Breaking the Barriers of Modern Academic Publishing

“Was the implementation of the F1000Research platform meant to highlight an issue relevant to the modern academic publishing system?” This was the first question we posed when we wrote to the University of Tsukuba for an interview. The answer was a resounding “Yes!” We tried to determine what it meant for a university to have its own academic publishing gateway, but we realized that this was a movement started by the humanities and social sciences’ researchers to bring changes in the publishing industry.

Challenging the English-oriented, impact factor-centric publishing industry

It all began with a new academic journal evaluation index called iMD (index for Measuring Diversity), originally developed in 2017 by the advisor to the university’s president, Professor Jun Ikeda, and Research Administrator at the university, Yukihito Morimoto. Prof. Ikeda—whose work also spans Library and Information Science, in addition to Humanities and Socio-information Science—questioned the fact that the typical citation-based journal evaluation models, such as the Journal Impact Factor, cannot fairly evaluate research in the humanities and social sciences. In response, he developed iMD, which evaluates all academic journals regardless of its country of origin, language, or field from a completely different perspective: diversity.

The iMD approach is very simple: journals are scored based on the number of institutions and countries represented by the authors of the papers published in the journal each year. Prof. Ikeda states, “The more papers are published by researchers from more countries and research institutions, the higher is the author diversity of the journal.” There are various problems with the impact factor, such as its inability to capture changes in short-term trends and a lack of transparency of the citation count data that form the basis for calculating the score. Researchers wanted to address the skewed situation that it was overwhelmingly advantageous to publish in journals distributed in English, in the fields of natural science, and from a Western institution or organization.

Prof. Ikeda says, “I do not deny the importance of English in academic communication. However, it is extremely important to publish in languages other than English for the humanities and social sciences. For example, papers on Japanese literature and research dealing with Japan’s Constitution, which are published in Japanese, should be considered the best in the world, shouldn’t they? It is wrong for these papers to be considered subpar just because they cannot be evaluated on a universal level unless they were written in English; good research in any language deserves to be evaluated. However, nowadays, university rankings, national university evaluations, and on-campus research evaluations are based on overseas dissertation databases such as Scopus. Those databases and evaluation systems often do not index non-English publications in the field of the humanities and social sciences nor consider them as achievements. I thought that the current trend of giving preference to English publications in journal indexing was absolutely strange.”

Prof. Ikeda’s team organized an international symposium to announce the launch of iMD and collect views from international academic publishers. That was the first time they met Rebecca Lawrence, Managing Director at F1000Research, who was a speaker at the event.

Creating “a world without journals”

Originally, Prof. Ikeda and Morimoto were interested in the fact that the US-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation used the gateway of the F1000Research’s publishing platform (Gates Open Research) to publish its findings. At the end of her speech at the symposium, Lawrence appealed to the audience, “Let’s create a world without journals!” This kickstarted a conversation that eventually led to a collaboration between F1000Research and the University of Tsukuba.

F1000Research is a cross-disciplinary open research platform with many gateways linked to it. A gateway is a personalized portal for an institution or organization, with links to featured content and other resources. If a paper meets F1000Research’s guidelines in terms of content, quality, tone, and format and is published on the platform, anyone can access the findings, instantly and for free, without being bound by the journal publishing process or regulations. Further, papers published in F1000Research are automatically indexed on databases like Scopus provided they undergo peer review after publication. As such, papers can be accessed from the database without relying on the evaluation of any published journal. Typically, the author of a paper does not have the right to reuse or redistribute it (as the publisher has the copyrights for published papers), but F1000Research allows authors to retain the copyright. In a sense, this is a platform that acts as a counterculture to existing academic publishing systems.

“F1000Research is a one-of-a-kind model and is unlike preprints and open access journals. I wanted to do something completely new, rather than thinking about risks. I thought that the papers would be published on the platform, given the same important in databases, and evaluated,” says Prof. Ikeda.

