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Matti Vuorre

@matti.vuorre.com

1.9K followers 510 following 920 posts

I am an assistant professor at the department of Social Psychology at Tilburg University's School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. I have a website at https://vuorre.com. All posts are posts.

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Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 1h

I also corresponded about this briefly with Stevan, who said something that I fear: "...it has to be conceded that the publishers – i.e., capitalism – have won again, with Fool’s Gold OA and pay-to-publish triumphing over the dreamy landscape of aspirational Green OA." (eprints.soton.ac.uk/343130/)

Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 1h

I've also put this up on my blog: vuorre.com/posts/prepri...

Thanks to many helpful discussions (and arguments!) on this at SIPS this year: @mkarhulahti.bsky.social @syeducation.bsky.social @alexh.bsky.social @sakshighai.bsky.social and many many others.

Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 1h

Scientific communication is part and parcel of the academic and scientific work that we do, independent of industry pressures or intervention. Why do we accept industry capture of this most essential part of our enterprise?

Neither does the role of an editor have to be tied to a commercial rent-seeker: The Publish, Review, Curate model of scholarly communication enables a given scholarly work to be included in a plurality of collections, perhaps analogous to journal volumes or blog categories, each curated by different editors on different platforms. Many editorial teams are already recognizing that things could indeed be better, and are resigning en masse to start free scholar-run journals.

These alternatives to ‘Big Academic Publishing‘ are already making it faster and cheaper to get one’s work permanently available and findable online, vetted by editors, and reviewed by peers.

Considering the estimated $8.97 billion dollars of (mostly) taxpayer money hoovered up in four years by only six commercial publishers on Open Access (OA) article processing fees, Elsevier’s $3,480 median hybrid OA processing fee, and an average turnaround time of 111 days, alternatives fare well: Peer Community In, an online platform for reviews and ‘recommendations’ (brief editorial reports), reports total costs of €369 per article. We’ve known these flawed economics for decades, yet the scientific literature remains in captivity. Maybe we just lack the sufficient anger for change.

Perhaps the time to replace academic journals is now. For me, it should have been 385 days ago.

Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 1h

I argue that the time is right for widespread adoption of open review platforms like PREreview (prereview.org) and Review Commons (www.reviewcommons.org) and reject the arbitrary administrative overhead imposed on us by the publication industry.

Never mind that my colleagues are reading and citing the document on PsyArXiv. For this manuscript to count as a legitimate scientific product I must first endure inexplicable delays; arbitrary formatting requirements (the formatting manual costs $47.99); conflicts between my scholarly values and the astronomical profits that private publishing companies make from our taxpayer funded work; introduction of errors into my manuscript by the journal’s proofreaders; websites from hell; and of course peer review. Without that process of publication, my work will remain a ‘preprint’—an incomplete and unreliable artifact unworthy of a place in the scientific literature.

Could things be better? I surmise that, like fish unaware of their wet surrounds, academics don’t feel the pain because it’s all they’ve ever known.

For one, peer review has nothing to do with commercial journals or publishers—it’s the voluntary labor of our colleagues in service of scientific progress. We could, right now, be reviewing each others work on PREreview or Review Commons. Alas, instead of these scholarly debates we are complacent with pretending that a 40% profit margin industry is somehow facilitating the peer-review process better than the transparent platforms already available to us, for free.

Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 1h

This short essay was inspired by Stevan Harnad's early works on scientific publishing, particularly "Scholarly skywriting and the prepublication continuum of scientific inquiry" (eprints.soton.ac.uk/251894/1/har...)

Preprints—scholarly manuscripts not yet captured by the publication industry—are widely read and circulated, yet the ‘intellectual perestroika‘ they could facilitate hasn’t been uniformly realized because scholars continue to think of preprints as less authoritative than their industry-captured (‘published’) counterparts. It is time to free the scholarly literature from hostile captivity and embrace preprints as the primary objects of scholarly communication.

385 days ago, I submitted a manuscript for evaluation at an academic journal. Around the same time, I submitted the same manuscript to PsyArXiv, a document sharing website popular in the psychological sciences. The results: Radio silence for the journal submission; 334 downloads and 4 citations for the PsyArXiv version.

But this is a meaningless comparison: The PsyArXiv version hasn’t been peer-reviewed and listed on a journal’s website: It is not published, and everyone knows that publications are more valid than preprints, and that it is publications, not preprints, that provide the pitons on a scientist’s climb to success and fame.

Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 1h

Against Publishing: universonline.nl/nieuws/2025/...

Preprints are read, shared, and cited, yet still dismissed as incomplete until blessed by a publisher. I argue that the true measure of scholarship lies in open exchange, not in the industry’s gatekeeping of what counts as published.

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Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 1h

I just updated PDF-direct (Firefox addon to bypass journals' "fancy online readers" and just get the darn pdf) to include everyone's favorite journal, PNAS: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo.... Source at github.com/mvuorre/pdf-....

Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 14h

Imagine getting desk rejected by a phone call. Worst of all worlds.

Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 17h

Can you imagine typing your manuscript up with a typewriter, then mailing it in, waiting, and having to do all that again. Insane.

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Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 17h

Word

Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 17h

You don't need any of this if you collaborate on a single diskette that you mail between authors 😎

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Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 17h

The issue with these is it's impossible to keep the source, environment, and output in sync for all collaborators simultaneously. And most people don't want to write in vs code or some other non-Word thing anyway.

Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 17h

Yeah it will always be a pain in the butt. This is why I keep a docx copy up to date for others. But that's obviously not perfect either. I've just learned to live with the pain.

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Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 17h

Quarto includes docx by default, just 'format: docx'. I don't think there's any benefit in providing something beyond that because the docx isn't / shouldn't be something you use to publish.

Reposted by Ian Hussey, Matt N Williams, Matti Vuorre

PCI Psychology @psych.peercommunityin.org · 17h

PCI Psychology is open for submissions! Did you know that you can easily submit your recommended preprint to any of the 20+ PCI Psych friendly journals? See all friendly journals here: psych.peercommunityin.org/about/pci_fr...
#PsychSciSky #SciPub

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Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 17h

If you slap 'format; preprint-typst' on that it should just work (™) and then the HTML will automatically link to it as well.

Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 19h

I've been using this for my own #quartopub manuscripts and it works really well and makes publishing in multiple formats very easy. See, for example, this manuscript's PDF (vuorre.com/posts/sdt-re...) and html (vuorre.com/posts/sdt-re...) outputs.

Estimating Signal Detection Models with regression using the brms R package – Matti’s website

Signal Detection Theory is a widely used framework for understanding decisions by distinguishing between response bias and true discriminability in various psychological domains. Manual calculation ap...

vuorre.com

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Reposted by Ian Hussey

Matti Vuorre @matti.vuorre.com · 19h

The quarto-preprint @quarto.org extension (github.com/mvuorre/quar...) for PDF outputs with #typst now includes proper appendices for reproducible #quartopub #rstats manuscripts, improved two-column layouts (and themes, incl. full-width content), better reference formatting & improved documentation.