A journey in Open Science: Peer Community In, Peer Community Journal and DAFNEE database

The scientific publishing market is widely known to be dysfunctional. The average publishing price is an order of magnitude above the real cost. This anomaly is notably due to the power of large publishing groups with high profit margins. Yet not all scientific journals are economically equivalent. Scientists are not always well informed about the complexity of journal business models, and rarely take this criterion into account when deciding to interact with a journal as an author, reviewer or editor. Supporting academia-friendly journals, though, is a way to contribute to a fairer scientific publishing system. In this talk we will present The DAFNEE database which offers a list of 398 non-profit, learned society, museum or university-associated journals relevant to ecology and evolutionary biology. The database includes Peer Community In (PCI). PCI is a non-profit association that creates communities of researchers who evaluate (via peer-reviews) and recommend preprints in their scientific field. Each PCI is a group of several hundred recommenders acting as editors who recommend preprints on the basis of peer-review to make them complete, reliable and citable articles, without the need to publish them in "traditional" journals. PCI is free of charge to authors and readers. When a recommender recommends a preprint, the preprint itself remains on the preprint server where it was posted by the authors and can be submitted to a journal or published in "Peer Community Journal", a diamond open access journal launched in 2021. The first PCI was launched in 2017: PCI Evolutionary Biology and there are now 16 thematic PCIs. The PCI initiative has won the LIBER 2020 award for innovation in libraries from the European League of Research Libraries and is supported by around 100 public research institutions such as CNRS, The Imperial College, University of Paris-Saclay, University of Oxford or INRAE.

Denis Bourguet and Thomas Guillemaud are the co-founders of PCI. They are senior scientists at the French national research institute in agronomy and environment (Inrae) where they study the evolutionary biology of pest insect species. Denis works in Montpellier, France, and Thomas works in Sophia Antipolis, France. Nicolas Galtier is a CNRS researcher, currently head of Institute of Evolutionary Sciences Montpellier. He created the DAFNEE project/database, which  aims at informing scientists on the business model of eco-evo journals and encouraging the use of ethical media.

[Host: Gabriel Marais, BIOPOLIS board]