In order to support scientific publishing with regard to a development that is appropriate for science, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) has published the position paper "Academic publishing as a foundation and area of leverage for research assessment: challenges and fields of action". With this paper, the DFG wants to advocate for an open publishing system and create incentives for the development of an evaluation culture for science that is content-oriented rather than metrics-based.
Fields of action for science and funders
After defining the basic functions of scientific publishing, the position paper names and discusses its current challenges: These include, among others, the findability of scientific publications, quality assessment and peer involvement, as well as the interactions between science assessment and publishing. Finally, the paper defines concrete fields of action for the two main addressees – science and the funding agencies – to strengthen framework conditions in the scientific publication and evaluation system that are appropriate for science: the responsibility of the (management level of) science would be to establish new forms of quality assessment of publications, to expand the addressee orientation of scientific publishing and to strengthen additional systems of reputation attribution, as well as to ensure the sovereignty of science over its own data. The responsibility of the funding agencies, on the other hand, would be to broaden the spectrum of accepted publication formats, to demand more content-oriented proof of performance and to strengthen the recipient side.