CREAF supports Peer Community In, a scientific organisation for open access

Following a proposal by researcher Jordi Martínez Vilalta  and with the involvement of the Head of Open Science, Florencia Florido, CREAF supports the scientific organisation Peer Community In (PCI). Martínez Vilalta is an editor in the forest thematic area of the organisation, which is devoted to disseminating research and is coordinated by the scientific community itself. The organisation is structured into groups responsible for editing and reviewing content (thematic PCIs). If the preprint is validated after evaluation (following peer review criteria), an open recommendation note with a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is published. Subsequently, the recommended scientific article may be published in the organisation’s open-access and free-of-charge journal, Peer Community Journal, with a DOI and a Creative Commons CC-BY licence, or in another scientific journal. 

CREAF’s involvement with Peer Community In is consistent with the centre’s commitment to advancing Open Science, making research transparent, accessible, collaborative and ethical, and helping to transform the procedures and indicators by which research is assessed. In this sense, it aligns with its commitment to the CoARA Agreement (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment) which basically proposes to recognize the results, practices and activities that maximize the quality and impact of research. The director of CREAF, Joan Pino, explains that "at CREAF we firmly believe in the democratization of research, and this necessarily involves promoting open science platforms like this one." As head of this area, Florencia Florido states that "one of the most popular manifestations of Open Science is also one of its pillars: open access to scientific publications. Essentially, this means guaranteeing a public digital version of articles, ensuring that reading them is free, and that there are no restrictions on reusing their content."

Jordi Martínez Vilalta explains that being an editor on this platform is a matter of “coherence, honesty and belief in the scientific method”, while also stating that “there are no objective reasons why the current system for publishing articles should incur such high costs for the public research system”. The CREAF researcher became involved with Peer Community In following an invitation from the French public research centre INRAE and explains that it proposes “an alternative, non-profit publishing system and that, so far, the small publication costs have been covered by INRAE”. 

For the scientist, moving away from the traditional system of publishing science "requires a paradigm shift in publishing itself and in the systems for evaluating research", and he admits that "breaking away from it can be very costly if recognition is based solely on impact factors". Jordi Martínez Vilalta is a senior researcher at CREAF and has been awarded 3 times (2014, 2020 and 2025 editions) the ICREA Academia Awards by the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in recognition of his research talent and scientific career. 

The international publishing system for disseminating scientific output is centralised in large private publishing houses that have progressively concentrated journal titles, with costs that are increasingly high and inaccessible. This business has distorted the essence of the research system, steering it towards quantifying output and assessing it according to a biased impact index, to the detriment of scientific quality.

For Jordi Martínez Vilalta, this is an “extraordinarily unfair” system, and he reflects that “it is hard to understand how we have allowed a situation like this to develop.” With the idea of returning to the origins of a mechanism linked to associations that promote fields of knowledge, the CREAF researcher is convinced that coordinated action is needed, as the cost of publishing is low. “Writing, reviewing and editing account for 95% of the work, yet we pay 200% of the cost; that is why I believe there are more appropriate alternatives”. Florencia Florido adds that academic publishing “should be an economically sustainable and public process. PCI initiative connects us again to the open science essence".