Earlier this month, a new journal based in Portland launched online with its first set of published scientific articles. But the Stacks Journal isn’t your typical academic journal, according to its founder, David Green, an ecologist who previously worked at OSU’s Institute for Natural Resources. He says that it removes some of the main obstacles associated with traditional academic publishing by being more affordable and available to anyone online. And it offers an alternative to the traditional model of peer review by having reviewers work together to provide feedback on a scientific paper and vote on whether it should be published. The process can be completed in just a few weeks compared to a year or more for an article to be published in a traditional journal.
Green joins us to share more, along with Phoebe Parker-Shames, a wildlife ecologist at The Presidio Trust in San Francisco who recently authored a study published in Stacks Journal about the impact of cannabis cultivation on wildlife in southern Oregon.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. There is a new scientific journal in the world. The Stacks Journal is based in Portland. It launched online with its first set of articles earlier this month. It was created by David Green, an ecologist who previously worked at OSU’s Institute for Natural Resources. He says Stacks Journal removed some of the big obstacles associated with traditional academic publishing. He aimed to create a journal that’s affordable for researchers and free for readers with a more transparent system of peer review.
Green joins us now, along with Phoebe Parker-Shames, a wildlife ecologist at The Presidio Trust in San Francisco. She wrote one of the first papers published in Stacks Journal. It focuses on the impact of cannabis cultivation on wildlife in Southern Oregon. It’s based on research she did for her dissertation. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
David Green: Great. Thanks for having me.
Miller: So David, first. You set out to create an alternative to publishing in traditional academic journals. What’s wrong with the current system? How does it work? Because the vast majority of us listening right now have never tried to publish in an academic journal. So, what is the current system like?
Green: Well, Stacks Journal has really redesigned the way that peer review happens, because there have been so many problems in the system. Peer review, for those of you that don’t know, is the foundation of the scientific method. It’s the last part of the science. It’s where you invite your colleagues to evaluate your research and make sure that it’s ready to go live, and that other people can then build off of it. But we’ve seen a lot of problems with peer review. And this is actually really important because, for our society, when we think about medicines, when we think about the efforts to change climate change, all of that research is built off of peer review.
What we’re seeing is that the peer review system is breaking down, and there’s quite a bit of research – the estimates are 50 to 70% of research is actually not getting published. And this is important research and important information that needs to get out there. What we see is that there are a lot of scientific journals that are starting to weaken or even circumvent peer review in efforts to get research out quicker. But that’s making it harder for us to know what kind of research we can trust. So Stacks Journal has really redesigned peer review to bring trust back to the peer review process and help get that research out.
Miller: How does peer review work, traditionally?
Green: In traditional journals, peer review happens in total isolation. When you submit your article to go to peer review, there’s an editor that tries to find two reviewers, and those reviewers will evaluate your research, often totally alone, even in isolation from each other.
Miller: These are people who theoretically are supposed to have some familiarity with the realm of research that they’re reviewing?
Green: Absolutely, right. But I think the problem right now is that journals are having a harder and harder time finding reviewers, because it’s typically a very thankless task. Being a peer reviewer is often seen as just service to the community and it actually can take a lot of time. In Stacks Journal, we’ve designed a peer review process to be something that people actually want to do, so instead of working in isolation, our peer review process is collaborative. Whereas, in traditional journals you get two reviewers, we average about six reviewers and those reviewers come together to collaborate on the review process. They can see each other’s comments, they can agree with them, they can disagree with them, and they really discuss the science to create better science.
We’ve had so many people go through this process at this point. And it’s been really interesting because some of the feedback we’ve had is that it’s actually been really fun and refreshing – which are two words that I don’t think I’ve ever heard people use to describe the process of peer review.
Miller: It is ironic that, if part of the problem you’re trying to solve is that people don’t want to take part in traditional peer review – there’s a shortage of them – that part of your fix was to add more people to the process. It’s a little bit of a surprise.
