🏴‍☠️ The academic literature deluge is out of control 🏴‍☠️ (this post has been written with the help of Gemini)

With the uncontrolled proliferation of journals, it has become impossible for researchers to keep up with the considerable volume of articles published each month (My doctoral students can confirm this).

Worse still, we are trapped in a system governed by impact factors, where large publishers benefit from free peer review and exorbitant publishing fees. In the age of large language models (LLMs)—where standard text can be generated at virtually no marginal cost—the traditional article is losing its value.

How do we fix a broken model? Here is a roadmap to renew scientific sharing:

💡 1. Reimagining Article Types We need to move beyond rigid and overly text-heavy formats. Mainstream media outlets now value and promote alternative contributions. Data & Software Articles: Treating code and open data sets with equal prestige. Re-Science Articles: Normalizing and rewarding replication studies.

👉 See the model used by the Journal of Open Aviation Studies:JOAS

👉  Distill is going on hiatus “We think that Distill is a really beautiful artifact which illustrates a vision of scientific publishing. But it is not sustainable for us to continue running the journal in its current form. We think preserving it in its present state is more valuable than diluting it with lower quality editing. We also think that it’s a lot healthier for us and frees up our energy to do new projects that provide value to the community… Although Distill is going on hiatus, the Distill template is open source, and we’d love to see others run with it!”

👉  Don’t we have enough journals already? The Journal of Open Source Software JOSS is a developer friendly, open access journal for research software packages. “We built this journal because we believe that after you’ve done the hard work of writing great software, it shouldn’t take weeks and months to write a paper about your work.”

🎵 2. The Music Industry Shift Think about the media evolution: Vinyl ➡️ Napster ➡️ Spotify. Academia went from Paper ➡️ Sci-Hub. Now, we need the final leap: Unified Scientific Streaming Platforms that sustainably support Diamond Open Access (free to read, free to publish) through institutional funding rather than predatory APCs.

👉 See ACM’s forward-looking framework for modern AI science: ACM

🎥 3. Multi-Modal Communication To spark the interest of the next generation of researchers, it is essential to complement dense academic texts with open-source code notebooks and concise video summaries. Even traditional publishing houses are recognizing this shift in communication formats.

👉 Read the recent Nature analysis on this evolution: Nature

The traditional model of scientific journals is an outdated one. It’s time to ditch the metrics and return to the collective advancement of human knowledge for a more sustainable world.

One missing point: AI also helps to find, in the state of the art, unsolved Erdős problems that have not been declared as such in the publication.

ChatGPT

👇 How can we renew the way we publish our scientific work?

#OpenScience #AcademicPublishing #GenerativeAI #Research #OpenData #Innovation