On Thursday 5th of December, Open Scholar co-founder Pandelis Perakakis gave a talk on how to move beyond open access and face academia’s real problems, at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. The talk focused on how the journal monopoly over three of the most basic processes in scholarly communication —validation, evaluation and dissemination— is creating problems even more important than the lack of accessibility to research output. The LIBRE platform was presented as an alternative, free, journal-independent, community-based model of research validation and evaluation where the author is at the center of an open and transparent peer review process.
Below are the slides of the presentation published under a creative commons attribution license that lets anyone distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon this work, even commercially, as long as they credit the author for the original creation. You may also watch the video of the presentation here.
This seems to me very important and exciting. I am impatient to start using LIBRE. I can see that a great deal of preparatory work has been needed before launching the platform. I read a couple of statements that the launch was due in October last year. But unless I have misunderstood, it has not yet taken place. What is the current state of play?
Hello Michael and thank you for your interest. It is true we had announced we would launch a few months ago, but we had to extend the internal testing stage. If you have provided your email on our welcome screen you will soon receive an invitation for the beta testing stage.