How To Enter a New Chapter in Academic Publishing
"The old system of editorial checking was already breaking down under the volume of publication." – Alex Freeman.
Complete the form below to unlock access to ALL audio articles.
In 2016, Dr. Alexandra Freeman returned to a career in academic research after several successful years working in media.
Shortly after this transition, she observed concerning parallels between the industry that she had left behind, and that which she had re-joined. It seemed as though, all around her, academics held a firm desire to tell what Freeman describes as “neat, short, easy-to-read and persuasive” stories in their papers. But good research isn’t about storytelling, she thought – it’s about evidence communication.
Inspired to create change, Freeman sat down one evening and got to work developing Octopus, a novel and radical publishing platform for scholarly research. She penned the idea in a single night, and with funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), officially launched Octopus in the summer of 2022.
“In Octopus, there are eight types of publication, each reflecting a part of the research process,” Freeman told Technology Networks in an interview ahead of Octopus’ launch. “This allows researchers to specialize in one or two of these parts of the process (with their very different skills) and to publish their work literally in collaboration with the rest of the research community – in time, as well as in space! Someone might publish a theoretical idea now, which someone else, 20 years in the future, will collect data to test. Then, another researcher, 20 years further in the future, might again choose to analyze that data using new techniques.”
As Octopus approaches its second birthday, Technology Networks reconnected with Freeman to learn about the academic community’s response to the platform, how it has evolved and her current stance on the publishing landscape.
Molly Campbell (MC): Can you provide our readers with an update on how the launch of Octopus went, and how the scientific community has reacted to it?
Alexandra Freeman (AF): The launch itself was a great event, but it was just the lighting of the fuse. Since then, we’ve been continuing to develop all the features that we need to in order to fulfil the vision that I originally had for Octopus – and that will continue for another year or more.
The reception has been great – we’ve got over 1,000 users, and publications on Octopus get viewed a lot – far more than I had anticipated! When we show Octopus to people, they are almost entirely positive about it too – but that isn’t to say that everything’s plain sailing, as I knew it wouldn’t be.
MC: Octopus evolved from your feelings of frustration towards researchers’ desire to tell “neat, short, easy-to-read persuasive stories in academic papers.” Has anything changed?
AF: In the big picture, no – not yet. The incentive structure for researchers is still mostly geared towards a paper in a journal (or a monograph). To get the biggest readership (and hence market) for those, the pressure is for brevity, simplicity and readability. Very few “casual” readers want highly detailed methods, complete results or analytical code etc., and it’s not commercially viable to cater for those who do, (even though that is what is needed to be able to assess and build on research that’s been done).
However, the ground is shifting – funders are beginning to make moves that could change the entire landscape. Funders really care about the quality of research work and have very few competing interests, so it’s them that needed to take the first steps – and that is happening. I think we’re going to see the pace of change pick up now.
MC: Almost two years after launch, is Octopus having the impact that you hoped for? Have there been any challenges? If so, how did you overcome them?
AF: Not yet. It is having an effect, in many different ways, but I’m very ambitious for the change needed, so there’s a long way to go.
When we introduce the platform and explain why it is designed the way it is, researchers understand it. Almost all say they would like to try it and support its aims. Most, though, say that they don’t feel able to use it regularly because of the pressures they’re under – or feel they’re under – to publish “the traditional way.”
The pressures that researchers feel come from institutions and funders – the people who will employ them and pay them.
Until fairly recently, there weren’t that many alternatives to the traditional article formats, and it was understandable for the research assessment system to be built around these formats. But now, there are better alternatives for sharing work in enough detail for it to be fully assessed and built on (Octopus being one example) and so the whole landscape can change.
We need to make funders and institutions aware of these new Alternative Publishing Platforms and their advantages (to them, to researchers and to the whole research landscape) so that they can change the incentive system that researchers feel trapped within. That is something I’m very much working on.
A branching chain of research publications on Octopus.ac. Credit: Alexandra Freeman.
MC: Do you feel that the research community is aware of Octopus and how they can use it?
AF: “The research community” is huge! A lot of people have heard about it, although we know from research that many have some misconceptions about it – it is quite a different way of working. I have published on it myself and know some of the questions that arise, like “what should be in a Results publication, as opposed to an Analysis publication?”, so I think there’s quite a lot of work still to do helping people with their first publications.
But there are also going to be huge numbers of people – around the world – who haven’t yet even heard of it. Many of those will, I think, be mid-career researchers who feel there is a set career path that they are on. They likely feel very under pressure to publish in certain ways, and don’t even have the time and energy to look at anything other than getting the next publication in the specific journal that they think they have to, in order to secure their next contract or grant.
