Theme Five: Octopus, a new way to circulate your research ideas and results, claim precedence and accelerate research.
The theme of Open Access week this year is “Community over commercialization”.
Across the next seven days, the Research and Scholarly Communications Team in the University Library Services will share with you some initiatives that aim to transform scholarly publishing and move away from the for-profit publishing that has largely dominated academic publishing.
Octopus is a platform, funded by UKRI, where researchers can publish primary research – things like hypotheses, full data, analyses, code, and reviews.
Octopus has been created to address many of the challenges faced by the research community. For instance: barriers to sharing research; incentivizing all research outputs, not just journal articles; addressing biases, whether they’re to do with the prioritizing of ‘positive’ findings, institutional bias, or those faced by non-English speakers; and improving the global research community by facilitating a more collaborative research culture.
Octopus aims to remove what they call the ‘hierarchical problems’ and ‘human gatekeepers’ that can inhibit new researchers and instead advocate for a more sustainable peer review system where authors are incentivised to publish fewer but better publications, and where reviewers are credited and rewarded for performing this important task.
A really positive aspect of this platform is how it aims to address the current research culture where individuals are often competitive rather than collaborative. By allowing researchers to publish their work at early stages, the emphasis shifts from ‘proving a hypothesis’ to sharing a good hypothesis with the community.
Everything published on Octopus is time-stamped and registered to the authors, which should alleviate any worries about author’s having their ideas stolen.
It’ll be great to see how this service develops, and whether it can move beyond its current science-centric bias. Anything that begins to address the demonstrable shortcomings of the current, unsustainable, publishing model has to be a step in the right direction.