Green: Totally. What we’ve learned is that when you make the process energizing and engaging, that people actually want to do it. And we’ve had reviewers come back time and time again to review multiple articles for the Stacks, because when they do this, they actually learn from each other. A lot of them liken it to these grad student or grad school seminars that they had been to, where you’re discussing the science. And this is something that we’re all trained to do. You know, we love talking about the latest research. We love trying to understand how it fits into our realm of knowledge.
Miller: But they’re still unpaid?
Green: They’re still unpaid. But in the Stacks Journal, we give them the opportunity to be listed as a collaborator on the article. Being a peer reviewer is really important work, it’s how you help advance your field. It’s how you help make a difference and make an impact. So when you are peer reviewing, you’re actually a collaborator. You’re helping to improve that research, helping to fix some things that might need a little bit of adjusting. So in Stacks Journal, we really wanted to give credit for that, whereas right now it’s a total thankless task. So when reviewers review for us, they can also opt in to be listed as a collaborator, and that gets listed just below the line of authors on the article.
Miller: What obstacles or experiences did you have yourself as a researcher when you’ve been involved in trying to publish your work?
Green: My background is in research. I’ve been doing it for quite some time now and I’ve seen firsthand how the system is starting to break down. And for us, what we see is that it can take a very long time to get your research out. A few years ago, I had just wrapped up some important research on wildfires here in the Pacific Northwest. I really wanted to get that out, and it took almost two years to get that research published and shared, and there were big decisions that were made without it.
I thought it was just something that happened in ecology. I thought it was just our field that had these issues with peer review and publishing. But I started talking to so many other researchers, and I heard from researchers who studied COVID, who couldn’t get research out fast. And I also heard from researchers who studied agricultural pest research, they couldn’t get that out as well.
Miller: And so for the two years – just for yours about wildfires, as an example – what was happening during that time?
Green: There were very important decisions that were being made without it.
Miller: You mean public policy decisions about managing forests?
Green: Yeah.
Miller: But behind the scenes in terms of the publishing, why did it take two years?
Green: It can take a long time for a variety of reasons. I think the first one is this issue of finding reviewers. With Stacks Journal, we create these vetted communities of researchers who come together around specific topics. So when an article gets submitted to Stacks Journal, it goes straight out to these communities and they are able to collaborate. And in our experience, because the process is so much more energizing and engaging, they actually want to do it. So we haven’t had these issues of finding reviewers, and researchers can actually sign up for free on our website at stacksjournal.org to become part of these communities, and help advance their field and help be a part of other new research that’s coming out.
Miller: As I noted, Phoebe Parker-Shames is with us as well, a wildlife ecologist, now with The Presidio Trust. Phoebe, we’ve brought you on because you are one of the first people to have a paper published in this new journal. Let’s talk a little bit first about this work, and then we can talk about what the process was like for you with the journal. So what was the big question you had for this work?
Phoebe Parker-Shames: Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to talk about this paper. It’s very near and dear to my heart. The general question that we were approaching with this was the effects of, specifically small scale, private land, outdoor, cannabis production and its effects on local wildlife.
Miller: Why study that?
Parker-Shames: Many reasons. I came to the question of cannabis and environment because I’m from Southern Oregon. And in the space of time as I was preparing to go to graduate school, I was thinking about what conservation issues really mattered to the community where I was from. It just so happened that that was around the time that Oregon passed recreational cannabis legalization. And even before the law had actually taken effect, we were seeing a lot of dramatic landscape changes and there was no research going on about that, because it was – it still is, until the rules change – a Schedule 1 drug in the U.S. So there were a lot of restrictions on researching it and understanding it.
There was this huge booming new industry that has, at this point, overtaken much of our traditional agricultural crops, and there was virtually no research about it at all. We had to make an entirely new policy and management sphere to help understand, put restrictions, and give guidance to farmers and communities about how to regulate this new crop.
Miller: What surprised you most by what you found?
Parker-Shames: Oh, that’s a good question. I think what surprised me most was the vast variability in individual species responses. We found a pretty wide array, and we looked across different types of behavioral responses to disturbance, using wildlife cameras and a set of two different types of models. We were able to find that there’s this group of species in the middle that have very complex and mixed responses, where they have some aspects of attraction to cannabis farms and some aspects of avoidance; whereas, other species were a little bit more clear avoidance or clear attraction.
