Archive for Peer Community Journal

Springer about to hijack Statistics & Computing

Posted in Books, University life with tags , , , , , , , on June 28, 2026 by xi'an

I recently learned that Springer Nature is about to make the reference journal Statistics and Computing, where I published close to twenty papers over the years, fully “open access”, which means that all accepted papers will have to pay an article “processing cost” (APC) to get published. The APC is currently 2390€ a paper.

These are terrible news, as it will obviously deter many authors from submitting, create a wider gap between highly funded and poorly funded institutions, and thus lower in the long run the appeal of this great journal of computational statistics, sucessfully managed by David Hand, Gilles Celeux, Mark Girolami, and Ajay Jasra over the years… Unfortunately none of them had a say in the matter to weight against this hijacking. .

Reminding me of earlier calls for peer community journals, truly open access and definitely off-the-hands of commercial publishers.

5 Comments »

the Peer Community journal [not the PCI journal!]

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on December 7, 2021 by xi'an

After a debate within the PCI (Peer Community in) communities as to whether or not create a Peer Community Journal, the decision was made to launch it and it is now ready. A really great initiative that I support (albeit from a fringe field when considering the range of the PCIs) and which can only succeed (to bypass traditional journals) if submissions happen. (There already exists a PCI Journal, specialising in research on precast, prestressed concrete. Not to be confused with!) To quote from the journal webpage,

Once an article has been recommended by a PCI, the authors can opt to leave it on a preprint server, to publish it in Peer Community Journal, to submit it to a PCI-friendly journal or to any other journal.

Peer Community Journal is run by researchers for researchers and is funded by public research institutions. It is:

  • Unique = it is a single journal for all PCIs, and a generalist journal (Ecology, Evolutionary biology, Genomics, Archaeology, Paleontology, Network Science, Zoology, Infection, etc. )
  • Free = it is a diamond open-access journal (free for both authors and readers), financed by public research institutions and Plan S compatible.
  • Exclusive = it publishes only articles recommended by PCI
  • Unconditional = it can publish any PCI-recommended article in its recommended version
  • Opt-in = it publishes articles only if the authors wish it
  • Immediate = after recommendation by a PCI, no delay between transfer to the journal and publication
  • Community-based, with more than 1500 recommenders playing the role of Editors

This journal, created and funded by the PCI organization, accepts PCI-recommended articles without further peer reviews.

Leave a comment »