At the workshop in Milan in October 2016 we discussed the possibility to start an open energy journal. Here were the main points we mentioned (wiki-editable):
Main features of journal
- All articles are open access (preferably CC)
- All research results are based on publicly accessible data and code (preferably open licence)
- High scientific quality (guaranteed by reputation of editors and editorial board, to distinguish from spam open journals)
- Non-profit (hopefully running costs could be covered by donations, otherwise small fee for article processing)
Other journals from other fields to serve as model
- Prestigious open-access arXiv overlay journal for mathematics: http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/
Necessary steps to form a journal
- clearly-defined topics
- reputable editor-in-chief, editors and editorial board
- journal name
- journal website
- software to handle the processing of papers and referee reports etc.
- formal aspects like ISSN, DOIs
- perhaps the hardest bit: getting it recognised by university hiring committees, Scopus, Web of Science and other indices
These steps are expanded below.
Topics of the journal (please add suggestions)
Similar to Energy/Applied Energy /Renewable Energy/Energy Policy/Energy Journal
- energy system modelling
- power system modelling
- energy economics
- energy policy
- energy model descriptions
- energy data descriptions
Potential professors for editorial board
Potential criteria: known to support open science, at least 5 publications in existing competitor journals (see above), (full?) professor? (possibly difficult for UK where professorship comes later in career)
Rather than putting names online, please email suggestions to @tom_brown.
Journal name suggestions
- Open Energy (simple, descriptive, short)
- Open Energy Journal (simple, descriptive, short)
Software
- Scholastica - platform for journals, fee of about 20 E per paper to manage the revision process for the editorial board, used by Discrete Analysis
- Open Journal Systems - free software, also has hosted solutions for $850 per year
Other issues
Is it worth starting a new journal given the decision of the EU that all research should be accessible in future?
=> the formulation is too weak to be sure that this will be implemented.
Alternative: not all papers are completely open; those which do not want open access or do not publish open data/code have to pay a publication fee (which can be a part of the financing of the journal)
Alternative model: example of SCOAP3 - selection of libraries pay for all papers in a given journal to be open access; no costs for authors
Separate project:
reviewed Datasets with DOI; you can have DOIs for Datasets from “Zenodo” but this Data is not (peer) reviewed.
=> ToDo: ask climate modellers if their Datasets are reviewed and if they are reviewed - how it works
References/Background reading
- Tim Gowers blog posts on Elsevier
- Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? - Grauniad
- Grötschel, Martin (29 June 2016). Elektronisches Publizieren, Open Access, Open Science und ähnliche Träume — Preprint (Electronic publishing, open access, open science and similar dreams — Preprint) (PDF) (in German). Retrieved 2016-09-15. Persistent identifier: urn:nbn:de:kobv:b4-opus4-25132 License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany.