Last week, PubMed Central became the primary and sole publisher of eLife content, putting its competition with publishers, its manipulation of PubMed indexing criteria, its competition with publishing technology companies, and its clear OA bias into stark relief.
Funder-sponsored journals raise important conflict of interest questions, and may be fundamentally untenable in an industry that requires independent third-party evaluation of research reports.
eLife is beginning to accept papers, but is it proper for them to promote papers they’ve accepted without having published the final versions? What will their approach be to media embargoes?
A new open access publishing service, Peerj, has been started by Peter Binfield, formerly the publisher of PLoS ONE. This augurs a price war among author-pays OA services.
eLife asserts that professional editors create more harm than good. But how do we know that? How can we know that? Or is this just an emotional argument based on anecdote and conjecture rather than fact?
Can a new open access journal that relies on working scientists to oversee its review process compete with other top-tier journals that employ professional editors?