Miller: Let’s turn to the meta piece of this, which is the publishing of this work. What was your initial plan or hope for where this study would be published?
Parker-Shames: I started the publishing journey for this article towards the end of my post-doc, which at this point was a little over a year ago. I initially submitted it to a more traditional journal, one that’s well established in the field of ecological conservation, and had a pretty rough time.
Miller: In what way?
Parker-Shames: I didn’t even make it to the step of the review, because in a lot of traditional journals, there’s a formal structure that goes into the submission process. I had spent months of getting the manuscript all correctly formatted, making sure that I’d gone through their style guide, looked at every single thing, made sure that it conformed to everything that was in their guide, and went through the online portal where you have to enter the same information like four different times. It’s a really long headache of a process.
And then after I submitted it, I had another three to four months of back and forth with one of their handling editors, because there were additional formatting things that were actually not listed in their style guide, that they wanted me to change before it even saw a managing editor for the topic itself. So after going back and forth for months about different formatting things, it finally went in front of one of their journal editors, who then desk rejected it, which means they said “We don’t think this is a fit for the scope of the journal, but you can submit it instead to our sister journal,” which is a very common practice among journals. They have the slightly higher-tier journal that most people submit to. They accept very, very few articles. Then they divert the rest of them into this still respectable but slightly lower-tier journal that is a “pay to play” model, where the submission costs are significantly higher – which they usually justify by having it be open access.
Miller: We haven’t even talked about the price of this for researchers, and we can get into that in a second. But just to finish this piece of the story, what happened with that?
Parker-Shames: I was pretty fed up at that point. I’d had this happen before with other journals and it felt like a pretty inappropriate process for them to have it be delayed by this many months to even get it in front of somebody’s eyes. So at that point, I said, “You know what, let’s check out Stacks.”
I already knew what David was working on. I’ve been trying to think of some other projects that might be a good fit for his journal. And I was like, let’s just do this one. It’s a really great article, I’m excited about it. And this is probably one of the best ways to not only make sure that it gets reviewed well … because it’s a fairly complicated model that my co-author Ben Goldstein, Justin Brashares and I developed. I wanted to make sure that we could have someone who really knew their stuff look at it and give us good, professional reviews. Also, that it wouldn’t take another year-and-a-half to get this out when it felt very relevant for farmers and policymakers.
Miller: One of the things that I think is very different about this model – and this gets to the ideal of more transparency – is that Stacks Journal publishes summaries of peer reviews, which feature, as David had said, the names of those reviewers, and it’s published alongside the study itself. What do you think of this system?
Parker-Shames: I think it’s great. One of the other big issues that we haven’t talked about yet with peer review is that there’s a lot of bullying and misconduct. I’ve been relatively lucky myself, but even I’ve been a co-author on publications where some of the comments that you get back from these anonymous reviewers are pretty inappropriate. They’ll say things like, “I don’t think this person actually knows how to do science,” or “I don’t know if they even thought this through,” or just things that clearly are not going to be the case if you spend a long time doing the research and deciding a study, and are mean without substance, mean without giving you something that you could fix.
So this process has been really different. I think part of it is, there’s a little level of accountability when you’re gonna have your name out there. And also, I think people really believe in the Stacks, it attracts a community of people who are really inherently supportive and excited about this idea. So, I think it’s really important to have the names, both for accountability and also for credit. It makes me more excited to be a reviewer in the Stacks if I know the time and effort that I put into a review, someone else can actually see that [and] say, “Oh, I see that they’re putting in the work.”
Miller: David, let’s turn to the money question. How much does it cost for a researcher, in general, or on average, to publish a paper with one of the big publishers? And how does that compare to your new journal?
Green: I’m happy to talk about that. I think it’s really important. Most people don’t quite know this. For one researcher to publish one article, it ranges anywhere from $2,000 to $12,000, and sometimes that’s not even open access. So when you publish your article, that might not even be available for people to read for free. They’ll have to then pay to access that article. And this is a huge barrier. There are so many people that are conducting really solid research but may not be able to afford this. That’s a huge sum of money.
