Maybe the real open source is the friends we made along the way

Is the exposure of one of several hundred journals and the abuse of overextended volunteers for peer-review worth several thousand dollars of your grant dollars to a glorified web hosting service?

An experiment in real-time self- publishing research

I’ve been rather vocal about my dissatisfaction with the modern publishing industry. It seems to me that paying several thousand dollars to publish our experiments isn’t really worth the resultant exposure returned. Now acknowledging that this could be sour grapes at a reasonably low H-index, I nevertheless think that the move towards open access hasn’t translated into better access for the public, but rather the mass bilking of the scientific community, and the taxpayer, for a sub-par service. What really broke me was the rise of preprints.

These non-peer reviewed first drafts provide citable facsimiles of the traditional publication, but fail to die when superseded, inputting more noise into the system that is already cacophonous. This is my attempt to put my money where my mouth is. Inspired by such folks as Randy Oliver, Andrew Heiss, and most importantly, Luke Hearon (who challenged me to act), here I will attempt to describe the projects upon which I’m working, with implementable code and an explanation of my reasoning. These entries will then be traced through to their final publication (if any) in a kind of version control basis. The format will likely be messy for awhile as I get to grips with this project, but stay tuned and ask questions! That’s the point.

The tools I’m using

• Quarto
• RStudio
• Github
• Stack Overflow