Trends in Publication

I predict three key areas of change within the next decade

Open Access Journals as Standard

I would say the biggest change over the next ten years would be the amount of fully open access journals, which would completely overtake the amount of ‘pay to view’ journals, and may come standard. There is growing pressure for scientists to publish open access due to them typically using public funding. As well as being fully open access, publishing full raw data (much more detailed methods used) would become standard, which can benefit science due to collaborations amongst other areas of science and meta studies. Most UK universities are increasing their funds for open access fees.

Publishing Pre-Prints as Standard

Relating to the above are the publication of pre-prints. At present only a hand few of publishers ask for authors to submit pre-prints to such sites as BioRxiv. There are also some researchers that still believe that others would take their ideas or their research if they publish pre-prints. However, within the next ten year this will become a mandatory request from publishers as well as to become the new norm for researchers. Feedback from other researchers can only benefit authors to improve their methods and data analysis etc.

Publishing Negative Results

Another change is the publication of negative results, method optimisation papers or papers demonstrating the strength of other works. At present there are very little incentives to publish negatives results. The culture at present is to publish positive results which can bias science. A negative results in itself is a result and if a researcher can see if this method or hypothesis had a negative result, they can only benefit form that knowledge. The other issue in science in general is repeatability. Some fields struggle to get the same results as published works, this must improve to develop science.

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