Today, I received an invitation to review a preprint on QEIOS.com. As a researcher, I value a lot my activity as referee in scientific journals. The peer-review process is painful but necessary to scientific research. Nonetheless, I also receive this kind of invitations every day from predatory journals. These invitations usually end-up in my SPAM folder, and so did this email from QEIOS.
As you may know, Qeios is an open-access, open peer review, academic publishing platform. Publishing is free, and it has no editors who make accept/reject decisions. Instead, the validity of the papers is determined solely by the reviewers, who communicate publicly with the authors after publication. We believe that this post-publication peer review system, which allows all relevant peers to participate, is more effective in highlighting robust research and controlling the dissemination of flawed works. Good research is praised as it deserves, while flawed research is given a low rating, preventing misinformation from spreading between journals after a few reviews behind the scenes. Most importantly, since Qeios does not have editors who make accept/reject decisions, the peer feedback provided is exclusively meant to offer authors suggestions for improving their papers and informing readers about the validity of the works. Furthermore, peer reviews on Qeios:
- are posted alongside the articles and get citable DOIs, boosting reviewers' visibility among other things;
- are made available under a CC BY 4.0 license, meaning that you retain the copyright on your hard work;
- are indexed in Google Scholar, and you can add them to your Publons / Web of Science and ORCID profiles.
For some reason, I decided to actually read this email and was genuinely interested by their original approach:
- It is an open journal, hence no fee to read the "published" articles
- It does not require the authors to pay to make their articles open access. This can be several thousand euros in traditional academic journals
- It offers an open review process, more on that later
- It does not have any editors (?!)
The journal QEIOS, or should I say the platform QEIOS, is marketed as the perfect alternative to traditional academic journals, which do have a lot of short-comings:
- Some journals (but not all) are owned by a few big companies (Springer, Elsevier...) which put a huge part of the scientific production behind a very high paywall. This hinders the ability of low-income countries to access and contribute to cutting-edge science
- These journals are also very tacky about copyrights and may protect their rights very aggressively
- Some paper also require researchers to PAY to publish, which is outrageous
- The peer-review process is opaque and still imperfect. Notably, it is very asymmetrical, in the sense that it is not a double-blind review process. The anonymity of the referee is guaranteed but not the identity of the authors who may suffer (or benefit) from the reputation of their University/country or their own reputation.
How it is in Physics
Fortunately for me, the physics community has developed throughout the years an ecosystem to soften these problems:
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First, my community usually publishes in friendlier journals that are not owned by these companies. For instance, Physical Review is owned by the American Physics Society (APS), and JCAP/JHEP are owned by IOP publishing, a public company and SISSA, an academic institution. Still, NATURE and SCIENCE have an unmatched reputation, but this is not everyday research.
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Second, we have the prepublication platform arxiv.org, which was launched in 1991! In my field, all the papers are first made public on this platform under a very flexible license. After a few weeks of collecting feedback from the community, the articles are then sent to actual journals for peer-review and publication. Most journals recognize arxiv's license and allow you to update the version on arxiv AFTER publication. Hence, the version on arxiv is most often identical to the published version but free to read! Arxiv has become so mainstream that journals offer to fetch your article on arxiv when you submit it for publication! From experience, when I receive an invitation to review an article and it is not on arxiv, it is not a good sign. Most often, it shows that the authors fear the feedback from the community and are not 100% certain about their work.
My opinion
I am very grateful that I can work in such a good environment compared to other fields of research, but this is not necessarily the experience of my fellow researchers in other fields. So can QEIOS be a good alternative? Although very interesting, I have three main concerns about QEIOS:
No human editors, AI editor!
That is my first red flag. In this journal, there are no human editors. An article can be refereed by volunteers or an home-made AI selects and contacts experts on the subject. This is of course made very clear to the potential authors, who can see this as a guarantee that they will not be discriminated against by some all-powerful editor.
However, this information is not communicated to the potential reviewers, and for good reasons! My time is precious, and reviewing an article is a very time-consuming and ungrateful activity. I do it because I think this is important and because I know there are humans in the process with whom I can discuss. Ultimately if there is a problem, I know that a human (the editor) will step in and engage his responsibility and credibility to solve the conflict and act as an impartial third-party.