The first step to overcoming the language barrier

F1000Research was initially unaware that publishing in Japanese was an essential requirement for this partnership. Even if humanities papers on F1000Research could be indexed in Scopus, it would not be possible to bridge the disparity between the natural sciences and the humanities/social sciences without being able to publish in Japanese. Prof. Ikeda and Morimoto were particularly concerned about publication in Japanese.
Prof. Ikeda recalls, “Our decision to partner with F1000Research hinged on its compatibility with Japanese. I strongly proposed that they develop a function that allowed researchers to publish in Japanese. Rebecca said, ‘Let’s do it!’, and I was very happy. They also agreed that there should not be any language barrier in research. I felt that they could be a reliable partner.”

There are various reasons for the language barrier, but the predominance of English in natural science research and Western publishers’ technological limitations are the main ones. Currently, Scopus indexes approximately 28,000 peer-reviewed journals around the world. Regardless of the country of publication, about 80% of the papers from these journals are in English. The reality is that the needs of the humanities and social sciences fields in Japan do not fit into the commercial framework of major publishers and do not have enough global support for publishers to invest in multilingual technology development.

Prof. Ikeda says, “Double-byte characters in Asian languages like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean have completely different character codes from single-byte characters in the English alphabet. This poses a huge technical barrier for publishers. Now that Unicode is very popular, it’s possible to achieve this. But because of a lack of technical expertise and motivation, this hasn’t been realized. Humanities and social science researchers have asked major academic publishers if they could index the literature published in Japanese, but a huge language barrier existed. Most of them said that they did not want to handle Japanese characters and wanted to work with single-byte characters in bibliographies for citation purposes. Some of them even suggested that we transliterate the Japanese bibliography into Roman characters.”

Any language barrier can be overcome if the barrier posed by Japanese can be overcome. Morimoto says this is just the beginning of the multilingual publishing movement. “By taking on the unprecedented task of disseminating research in languages other than English on this platform, we want to innovate in research dissemination and disseminate research in any language. I want a world where researchers can communicate in their local language, be it German, Russian, or Zulu. I hope what we do lays the foundation for future innovation.”

Ensuring the quality of papers in post-publication peer review

The most difficult thing to understand about the mechanism of F1000Research is the concept of post-publication peer review. In the existing academic publishing process, the editor checks the papers submitted to the journal. Several peer reviewers evaluate the papers, and those that meet the criteria are published. However, F1000Research “publishes” pre-peer-reviewed papers on the platform. It is often confused with “preprint,” which is a pre-published paper; however, papers on F1000Research are published and can be cited. After publication, peer reviewers are invited on the platform to carry out open peer review, and all revisions to the peer-reviewed paper are made public. It is a novel approach that ensures the transparency of academic verification by removing the hurdles for research publication, thereby increasing the speed of publication and making the entire process transparent.

But as a university, does it have concerns about publishing papers before it undergoes peer review? Prof. Ikeda answers, “It is necessary to ‘evaluate time’ to verify whether the research is correct. In the humanities and social sciences, some research is evaluated in units of 10 to 100 years, and some others are not evaluated at all. It’s the same in the natural sciences, and published papers are constantly being retracted. In other words, the findings of all papers are tentative hypotheses. A theory I believe to be correct now may be reversed in 20 years. I think that the current peer review system is the best we have at the moment, and we should value this system where the research is carefully evaluated by experts before publication. However, you cannot say, ‘This research is universally correct because it is published in Nature.’ In that case, it may be fairer to disclose everything, including the evaluation of peer review, the revision process, and comments. Wouldn’t it better to have more choices in the way we can publish?”

Let’s just do it! – The president approved immediately

For a national university, with many stakeholders and decision makers, agreeing on the direction to take and collaborating with a start-up like F1000Research must have been extremely difficult. Prof. Ikeda, Morimoto, and Masayo Shindo led the project on-site, and right from the beginning, all decisions were made together with Prof. Kikoshi, Vice President of Research, and Prof. Aoki, Director of Humanities and Social Studies.

A university-wide project cannot progress without considering the needs of researchers across disciplines. Vice President Kikoshi was responsible for collecting feedback from the researchers at the University of Tsukuba, conducting needs assessment surveys with the directors of all departments, and organizing inputs to help decide the way forward.