The only way these researchers can be freed to think about the quality of the work they’re doing – and how useful what they’re sharing is for people other than themselves – is if institutions and funders make it very clear indeed that “the system” has changed and demonstrate that the old rules no longer apply.
MC: There have been many notable changes to the publishing landscape since our last conversation, such as the introduction of large language models (LLMs). What are your thoughts on the current scientific publishing landscape?
AF: There have been some big changes. As you say, generative AI is a huge one. We were dealing with a system where people were incentivised to get their names on as many publications as possible – that was bad enough. Now those publications can even be generated artificially within minutes, at scale, by computers.
The old system of editorial checking was already breaking down under the volume of publication, and that pressure hose of publications has just been turned right up.
I can’t see any way in which the old system, with a small group of volunteer peer-reviewers and editors, can deal with sifting through an almost infinite volume of papers, to try and recognize the ones that are created by humans and based on actual research, and then pick out the good research.
Rather than resorting to “easy” cues that inevitably lead to bias (such as previous reputation of authors or institutions), I think we’ll need to move to systems that demand greater evidence of the work done and its trustworthiness – such as open data, analytical code, etc.
I’ve always thought that the old system of editorial approval is unsustainable: that we cannot rely on “peer reviewed” as being a stamp of trustworthiness. I think that has become increasingly obvious as the volume of published AI-generated papers and AI-generated reviews has been revealed. As readers, we are going to have to judge things for ourselves more carefully and not take things “on trust”, outsourcing the judgement to anonymous reviewers; just as we have to with any information we read online these days.
On a more positive note, the Gates Foundation has signaled the start of another major change in the publishing landscape – it has announced that it will no longer pay publishers to publish papers. Instead, it will be supporting more free, alternative ways of sharing work, such as the use of pre-print servers. I think this is exactly the kind of leadership that funders need to take. They have the power to change the status quo, and someone needs to!
MC: UKRI provided the funding to launch Octopus, and for several years thereafter. Has funding been secured for the future?
AF: UKRI, through Research England, has released two more years of funding for Octopus. However, we do need to look ahead to the future. Most importantly we want to keep our costs minimal – it’s only a tiny staff and enough to cover the technical costs of keeping the platform running. We want to make the back-end database distributed so that institutions can volunteer to host a portion of it. This will keep our hosting costs low, and will ensure that all the data is safely mirrored across different geographical locations.
Keeping our costs minimal means we shouldn’t need too much to keep going. But it’s not nothing, so I am going to be doing a lot of talking to funders, philanthropists and institutions.
MC: Are there any misunderstandings or misconceptions about Octopus that you would like to address?
AF: A few have come up, and it’d be great to set the record straight.
1. Octopus is like a pre-print server in that you can publish work on it – and get peer reviews – and then submit it to a journal. However, since Octopus doesn’t publish papers, you need to format your work differently.
2. It is like a pre-registration platform, in that you can publish your research questions, hypotheses and methods before collecting any data (and there is a marker to specifically highlight that you are pre-registering). But you do have to make these public before they get DOIs and dates. On the plus side, like a registered report, you can get peer review of these before you go and collect data.
3. It is a bit like using GitHub, in that you can “fork” a chain of research and take it in a different direction, but unlike GitHub (or ResearchEquals, or Jupyter notebooks) it’s not a place for day-to-day work, which is constantly changing or being updated. It’s designed to be where you publish finished work (this can be a smaller chunk of work than you might think of when you’re used to publishing papers).
4. It is like a repository, in that you can put work on Octopus that has been published in journals, but again, the format is different so you will need to do a bit of work to turn it into Octopus publications. The benefit, of course, is that Octopus is open for others to read, so your work can get a broader readership than a paywalled article, and you don’t have word or format limits so you can go into more detail too.
MC: You run Octopus in your spare time – you must be busy! How are you balancing everything?
AF: I’m used to being busy! But all the day-to-day work is done by a team based at Jisc now, so although I keep across everything with meetings – and I still give quite a few talks – I can fit it in. Octopus is so important – I’ll make as much time as it needs for as long as I possibly can.
MC: Is there anything else that you would like our readers to know about Octopus?
AF: If you agree with the principles of Octopus, the best way that you can help support us as a researcher is to publish on it. It will probably take you about an hour or two to take one of your published papers and put the work up on Octopus, depending on how quick your co-authors are to approve publications If you have less time than that, see whether there is a publication you can write a peer review of – these take a much shorter time than reviews of whole papers.
If you have the power to change policy at an institution or a funder, check whether your policies support people who use these alternative publishing platforms. What can you do to help change the tidal stream that good, careful researchers currently feel is against them? We all have our parts to play. We can all make a positive difference.
Dr. Alexandra Freeman was speaking to Molly Coddington, Senior Writer and Newsroom Team Lead for Technology Networks.
About the interviewee:
