How to Start Your Own Journal: Quantum

The journal Quantum was founded in 2016 by quantum physicists Lídia del Rio, now at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, Marcus Huber at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, in Vienna, and Christian Gogolin, now at Covestro. It is an arXiv-overlay journal, publishing and linking to the final revised versions of papers hosted on the arXiv preprint repository, after the papers have been reviewed by experts. In a recent survey of FQxI members, Quantum was highlighted by members as an excellent model for building a high-quality, non-profit journal. Brendan Foster spoke with del Rio and Huber about their motivation for launching the journal, the problems and value of peer review, and how scientific publishing could be improved in the future.

Why did you start Quantum?

MH: If you went to conferences, you could see and hear a growing dissatisfaction with the way publishing was organized. There were also articles published on the perversity of for-profit publishing, both in terms of taxpayer resources being wasted and wrong incentives. At some point, Lídia, Christian and I got together. Christian had a particularly bad experience with a very famous for-profit publisher that charged insane amounts of money to basically provide no service. And we said, "yeah, let’s just do it!"

LdR: I was in Bristol as a postdoc at the time, and there was a new kind of community-owned newspaper there called the Bristol Cable, and so I could see that these kinds of initiatives can work. So why not in science? It was a sweet spot where we had some respectability and not too many tasks because we were all young postdocs.

Were you worried about the time commitment involved and the impact on your career?

MH: We knew it would take a lot of time away from research, which was, of course, crucial for a career development. So in some sense, it was a big risk. On the other hand, you look at academia and your immediate surroundings and a lot of things seem archaic, anachronistic, and so immutable to change. We found a small vector where we could actually improve the situation for our community in a tangible way. That spark gave us the extra motivation for all that work.

Many physicists now post their papers to arXiv, the preprint repository, prior to submitting them to a peer-reviewed journal, where they will be checked by experts in the field. Before publication in the journal, much of the physics community will already have had free online access to the preprint. Given the popularity of the arXiv, do we even need peer review?

LdR: The main role of peer-reviewed journals is curating. It’s not about access to information, it’s about giving a stamp of approval from the community saying that it reaches this threshold of quality. I don’t think many people just buy the journals PRX and PRL editions, and just go through them for fun. It’s not the 1800s. But publications in journals are used by fund-granting institutions, as a way to measure quality. That feels like a necessary evil at the moment.

MH: Traditionally, journals had three purposes: dissemination of information, and checking information for trustworthiness and importance. The dissemination part is done by arXiv, but it’s an incomprehensible flood. So the curation, as Lídia said, trustworthiness and relative importance within the field, that is what is left for journals. I think peer reviewed journals are still the gold standard. Ultimately, people that are not experts in the field need to know what are trustworthy results.

How are journals usually funded?

MH: Historically, university libraries would pay subscription fees with particular journals, very high ones, often. That would guarantee that members of their university had access to those channels, and authors could publish their papers for free. Traditional editors, reviewers, and authors were unpaid, but also didn’t have to pay. Then came the open-access movement that said that tax-funded research should be readable and open to anyone, meaning that you cannot charge subscription fees anymore, which left publishers struggling for funding. The solution they came up with was article processing charges, meaning that authors had to pay in order for their article to get published. The publication fees are astronomical, often like US$5,000 per article, or more. It meant that the high-quality high-impact journals were all very expensive. And that creates a perverse system, where access to resources gets you easier access to high-impact publication, which gives you easy access to resources.

We wanted to start a journal based on the principles that said, we do not want to create any incentive to accept low quality papers, we do not want any researchers without sufficient funds to be excluded from publishing with us. And yet, we will eventually have a need for funding in our launch phase to prove it’s successful and possible.

Let’s turn to how you set-up Quantum, as a non-profit journal. What are the costs associated with a new journal and how do you fund it?

LdR: We started with very little money. One of us donated €1000 to the journal and this was enough to run for the first couple of years because it was the three of us working as volunteers. At the start, there’s the legal costs of having an association, of having the website, and then there’s people we need to pay, who are administrative assistants, to handle the finances, to help the editors and so on. And then there could be pay for reviewers and editors, but we don’t pay reviewers and editors. All the scientists working on this, they work as volunteers.

