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Thu 6 Jul 2017 8:40AM

Manifest for an epijournal in mechanics

VA Vincent Acary Public Seen by 413

This manifest is a draft. You're invited to comment in the related threads to each points and your remarks might be incorporated in the manifest. The goal is to end up this process with a proposal for an epijournal in mechanics by October 15, 2017. The manifest will then be sent to various communities in Mechanical Engineering.

** 1. Need for an epijournal in Mechanical engineering **

Under the constant pressure for open access, the publication model of many journals in mechanical engineering is currently undergoing a drastic change. Open institutional archives (HAL in France), preprint archives (arxiv.org), Journals with Green Access, Journal with Gold Access have emerged. While a few years ago, researchers were hoping for access to papers at virtually no cost, major publishers (Wiley, Springer, Elsevier...) have been successful in convincing the community that they could not be ignored, mainly because of the impact factors used in evaluating research works. The current trend is that journals with golden access are leading the race and will eventually be the only option to publish papers. Among these journals, two main families sit alongside: highly reputable and scientifically serious journals with fairly high APC (article processing charges) (from $1000 to $5000) and predatory journals with virtually no scientific input and fairly low APC (less than $1000).

There is a third avenue in the form of epijournals (a.k.a. overlay journals)! Epijournals get fed in articles via open archives. The process is as follows:
* A paper is first deposited on an open archive.
* The evaluation procedure is (almost) identical to the evaluation implemented in the main standard journals with commonly three referees and a final decision. This evaluation is requested by the authors or by the epijournal.
* If the paper is accepted with major revisions, a second version is deposited by the authors on the open archive and will be part of the collection of the epijournal which exists in electronic form only.

The beauty of this approach is that APC become irrelevant (or very low) and papers are free on both sides: for the readers and for the authors. Such a kind of journal is currently missing in mechanical engineering. It should be set up as early as possible to avoid always increasing publication costs in other journals.

** 2. Scope of the epijournal **

This is not defined yet and should be properly discussed by the community. It could be a wide-scope epijournal (let's call it "Bulletin of Mechanics") with various incarnations such as Bulletin of Mechanics: Vibration or Bulletin of Mechanics: Robotics. It could also be a simple epijournal with a fairly narrow scope. A poll is opened to have a better overview of the community's desires. Let us also mention that more than one epijournal in mechanics could be created.

To be discussed at https://www.loomio.org/d/GWjeCbPZ/scope-of-the-journal

** 3. Review procedure **

A high quality review process is mandatory. The most common process of reviewing (public authors with blind reviewers) can be kept with various enhancements. The dominant review procedure in engineering is "blind reviewers". This has drawbacks with many limited and unuseful reviews. It could be complemented by a forum of discussion attached to every paper bringing new insight if needed even after a paper has been accepted.

To be discussed at https://www.loomio.org/d/oDR6gPIy/reviewing-process

** 4. Editorial management **

To be written

To be discussed at https://www.loomio.org/d/Pi9dqfRb/editorial-management

** 5. Sustainable science **

The epijournal in mechanics could come with fairly strict rules on how algorithms and data sets should be shared. Many papers currently accepted in engineering (numerical methods or experimental investigations) are virtually impossible to reproduce. This is no more acceptable in the light of sustainable science.

** 6. Submission to an epijournal **

The community will be responsible for maintaining the epijournal in a good shape. This involves two main requirements: (1) the willingness to be part of the editorial team for a limited amount of time and (2) the willingness to publish in the epijournal as a replacement of standard journals even though impact factors and other indexation will be missing at the beginning. This is the responsibility of senior researchers to support epijournals as they are less sensitive to evaluation than junior researchers.

** 7. Ethics **

To be written

To be discussed at
https://www.loomio.org/d/7VBQFN05/ethics

** 8. Conclusion **

The community is fully responsible for the always increasing costs of publication. Sadly, the community performs two main activities for free: writing and evaluating but pays undecent amounts of money in publishing (either through Golden Access APC or academic libraries subscriptions): this is mainly because the community highly relies on evaluation metrics (impact factors) attached to every journal and smartly maintained by publishers. Via lobbying activities, publishers are currently trying to convince researchers that the quality of the published papers will eventually decrease if they are pushed outside the loop. This is certainly an unjustified statement and this is now time to move towards a model where the whole process (writing, evaluating, publishing) is supervised by the researchers themselves in order to keep the costs very low. Instead, taxes will nicely be reoriented towards hiring more professors and researchers.

DU

Poll Created Thu 6 Jul 2017 9:00AM

Should we create an epijournal in mechanics? Closed Fri 1 Sep 2017 4:41PM

Results

Results Option % of points Voters
Agree 100.0% 24 VA DU SN FG HK S EH Y LS MJ CT AT L JR DU NF KN MG S NC
Abstain 0.0% 0  
Disagree 0.0% 0  
Block 0.0% 0  
Undecided 0% 60 MM AN SO MP SG NB BR GP JB EC R J GL ED MP AB L MCL J M

24 of 84 people have participated (28%)

DU

Poll Created Thu 6 Jul 2017 9:00AM

Should we create an epijournal in mechanics? Closed Fri 1 Sep 2017 4:41PM

Results

Results Option % of points Voters
Agree 100.0% 24 VA DU SN FG HK S EH Y LS MJ CT AT L JR DU NF KN MG S NC
Abstain 0.0% 0  
Disagree 0.0% 0  
Block 0.0% 0  
Undecided 0% 60 MM AN SO MP SG NB BR GP JB EC R J GL ED MP AB L MCL J M

24 of 84 people have participated (28%)

VAY

Vladislav A. Yastrebov Fri 7 Jul 2017 10:19AM

It can be added in Section 1, that there are already major journals in geophysics run by AGU did implemented author-pays paradigm:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010EO500005/abstract

VAY

Vladislav A. Yastrebov Fri 7 Jul 2017 10:28AM

Concerning the phrasing of "strict rules on how algorithms and data sets should be shared" -> I fully agree that data should be shared, concerning the algorithms (or rather computational codes) everything is much more complicated, if it is a small python script, it is easy to share but if a new algorithm is implemented in a huge software, it would be hard for reader to understand the code even if it shared, without even talking about trying to recompile the whole project on the platform the reader works...