Open Science with Public Infrastructure

Open science is a hot topic, much like open access was a couple of decades ago. The open access movement began with the goal of providing free access to research output (particularly publicly-funded research), but the disaster was epic. Instead of achieving its goal, it ended up merely shifting the publishing business model, where authors pay instead of readers – often at a higher cost. There is a looming danger that open science will follow a similar path, resulting in a market of profitable services that cater little to the true interests of science and society. However, all is not lost, and we need not passively surrender to the commercial interests of publishing houses at the expense of the ideals of science (our job and sometimes passion) and the needs of society. Solutions exist here and now, and, unlike in other fields, their adoption and promotion depends solely on the academic community. In this talk, Perakakis will present the important innovations implemented by the journal of the Spanish Society for Experimental Psychology: Psicológica. Using this example and others, he will demonstrate why owning the scholarly infrastructure is crucial and what we can all do to help advance a new generation of scholarly communication focused exclusively on benefiting science and society.

Pandelis Perakakis is an Associate Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, researching sports neurophysiology and affective dynamics. Early in his research career, he was struck by the extent of science's reliance on commercial journals, anonymous reviews, and exorbitant prices for accessing publicly funded research results. Consequently, he decided to dedicate a significant portion of his academic efforts to researching and promoting alternative publication models. In 2010, he co-authored the article "Natural Selection of Academic Papers," which proposed a scientific communication model based on the public infrastructure of institutional repositories. In 2012, he participated in the founding of Open Scholar (https://openscholar.org.uk), an international organization of volunteer academics dedicated to developing models and infrastructure for more efficient, open, and transparent scientific communication. Perakakis has been involved in various international expert groups aimed at redesigning the scientific publication model and has delivered invited lectures at numerous European universities and libraries. In 2015, he led a project funded by the European Commission to develop the first open review module for institutional repositories. Since 2016, he has collaborated with the "Confederation of Open Access Repositories" (COAR) to develop a sustainable model of scientific publication and evaluation based on public infrastructure. As of 2022, he serves as the managing editor and coordinator for the transition of Psicológica, the journal of the Spanish Society for Experimental Psychology, to an innovative publication model utilizing public infrastructure.