RE: A new way to publish research findings. The Fair Journal pay scientists what is fair, and publish cartoon versions of the articles for kids

Hi lemouth, thank you for your feedback! I also appreciate what you do on Steem :)

I agree that there are more and more good options for scientists to get their research out without paying anything. I really like what bioRxiv and arXiv are doing! And it is great that more and more scientists are using this. There has also previously been at least one attempt to pay scientists for their articles. But they failed due to not being viable in the long run (sorry I don't find the reference for it right now). In my opinion it will only be viable if a lot of people are interested, hence, it is not enough that only scientists find it interesting. And that is what I try to circumvent with the cartoons. The journal that attempted this before were paying a flat rate, whereas we would pay a percentage. So in that sense it will never lead to a deficit, and could therefore be more viable than with a flat rate. It would of course also mean that if it goes really well for an article, the scientists would be paid much more than they would have been from a flat rate :)

I understand what you mean about articles being difficult to understand because they are written specifically for peers. But I have seen many times that scientists use very fancy words in order to sound sophisticated. For instance the example I give in the intro cartoon: Instead of writing "the protein was located next to the nucleus" some would write "the protein occupied a juxtanuclear position". This means completely the same thing, but many would not understand the latter. And it is this type of language use I would like to minimize.

I also realize that the major caveat right now is getting full research manuscripts, as we do not have the normal things in place that a scientist usually looks for. Such as editorial board, author guidelines, etc. I think what most other scientist are asking for has been database indexing, ISSN etc, but those things are not possible to get until some articles has been published. So it's a bit of an evil circle that scientists will not submit until those things are in place, and we cannot get those things in place before scientists start to submit. We did try to circumvent this by allowing scientists to just submit layman versions of articles published elsewhere (and still pay them part of the revenue for that). That would of course still not allow indexing and ISSN, but at least it would get the ball rolling and create more awareness of the concept.

But thanks again for your feedback, and I'm happy to discuss more!
Cheers,
Jonas (creator of the Fair Journal)