Replacing academic journals

with repositories and peer communities

Pandelis Perakakis · pperakakis@ucm.es
BrainHack Donostia, 4 November 2026

A solution to a problem we no longer have

1665: the journal is invented

Philosophical Transactions solved two problems of its time: registering who found what first, and distributing findings to scholars in other cities, on paper.

The web solved both.

Peer review came much later

Einstein to the editor of Physical Review, 1936, after his paper was sent to a referee without his consent.

Three fundamental processes in science

All three controlled by journals
Validation 2–3 anonymous reviewersreviews not available
Evaluation The impact factor and the journal's prestigestand in for the quality of the work
Dissemination Private serversrestrictive licences, subscriptions or APCs

Validation

2–3 anonymous reviewers; reviews not available

Does peer review work?

Smith, Times Higher Education, 2015 · Jefferson et al., JAMA 287:2784, 2002 · Jefferson et al., Cochrane Review, 2007

Reviewers agree little more than chance

Rothwell & Martyn (2000). Brain 123:1964–1969

Retractions

Van Noorden (2011). Nature 478:26–28

The reviewing is done by us, unpaid

In 2020 researchers spent more than 100 million hours on peer review: over 15,000 years of work. The time of US reviewers alone was worth more than US$1.5 billion.

Aczel, Szaszi & Holcombe (2021). Research Integrity and Peer Review 6:14

Evaluation

The impact factor and the journal’s prestige stand in for the quality of the work

A number for sale

1958 · Institute for Scientific Information founded
1992 · bought by Thomson for US$210 million
2016 · sold to private equity, now Clarivate, for US$3.55 billion

“Journal impact factors are only used, and with caution, to measure and compare the influence of entire journals, but not for the assessment of single papers, and certainly not for the assessment of researchers.”

Garfield (2006). JAMA 295:90–93

A journal oligopoly

Impact factors of 8,011 ISI journals, 1974–2001 · Taylor, Perakakis & Trachana (2008). The siege of science. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8:17–40

The impact factor is not yours

Articles by citations received in a year, three biochemistry journals · Seglen (1997). BMJ 314:497, reproduced in Taylor, Perakakis & Trachana (2008)

High impact, not higher standards

Statistical power against impact factor: Brembs, Button & Munafò (2013). Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7:291 · Tressoldi et al. (2013). PLOS ONE 8:e56180

Scientists, or academics?

“Most researchers today, especially those at the beginning of their careers, want to be scientists, but are forced to become academics.”

Perakakis (2017). Open scientists in the shoes of frustrated academics. Euroscientist

Dissemination

Private servers, restrictive licences, subscriptions or APCs

What two Spanish universities pay for subscriptions

2020 2024
Universidad Complutense de Madrid 2,846,040.62 € 2,972,520.85 €
Universidad de Granada 1,045,250.00 € 2,250,000.00 €

Budgets for journal subscriptions · ucm.es/portaldetransparencia · gerencia.ugr.es

The bill keeps rising

Couperin consortium, France: subscriptions and APCs, 2013–2030

What we pay for an article, and what it costs

Grossmann & Brembs (2021). Current market rates for scholarly publishing services. F1000Research 10:20

Open access: from a right to a business

Free availability on the public internet, to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full texts, without financial, legal or technical barriers.

Two complementary strategies: self-archiving in repositories (green) and open access journals.

“Gold OA represents a business opportunity, whereas Green OA represents a business problem.”

Joseph Esposito, publishing consultant, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2013 · budapestopenaccessinitiative.org

Transformative agreements: a service for the authors!

UCM library guide to the CRUE–CSIC agreements · González MacDowell (2023). El verdadero coste de los acuerdos transformativos. Anales de Química

A business, not a service

Profit margins, 2007/2008

MIT Libraries; RMA Annual Statement Studies, 2007 (data from 2007 or 2008)

Profit margins, 2024

Company annual reports, 2024 (STM segments for publishers)

Build by scientists, for scientists

2012 Elsevier Pure research information system
2013 Elsevier Mendeley reference manager
2016 Elsevier SSRN preprint server
2016 Wiley Atypon publishing platform, US$120 million
2017 Elsevier bepress repository software
2017 Elsevier Plum Analytics altmetrics
2017 Clarivate Publons records of peer review
2018 Elsevier Aries Systems Editorial Manager
2018 Clarivate Kopernio access to papers
2020 Taylor & Francis F1000 Research open publishing platform
2021 Wiley Hindawi open access publisher, US$298 million
2021 Clarivate ProQuest US$5.3 billion
2022 Elsevier Interfolio faculty evaluation
2022 Springer Nature Research Square preprint server

Company press releases and SEC filings; Library Technology Guides, mergers timeline

The tools for the revolution are here

The infrastructure has existed since 1991

Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web · Paul Ginsparg and arXiv

Repositories everywhere

OpenDOAR, number of open access repositories · v2.sherpa.ac.uk

Our model unchanged since 2010

Perakakis, Taylor & Trachana (2010). Natural selection of academic papers. Scientometrics 85:553–559

Replacing academic journals

A federated network of interoperable research objects, governed by the scholarly community and connected by open standards.

Brembs et al. (2023). Replacing academic journals. Royal Society Open Science 10:230206

The three processes decoupled

Each done by those who should do it
Validation Peer communitiesopen reviews, published and citable: PCI, scientific societies
Evaluation Assessment of the work itself, not of the journal's nameDORA, CoARA, funders and evaluation committees
Dissemination Repositoriespublic, open, permanent: institutional repositories, Zenodo, arXiv, PsyArXiv

Peer communities review preprints

Peer Community In · peercommunityin.org

Repositories and review services talk to each other

With COAR Notify, a reviewer’s report travels back to the repository and is shown next to the preprint.

coar-repositories.org/notify

Psicológica: a journal without a publisher

2022: a society journal moves into a public repository

psicologicajournal.com · digital.csic.es/handle/10261/228593

About €30 an article

“At an estimated cost of €30 (US$34) per publication, Psicológica can increase its output without incurring substantial extra costs.”

Bernal & Perakakis (2023). Nature 619:698

The three jobs, at Psicológica

Collaboration of academics and librarians
Validation The society's editors and reviewersreviews deposited next to the article, each with its own identifier
Evaluation The open recordpreprint, reviews, comments and the published article, all readable and citable
Dissemination DIGITAL.CSICthe public repository of the Spanish National Research Council; no publisher

Example: an article with its reviews and comments · hdl.handle.net/10261/264625

Remove the profit, remove the obstacles

Publishers had the money to do all of this and never did. Communities that care for science rather than profit can do it now:

  • open reviews as research objects, deposited and citable
  • registration, perservation, metadata curation and discoverability in institutional repositories
  • certified reproducibility (trust in science) by reprocheck, this week at #BrainHackDonostia2026

Where do we go from here?

CHAOS OR COMMUNITY?

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)

Thank you

Pandelis Perakakis · pperakakis@ucm.es

pandelisperakakis.info · openscholar.info · psicologicajournal.com