The president’s approval was the last step. Getting the president’s approval was unexpectedly smooth, says Prof. Ikeda. “We went to him with the intention of talking him into this idea. But turns out he is the easiest person to convince. He loves to try innovative things and encourages others to try new things. We took him through our approach and our interactions with all the directors on campus. ‘Okay, let’s just do it!’ he said immediately after listening to us. The University of Tsukuba is said to be a new concept university and follows the philosophy of trying out new things. President Nagata embodies this philosophy.”

It helped that the president had long been aware of the problem: that the current academic information distribution is over-commercialized. “A paper is public property created by investing money, including public funds. Despite being public property, research papers have been over-commercialized in modern systems. The publisher holds the copyright to the content, and researchers have ‘outsourced’ too many aspects of publication. Researchers should be committed to the distribution of information about their research. The president has always said that this situation must change.”

“When you do something new, do not rush.”

Not all researchers on campus understand this new publishing model. The academic publishing culture and opinions vary across disciplines.

Shindo, who has a background in the life sciences, says, “The reality is that it will take some time for researchers in the natural sciences—who mainly write papers in English—to enjoy the benefits of gateways like F1000Research, and those who are interested will still want to wait and watch. The challenge for the university lies in dealing with the reality that the culture of journals in each discipline is solidified.”

Throughout academic publishing’s long history since the sixteenth century, publishers have taken charge of distribution. Experts in each field conduct peer review to ensure the academic quality of the paper. This approach has not changed much—not even in light of recent disruption in the distribution model. The emergence of e-journals and open access following the spread of the Internet has influenced the publishing business model. But universities have somehow remained out of the loop of this ecosystem for a long time. Nevertheless, soaring subscription and publishing costs, and the system of research evaluation centered on Europe and the United States, have gradually put pressure on university finances and its diversity in research, even as international research competition gradually intensifies every year.

This initiative by the University of Tsukuba may seem like a small drop in the ocean, but will this drop eventually lead to a ripple that will return power into the hands of researchers? And how much do individual researchers want from this move?

Prof. Ikeda says, “The most important thing I learned is that you should not rush when you attempt something new. It is difficult for many people to understand the vision, aim, and its implications at once. Therefore, I think it is important to gradually improve understanding. I never expected to have hundreds of papers to be published on our gateway as soon as the platform was launched. Start with 10 or 20 papers and gradually scale up. Since it’s a new initiative, I want to discuss the pros and cons carefully with the researchers in the field, and make changes gradually.”

Profiles

JUN IKEDA

Jun Ikeda is Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences, Advisor to the President, at the University of Tsukuba. After graduating from the University of Tsukuba, School of Humanities, he completed his master’s degree at the Graduate School of Arts and Languages. He obtained a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Tel Aviv University, in 1995. After working as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Foreign Studies, Kansai Gaidai University, he joined the University of Tsukuba in 2000. He specializes in Semitic studies centered on Hebrew and Akkadian as well as in Library and Information Science/Humanistic Social Informatics.

YUKIHITO MORIMOTO

Yukihito Morimoto is Research Administrator, URA Research Strategy Promotion Office, University of Tsukuba. He obtained his doctorate in economics from the Graduate School of Economics, Kansai University. After working at Kansai University URA, he joined the University of Tsukuba Headquarters URA in 2013. He developed iMD in collaboration with Professor Jun Ikeda. In 2018, he won the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research as part of the URA’s work.

MASAYO SHINDO

Masayo Shindo is Research Administrator, URA Research Strategy Promotion Office, University of Tsukuba. After graduating from the Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Tsukuba, she obtained her master’s degree from the Graduate School of Agriculture and Life Sciences, University of Tokyo, and a doctorate in science from the Department of Genetics, Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI) in Kanagawa. She specializes in developmental biology. Following her postdoctoral studies, Shindo is currently providing a wide range of research support by using her experience in branding, marketing, and technology/intellectual property transfer support from a private company.

This article is a part of ScienceTalks Magazine issue Welcome to the New Era of Open Publication.