Journals normally make money by publication fees paid by the authors. Our decision was to make this a voluntary fee—the authors of about 27% of published papers ask to waive the fee. So Quantum is mostly funded by this. We have public accounting that you can consult on our website. At some point we had a big flux of submissions, and we had to hire some people. Then we got individual sponsorships from companies or universities that wanted to pay a little bit. In the same way that they might support a conference, they will support the journal, but these were small grants. Now recently, we have this agreement with Covalent.

MH: We just cover our basic costs. And we make it voluntary, so people that cannot pay don’t pay, while people who have got large grants or come from well-endowed universities, they do pay. We’re currently trying, in Europe, at least, to get proper open-access journals funded publicly directly, not through article processing charges. But in any case, our financial system turned out to be very stable. Lídia was very active in making sure that all the structures we have are copyable, for others who want to start similar journals.

Quantum is now highly successful. But where is there room for improvement in the future?

MH: I’m very happy that with we created a reputable journal that is financially stable that provides good employment for excellent employees and provides value to the community. We have continuing struggles with finding referees and with processing times. But so do all channels, I think it’s not something that is particular to us. There are lots of publishing experiments that we talked about wanting to do in the future, like living reviews, where basically review papers could be updated with all new knowledge and will be interactive online objects, which clashes a bit with the notion of a permanent user interface where once something is set, it’s set in stone forever. There’s tons of things we would still like to try, and experiments we want to do. But these things take time.

LdR: Right now, people are submitting to the journal at increasing rates, so the number of publications has been increasing every year. However, the number of editors we have is more or less fixed at about 80 people, of which, at any given point, 40 to 60 are active. The bottleneck is really the time of the editors, because they are full-time researchers, and this makes processing times of papers long. There’s no good solution that I can see to this. All our problems come down to time, human hours.

You mentioned that the journal’s editors and reviewers are volunteers, which is similar to most other journals. But some researchers have called for these to become paid roles, across the board. Ideally, if you had more funding, would you pay them? Would that help to incentivise them?

LdR: This is something we discussed a lot. If we include some kind of payment method, say, you’re paid for every paper you handle or for every paper you review, then this creates some bad incentives for rushing things, going through as many papers as possible, and not going through them very deeply, or for getting them published versus rejecting them. Also, if we paid a fixed amount, when I say we pay 50 bucks per paper you handle, this means very different things for a researcher based in Switzerland versus Brazil, so you’re, again, including some inequality. If we try to make some kind of credit system that also takes into account your income, where you live, and so on, then this is a managerial administrative nightmare.

Or suppose we pay editors by time? But if people work as full-time researchers, they have very varied availability for doing all this outside work. Then there’ll be someone who’s reviewing five papers a month versus someone who’s reviewing one paper every two months or so. Unless we’re offering them a stable job, there’s no financial amount that would be worth it, because it’s always more profitable for them, in the long run, to spend their time publishing papers, because that’s how they get grants. So they will do this only if they think it’s the right thing to do and that it’s necessary for the community. I’m not sure if mixing in financial incentives would help anything.

MH: Whatever metric you get, you can game it. And if you’re in a precarious situation, an extra couple of hundred euros, in most cases, will not really change the situation. The better thing to do for your career, unless community work is acknowledged, is to focus on your own work instead of helping the community evaluate. So in the end, I don’t think financial incentives are what is the cause for a lack of reviewers. At the moment, you find a lot of people that would be very willing to review, it’s just very hard if you have a finite amount of time. I mean, we could give a month’s salary per review, something that could really change lives and careers, but that would make publication fees so high that the whole system breaks down.

Plus there’s the bureaucratic effort of trying to set up payments, and do it fairly across all the countries of this Earth, and all the different career stages, the respective economies, with different taxation grades. It’s not that we’re fundamentally opposed. But we haven’t found a tangible way that we feel would actually improve anyone’s life significantly.

If you had the power to transform the publishing industry or academia as a whole, to help improve matters, what would you do?

LdR: I think many researchers would love to give more time to active community work, like work on Quantum, or developing journals, or refereeing papers. But this is not what they’re evaluated for. This is not what their funding is decided on. Academia is a very precarious work environment: we’re essentially freelancers with an office, social security plan, but you know, we always need to be publishing. So if I had to change everything, I would start at the level of universities so researchers can have more long term contracts, and that this work caring for the scientific integrity of the field is appreciated and rewarded. Only then could we have a healthier system.

Otherwise, I think that Quantum is a bandaid. But I mean, bandaids are useful.