In Stacks Journal, affordability and access is really important to us. In traditional journals, it’s anywhere from $2,000 to $12,000. For us, it’s $200 for a year of unlimited publishing. That is how we can help run the platform, how we can make sure that peer review happens. But we never want cost to be the reason that people aren’t able to get their important science out.
Miller: There is a kind of prestige hierarchy, both within specific fields and in the world of research as a whole. It’s a big deal to have your paper published in Nature or Science or The New England Journal of Medicine for medical research. Are you interested in trying to compete for prestige, over time, to play by those rules?
Green: It’s an interesting question. I think, for us, the system of peer review really hasn’t changed much in 40 years. Even these typical journals, these traditional journals, have this credibility from over time, being the only ones in the space. But their peer review system is also breaking down. And there are articles that are being published in these high-impact journals, these well known journals, that are often being retracted, or there have been issues with the peer review or with the data sets and things like that. So what we’re seeing is that the whole system of peer review needs an overhaul. It’s not working for scientists.
Stacks Journal’s model of this collaborative review, where reviewers can come together, and you can have more than two reviewers, is also increasing trust and credibility in a different way. So instead of having the name brand of Nature or Science, we are increasing trust through our transparency by posting these reviews, by having many more reviewers on every article. In a traditional journal, you’re lucky if you get two reviewers, anonymous reviewers. In Stacks Journal, our average is actually six reviewers per article.
Miller: You started with three papers about ecology, which is your own field of academic study, and I imagine your own community of researchers. What do you think it would take to build up that kind of a network? Because that’s what you’re really talking about here – in pharmacology and medicine or computer science or anything, there’s a lot of worlds out there that I assume you have fewer professional connections to.
Green: It’s true, my background is in ecology and that’s why we started in ecology. But people have been so connected to our mission at Stacks Journal that we have people from all fields signing up to be reviewers. And we actually are reviewing some articles right now in health and medicine. So I see this starting to grow, and researchers can sign up for free on our website at stacksjournal.org, to help be a part of this change and to help fix the problems that we see in peer review and in scientific publishing.
Miller: It seems pretty clear to say, there has been an erosion of societal trust in science in recent years. A lot of that has been politically-driven. We don’t need to get into that. That’s a huge issue, but I don’t think I ever hear members of the general public say, “I’m concerned about the peer review system.” I don’t think I hear them say, “I’m concerned about problems with the fee structure for applying to be published.”
Do you think there’s a connection between current publishing norms and the public’s understanding of, or faith in science?
Green: I think they’re both so intimately connected. I think that if the scientists themselves are losing trust in the peer review and publishing system, then there’s no way that we can expect the general public to also trust and believe in the scientists. And I think there have been so many articles coming out about the bias in peer review and publishing, and high profile studies that are being retracted or shown to have falsified data or things like that. All that does is slowly chip away at the general trust in peer review and in science.
At Stacks Journal, we are really trying to make the whole process so much more transparent and trustworthy, to build a foundation that allows for science to continue to grow, to continue to impact things like medicine development or climate change, or all of these things, and also be trustworthy. And that’s why we have many more reviewers for every article, so that it can feel more transparent. You get more eyes on every article. And that’s why we post the peer reviews with it, so that anyone that wants to look at this research, they can see the full opinions of all of the experts that have evaluated that. Each article actually gets assigned a credibility score as well, which is based on that reviewer feedback. So when you’re looking at an article, you know that you can trust it.
Miller: Phoebe, are you interested in staying within the Stacks Journal community going forward?
Parker-Shames: Absolutely, yeah.
Miller: Phoebe Parker-Shames, David Green; thanks so much.
Parker-Shames: Thank you.
Green: Thanks for having me.
Miller: David Green is the founder of Stacks Journal. Phoebe Parker-Shames is a wildlife ecologist, now for the Presidio Trust. She’s one of the first authors of an article in this new journal.
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