Alternative Publishing Platforms: An Analysis

Information Industry News

Lutz, J. F., Sondervan, J., Edig, X. van, Freeman, A., Kramer, B., & Rosenkrantz, C. H. (2023). Knowledge Exchange Analysis Report on Alternative Publishing Platforms. Alternative Publishing Platforms. https://doi.org/10.21428/996e2e37.0eafc1a8

This analysis report follows up on the release of a scoping paper in 2022, an overview of what the authors saw as being “ a vibrant ecosystem of so-called alternative open access publishing platforms has emerged, many of which aim to tackle some of the perceived issues with the journal publishing system other than cost. Platforms represent a move away from the traditional journal as an organising principle. These platforms might differ from traditional scholarly journals in a number of ways, including publication process, governance and underlying infrastructure.” The alternative focus was more on equitable publishing models, iterative publishing workflows, quality control, etc.

Late in 2022 and continuing throughout 2023, data was collected from a spectrum of these platforms to gain a better sense of available options as well as their focus and strengths in order to gain a better sense of the existing landscape. While those doing this analysis were primarily based in Europe, responses to their survey were returned from an international body of platforms. The following quote from the Methodology segment of the report gives an indication of respondents:

45 platforms answered the question and a majority of platforms said they were designed to cover all disciplines: 29 platforms (or 64% of all answers) answered ‘All’ to this question. Of the 29 who said that they served ‘all’ disciplines (at least in principle), 7 were author-facing: ScienceOpen, ResearchEquals, PubPub, Peer Community In, F1000 Research, Humanities Commons, Octopus. The rest were tech stacks or journal hosting platforms. All six of those who said they served both social sciences and humanities were journal hosting platforms.

The platform functions that were touched on included registration, certification, dissemination, and archiving.

The report concludes that there is limited innovation seen thus far in these platforms, although there might be some alternative means of handling peer review by a few of those responding to the survey. Nor is much seen in terms of shifts in formats of the scholarly output. In their concluding remarks, the authors indicate that the primary difference in these alternative publishing platforms is that they are non-profit. The non-profit groups continue to perform most publishing activities in traditional ways. 

The 2022 scoping document may be found here.