Re: [AUDITORY] preprints, community journals, and the carbon footprint of hearing healthcare

Hi Jan-Willem

Nice to hear from you and read this interesting message. About pre-prints, I can share here some thoughts and experiences

I had a meeting yesterday (coincidence) with people from eLife about their platform https://sciety.org/ and I got a better idea about how it operates.

In this platform, you can check if preprints have been evaluated and read the reviews

As an example in hearing sciences, you can check this article: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.05.24.493204 which has been already published in eLife.

As you said, eLife is not the only one shifting paradigm, pubpeer and others are doing interesting things. Also F1000 follows a new publishing model but not based on preprints.

What you refer as community-driven peer review I think is the same concept as peer-review groups: https://sciety.org/groups https://blog.sciety.org/sciety-groups/. Besides eLife, there are some peer-review groups in specific fields (e.g. neuroscience https://sciety.org/groups/pci-neuroscience/about)

It would be great to create a peer-review group in Hearing Sciences, I would be very interested in collaborate and participate of this initiatives.

About community-driven journal, I guess you mean “diamond open access journals” which are often own by an university (e.g. oxford university press) and there are no article processing charges for authors and no subscription.

Coalition S has recently (last year) made available a report about that: https://www.coalition-s.org/diamond-unearthed-shining-light-on-community-driven-open-access-publishing/

In the journal where I am editor (https://journal.auditio.com ) we are actually trying to get funding to make the journal “diamond” again. Our APCs are very low (150€ if you are not a member of the society, 0€ if you are), but we would like to be sustainable in the long run and, at the same time, remove completely the APCs. That’s particularly challenging for us because we translate every single article to either English or Spanish and that is not cheap. However, AUDITIO is owned by the Spanish Society of Audiology so I am unsure in which category it should be.

If you are interested in diamond OA journals, I took a quick look here: https://zenodo.org/record/4562828#.Y2TkV3bP2Uk but I did not find any “auditory” one there, but I know a couple of local ones that are not in the list if you are interested.

Best wishes

Raul Sanchez-Lopez

From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Wasmann, Jan-Willem
Sent: Thursday, 3 November 2022 11.17
To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [AUDITORY] preprints, community journals, and the carbon footprint of hearing healthcare

Dear list,

Via this thread, I’d like to touch upon preprints, community journals, and the carbon footprint of hearing healthcare. If you are in a hurry, please skip this message TLDR. Otherwise, it would be great to tap into your collective wisdom.

In recent years, preprints have become increasingly popular to increase open access. Some preprints get cited a lot (e.g., https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.04.463034v2.abstract > 300 times). And especially in AI, some preprints will probably never get peer-reviewed. A well-known example is:

Saon G, Kurata G, Sercu T, Audhkhasi K, Thomas S, Dimitriadis D, et al. English Conversational Telephone Speech Recognition by Humans and Machines. ArXiv170302136 Cs (2017). Available online at: http://arxiv.org/ abs/1703.02136

There are multiple platforms to use. The most well-known is Biorxiv or Arxiv. But also OSF or Zenodo. I have used OSF since it has a broad scope and allows you to upload projects. It provides a preprint DOI, which remains the same if you update the preprint at a later stage. Also, you can link the DOI of the final peer-reviewed version of your paper. Zenodo can also be used for projects (data+paper), but every update will create a new DOI.

Q1a How do you regard the status of preprints?

Q1b Is it a missed opportunity if one decides not to go for a peer-review process of a preprint?

Another new development is open community-driven peer review procedures. I found examples in other fields; see below.

Q2a Do you know of examples of community-driven peer review in hearing sciences?

Q2b Can you recommend a community-driven journal?

Many scientists have responded to the new transparent consultative peer-review procedure by eLife (https://elifesciences.org/about/peer-review). This might be an exciting venue for those looking for new ways of peer review. However, the charges amount to $2000. The charges for open access can be enormous (Nature $7000?) and a barrier for early career researchers.

So far, I have found the following examples of community journal/peer review processes:

Pubpeer (The PubPeer Foundation is a California-registered public-benefit corporation with 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in the United States. The overarching goal of the Foundation is to improve the quality of scientific research by enabling innovative approaches for community interaction. The bylaws of the Foundation establish pubpeer.com as a service run for the benefit of its readers and commenters, who create its content. Our current focus is maintaining and developing the PubPeer online platform for post-publication peer review. https://pubpeer.com/static/about_)

Here you can find our preprint on that platform

https://pubpeer.com/publications/AE2235B5F9F35577B977F87F9834B8

It looks like an easy platform to use. It can be used for creating special issues/collections (see https://pubpeer.com/publications/peeriodicals). At the start, I had trouble registering using my name/institution. An anonymous account was created quickly. Currently, PubPeer is used for post-publication review. I heard that in other disciplines, Pubpeer is used to flag suspicious publications (read fraud).

Another exciting example is ReviewCommons (Review Commons provides authors with a Refereed Preprint, which includes the authors’ manuscript, reports from a single round of peer review and the authors’ response. These Refereed Preprints are transferred on the author’s behalf to bioRxiv. The most recently-completed Review Commons peer-reviews are listed below, with the most recently posted reviews at the top. https://www.reviewcommons.org/authors/)

Unfortunately, auditory sciences and audiology are not within the scope of the peer-review initiative.

The last example I know of is NBDT (NBDT is a community journal. If your handling editor sees it as in-scope it is appropriate. Editors are instructed to only handle papers that they consider running as a journal club paper for their own lab https://nbdt.scholasticahq.com/for-authors). It’s interesting to see their procedures, including “Can you propose reviewers? Short answer: no. Long answer: we did our own statistical analysis on a private dataset and have concluded that it produces huge undesirable biases without leading to better reviews.”

The Carbon Footprint of Hearing Healthcare

With Jan de Laat, I have just written a perspective paper/blog about the Carbon Footprint of Hearing Healthcare (see version 2, Preprint DOI 10.31219/osf.io/3sj5u). The hearing tracker will publish the content today/tomorrow as a blog. So far, we have extracted information from ESG reports and our contacts within the hearing healthcare industry. Ideally, we would like to organize a community-driven review process to collect comments from engineers, industry, sustainability officers, authors from ESG reports, and scientists.

Q3a What would be a suitable platform to organize and publish a community-driven review process of a perspective paper about carbon footprint in hearing healthcare?

Another ambition could be to create a carbon footprint tracker of hearing healthcare by annually updating table 1 from the preprint, including an assessment of whether climate ambitions by industry were updated and achieved.

Q3b What would be a suitable approach to annually monitor the carbon footprint of the hearing healthcare industry? (Maybe not peer-reviewed?)

Please let me know what you think is the best community journal for auditory sciences. Don't hesitate to let us know if you believe opinion pieces shouldn’t get into the review process. For me publishing this perspective paper is a low-risk experiment. If it goes well, I will consider submitting an original research manuscript.

Thank you for your time. I am looking forward to your responses and advice.

Best regards,

Jan-Willem Wasmann

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