Open letter to DG Research & Innovation

The hurried time schedule is based on an urgency that does not actually exist: if it were not for the requirements of the European Commission itself, one could ask the question if even the authors would see the need for most of these articles to be independently published as significant standalone contributions to science. The operational practises established in 1665, when the 'Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge' published the first issue of Philosophical Transactions, may have shaped science across the world since, but their overall benefit is no longer uncontested after three and a half centuries. We are convinced there are significantly more worthwhile alternative options that would better serve the public interest and the purposes of the European Commission, and which would be realistically achievable within the same budget range. While technologies such as Artificial Intelligence may become useful in the long run to support the maintenance of large knowledge graphs derived from papers as well as raw scientific content, finding more efficient ways of continuous human curation of knowledge will become an essential precondition to research. There is a unique opportunity to embark on a more open and inclusive approach that invites good ideas and talent from the scientific and engineering community, from the publishing community, from the free/libre open source community, from the archiving and digital heritage community, from social sciences, scientometrics and civil society. One should extend currently available open source infrastructure and tools to enable any individual or community to produce, review/audit/curate and maintain articles and to link them with related artefacts such as data sets and software.