List of alternative publishing projects

Je pense qu il y a deja plein de journeaux 'corrects'. Peut etre donc pas besoin de creer un journal ab-initio. Peut etre simplement s assurer que la communaute francaise de meca publie dans ces 'honnetes' journeaux... ???

Quels sont ces journaux honnêtes ? Accepteraient-ils d'être transformés en épi-journaux (c'est sans doute le sens de la réponse de Vincent).

@sebastienneukirch I agree with you. It is an serious alternative. We have also to think to this possibility.

Nevertheless, there is no epic-journal and I think the model od an epi-journal is a long term warranty to be sure that the journal will ne managed by a non-profit organisation.

In my former University in Moscow they have all their journals that are now open-acess (but they are in Russian)
http://vestniken.ru/eng/
http://mmcm.bmstu.ru/information/
http://technomag.bmstu.ru/
Compare to this approach i think the epi-journal is more sustainable because the papers are archived in open-access archive with mirror archives (ex: Arxiv and HAL).

There are two problems:
- do we need another journal for supporting the possible amount of quality publications the community os able to produce?: the answer is no. Hence a new journal shall exist only if after some time people move away from existing journals because the new offer is more attractive
- people in our field are quite conservative (some say "pragmatic") and will deny this initiative as they are interested only in publications that are "counted" by their administration or the research structure because they are "indexed", "known", "have a good review process" or whatever other reasons (including the fact that they are in the Editorial Board :-). Clearly being indexed (whatever this means) cannot happen for a new journal immediatly. Hence it is necessary to get the involvement of structures for producing a long term effort

In this comment, you seem to say that research indices and article metrics are important tools to attract attention. In another comment, you were saying that such metrics are polluting research work. Can a compromise be found?

Bibliometry is here and has been discussed at length. It may be in some cases an element that may be taken into account provided that the user knows exactly what he is doing, what the numbers are intended to describe and what are the very strong limitations of this approach. This is not usually the case (e.g. who know exactly how an impact factor is calculated ?) and these numbers are used "as it" for making decisions both by the "managers" and by some colleagues. Meaning that any new initiative can be killed by bibliometry just because a new journal has first to be able to exist for some time to impose itself naturally as one of the best journal. Hence it will be necessary to argue about intrinsic quality with the decision makers and convince them that the "indicators" does not tell everything

A long Guardian article on Elsevier :

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science?CMP=twt_a-science_b-gdnscience