I think what you're doing is great; I would love to see a shift in how academic literature is shared and I think we are long overdue for the modernization that has already been readily accepted in other fields.

Unfortunately, I find that these academic journals all appear to suffer from low impact factors currently. What would you say to a budding scientist--who's career depends upon publishing in "high quality" journals--that would encourage them to publish in your journal?

Thanks!

Alberto_Pepe

Co-Founder | Authorea

Hi Jenna- I understand your concern: no matter how open and innovative you may want to be, at the end of the day, as a scientist, you are required to publish in "high quality" journals, because that is the only way to get tenure, grants, and recognition in your community. I think that in the next few years we will see new metrics and methods to assess a scientist' contribution (metrics that go way beyond a journal's impact factor and/or number of citations). But, while we wait for that to happen, what can you do TODAY? Two things come to mind:

(1) deposit a pre-print or post-print of your article in an institutional, disciplinary (or any other) repository that is indexed by scholarly search engines. A pre-print is the version immediately prior to what is published in a journal (and post-print immediately after). Even if you lose your copyright on the published version, the pre-print and post-print versions are YOURS. By depositing an open version of your work, you are giving the entire world open access to your work (and you and your work also become more visible!). If you write an article on Authorea, all you have to do is make it public and it will be a pre-print!

(2) if you have datasets and code associated with your work, publish them with the paper. Publishing the data and code behind your papers/images make your work more likely to be reproduced (and again, they make you and your work more visible!). Most journals today do not allow you to deposit data and code with your paper. Putting a link to a dataset in your paper is not enough because those links die with time. There are tools like Figshare, Zenodo and Dataverse that allow you to deposit data/code and get a DOI for it. In Authorea, you can take even a step further and include the data and code inside your paper. My dream is that the paper of the future will make data and code first class citizens.