Here, not only there is no human third-party to solve conflicts and to select referees properly, but nobody can be held accountable in case of wrongdoing. Who takes the responsibility to retract the paper if contains errors or worse, if it is manipulated?
To the contrary, I think that having human editors is perhaps the only added-value of traditional journals. This helps a lot with the credibility of the journal, and therefore with the credibility of the published research.
Marketing and business plan (€24.99/month)
Second red flag, there is a monthly subscription to help researchers with the publication process. To be more precise, quoting their website
On Qeios, you can publish for free if your articles attract spontaneous reviewers and already meet language and field standards. Or, for just €24.99/month, our Pro plan ensures all your articles are sent to peers for feedback via our AI-assisted invitation process, offering unlimited publishing possibilities.
This subscription also unlocks additional services such as "Secure positive reviews with Grammar Correction", "Multiply readership with Custom Cover Images" and "Social Media Promotion".
Rather than being a scientific journal, I think it is safe to say that QEIOS is actually a service to help you write scientific articles that are more likely to be accepted in scientific journals or to attract attention.
Note that the use of AI as an editor now makes a total sense now, QEIOS is actually a start-up that sells AI services: grammar correction, probably AI generated cover images, AI-invitations of referees...
This whole package is coated into several layers: it is branded as an open scientific journal, or as a social platform between researchers around the globe to discuss papers. Don't get me wrong, it is doing both those things relatively well but this is not what they sell. Quoting their Publishing Policy:
The financial resources needed to operate our platform come entirely from our Pro plan subscriptions. Qeios is not accepting any kind of direct or indirect advertising. No ads or promotional content is allowed anywhere on our platform. Furthermore, Qeios does not collect any personal/user information to sell it to, or share it with, third parties for advertising or any other commercial purposes.
No ads or selling of personal data (that's a good point), but they make money exclusively from selling AI services. And the researchers contributing time to QEIOS are giving all the more value to these services for free.
Open review process
Finally, the open review process. I actually have mixed feelings about this. The world of research is certainly not pretty, and a lot of prejudice can have an effect behind close doors during the publication process in scientific journals. Some researchers can be discriminated against because of their origins, affiliations and their previous works. To the contrary, famous researchers may have an easier time getting published due to their reputations. But I don't think that a fully open review process is the solution.
I think that hiding the identity of the referee is a prerequisite to give a fair and impartial review of some article. More than once, I had to step up and contradict famous researchers in my field. I don't think you it would have been possible, or at least as simple, if I knew that giving a bad review to a paper could cost me an academic position later. This means that postdocs and all the non-permanent researchers would be strongly discouraged to give fair (and bad) reviews to more senior researchers.
Additionally, referee reports are often not pretty and may show that, as an author, you made terrible and embarrassing mistakes. This is always hard to swallow but that's research. But this is something else to expose someone's mistakes in front of the whole community. It does happen from time to time in traditional academic journals (type "comment on" in arxiv and have some popcorn), but it is rather rare and usually because someone made outrageous claims to begin with. On QEIOS, this happens all the time, and may subject the authors to online harassment. I don't think it is healthy for anyone.
To the contrary, I think we should tend more towards a double-blind review process, where the identity of the authors is obfuscated. Of course, you always end-up identifying the authors based on the topic of the paper and the bibliography, but at least you don't start reading the paper with prejudices.
Conclusion
With all that said, I think it is clear that QEIOS is not for me. It responds to a problem I do not have, I do not like their business model, the AI bullshit and I don't think an open review process is good for quality research. I will not publish nor review for QEIOS.
That being said, I think QEIOS still has some added value for authors, but not as a scientific journal. It is a platform designed for researchers to publish preprints, create connections and collect advice. It is a company that sells a service, mostly AI but also free work done by volunteer reviewers. Note that your subscription is not used to pay the "human researchers" you'd expect in a scientific journal (editors, referees), but to pay the cost of running a social media platform and AI services.