In recent years, the current and future system of scientific publishing has been heavily debated. Most of these discussion focused on criticizing aspects of the current system such as:

• the scientific publishing industry being one of the most profitable branches (Guardian, 2017) in media, because the scientific community basically does all the work for free

• the peer review system being corrupted, or at least not functioning perfectly

• the limited access to scientific papers due to its current business model

• the surging number of submitted papers in recent years, especially with strict publication requirements for PhD candidates. This is putting more pressure on editors, reviewers and readership, and will decrease the visibility and impact of each publication.

Times are changing, which can be seen in the increased demand and supply for open access publishing. However, we believe there might be plenty of other ideas and suggestions on how to improve scientific publishing. We invite and challenge everyone from the scientific community to propose ideas on how to do so in 5 minute presentations. Afterwards we will continue the discussion to answer questions such as: Who needs to pay for reading our work? Who should publish our work? How to cope with the excessive amount of submitted papers? Should we even be publishing?

Solicited contribution: Doerthe Tetzlaff - Suggestions to improve scientific publishing: an author’s and editor’s perspective

This session is organized in cooperation with the Young Hydrologic Society (youngHS.com).

References
Guardian, 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science