazon or Netflix have. Not sure if PeerJ has something like that.

Bruce: your point is well made; I'd be happy to drop the "sensation" label. I more wanted to encourage the submission of articles examining other modalities (hence "perception" rather than "vision"). I think this would only work if we could get a few auditory / crossmodal people on the board as well.

Jonas raises a great point. I think this highlights the importance of having a good and motivated editorial board. I 100% support the editorial policy that articles should not be judged on their "potential impact" or similar "sexiness" dimensions. However, there are grades of "technically sound", and it would be possible for a well-chosen, subject-specific editorial board to enforce a strong cutoff on this. I feel that's the place that JoV and Vis Res fill in the current landscape.

I think one important reason why PLOS and Frontiers have become dumping grounds for "lesser studies" is that the editors and reviewers are often not subject matter experts (this is particularly true of Frontiers due to their reviewing / publishing model). Somebody who knows little about the methods of a field, or even a topic within a field, likely has a more loose definition of "technically sound" than a real expert.

We should decide where we want the new journal to stand on this. One avenue is what Jonas suggests: a cheap place to publish peer reviewed studies, but with a relatively low bar and an emphasis on post-publication recommendation and review. I'm intrigued by this model, and PeerJ might be one of the better platforms to support it because members are encouraged to review (including post-publication comments) to maintain their membership. This might provide the critical mass to make post-pub review actually viable.

The other avenue would be to set a relatively strong cutoff for what we mean by "technically sound", and ensure that we have the editors and reviewers on hand to enforce it to the best of their abilities. In my opinion this is the current JoV / Vis Res market.

My current position is the latter. The new journal should not become a dumping ground for technically flawed papers. I feel there are enough of those to serve the "lesser paper" market already (though as Jonas says, they're not as cheap as they could be). In my mind, this new journal is seeking to take the place of Elsevier's Vis Res in terms of community standing (and hopefully some of their editors as well).

I'm happy to be convinced otherwise, if others have strong opinions.

The realities of the REF in the UK (and increasingly similar exercises in other countries) means that we need to be able to publish in two types of journals: strong specialist journals (equiv of Vis Res or JoV) and "fancy" multidisciplinary ones (equiv of Current Biology, Nat Neuro etc). The discussion so far addresses the former but not the latter.

It seems to me that there is a suitable "fancy" journal out there already if we as a community decided to adopt it - eLife. It meets all the concerns re OA and from what I recall its already got a number of vision scientists on the Editorial Board.

Thoughts?

To pick up a different point - I understand all the arguments for OA but there is another model we could consider, society journals. Take QJEP, its run by the EPS (Experimental Psychology Society; http://www.eps.ac.uk/), its subscription rates are very low, I believe it provides free subscriptions to universities in less affluent countries, and the profits go to funding travel awards for students, supporting conferences etc. Its also of course already an established title with an Impact Factor et and there is no fee for publication.

So rather than starting from scratch we could switch our publishing allegiances. To take QJEP as an example, many of us know people involved in the journal and I'd expect they might be quite keen to embrace vision research.

I guess this begs the question: what is the priority? Open access full stop, or stopping publishers profiteering?

How did the ECVP discussion go- what points were raised, what was the general feeling?

Lee chaired the meeting and I'm sure he will write a detailed message for this group.

I think that everybody really appreciated the setting up of the issues that Lee provided, because it was careful and factual, including discussing journals and options that already exist but people may not be aware of (for instance only one person in the audience had published in PeerJ, mainly because they just did not know about it).

Opinions ranged. I had a sense that people were very aware of how much work is involved in running a journal and thus were a bit skeptical about the idea of setting up a new one.

There were approximately 150 people in attendance. I reviewed some of the options for open access, as detailed in my slides (http://www.slideshare.net/leedewit/open-access-ecvp-2015-51874667). At the end I took a number of straw polls of the popularity of the different options. There was an almost unanimous agreement that it would be useful to try to use eLife as the 'high impact' OA alternative for vision science (thanks to @simonrushton for putting this on the agenda). Approximately 65% of those present thought that setting up a 'subject page' within PeerJ would be a good move. There was only a little support for the other alternatives (setting up a journal with Ubiquity, setting up a journal with open software, or supporting Eye and Vision). I would say one of the main criticisms of PeerJ was that it was still a commercial model, and that ideally publications should be free, and directly supported by research funding (hence the support for eLife). I will start two new threads to develop these two options:

PeerJ -
https://www.loomio.org/d/c5QXFDaj/a-vision-science-subject-page-within-peerj

eLife -
https://www.loomio.org/d/xRlPkHe4/elife-as-a-prestigious-publisher-in-vision-science