I have proposed a personal view: a conservative way forward for OA publishing, whereby research funders continue to pay APCs, but measures are taken for journals to be more transparent in their costs and avoid using APCs as a cash cow. I look forward to hearing the views of others.
Others have expressed enthusiasm for preprints. I'm in favour of pre-prints but I believe they have a limited role. They are good for rapid sharing of results among researchers, where a field is moving rapidly. But they are not very useful in general for the majority of end-users of health evidence.
There is an argument that pre-prints provide an opportunity for the paper to evolve through a process of open peer-review, whereby fellow researchers (and others) comment on the paper. Does anyone have experience of how this works?
Many pre-prints are subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals. Again, do you have experience of this? How did it work? Was it easier or harder for your preprint to be accepted in your journal of choice than it would have been if it were not previously available as a preprint.
What do journal publishers think about the way forward for OA publishing, and the role of pre-prints?
I understand that some publishers have set up their own pre-print repositories, which presumably allow open peer-review aith a view to being accepted in one of the publisher's journals. How does this work? Is there a need for a two-stage peer review process, with open peer-review at the pre-print stage followed by conventional peer-review of the submitted manuscript?
Looking forward to your inputs. hifa@hifaforums.org
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org