Sivu

Scientific publishing as it should be

Scientific publishing is broken.

Universities worldwide pay over $2.5B every year to the six biggest publishing houses in article processing charges (1). This means that (after funding the actual research work) publicly funded research institutions pay on average $2,044 for each open access article just to get the results published (2). Peer-review, the only meaningful step in the publishing process, is done by researchers for free. Meanwhile, the publishing houses produce nothing else but money to their owners with profit margins close to 40 % which aligns with companies such as Google and Microsoft (3).

It does not have to be this way.

The scientific community has all the power to remove the publishing houses from the equation. We should start publishing open science like open source software is published: using a git server. Git provides all the features high-quality science requires: traceability, easy collaboration, transpatent workflows and end-to-end reproducibilty.

Sivu is our proposal to fix scientific publishing.

Sivu is built on a beatiful Gitea codebase but incrementally adds the features that scientific publishing requires: PDF rendering, DOI assignment, open peer-review and science specific merit tracking. To understand what this means in practice, see our example repository. We are learning as we go but a few corner stones will remain: Sivu is built from scientists, to be used by scientists, to benefit everyone.

Sincerely yours,

On behalf of Sivu core team:

MD Jalmari Nevanlinna

References

(1) Haustein, S., Schares, E., Alperin, J. P., Hare, M., Butler, L.-A., & Schönfelder, N. (2024). Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.16551

(2) Broschinski, C., jbartlewski, Jahn, N., Porquet, T., Sikora, A., JohanCFroberg, Peil, V., Tullney, M., Moch, M., VuK – Open Access Brandenburg, Clemens, Hahn, U., Becker, H.-G., Hamalainen, V., Daniel, Medizinische Bibliothek der Charité, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Universitätsbibliothek, Voigt, M., Labastida, I., … Strömert, P. (2026). OpenAPC/openapc-de: ASH Berlin TA data 2024 (v5.1.9-8-5) [Software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19238155

(3) Hagve, M. (2020). The money behind academic publishing. Tidsskrift for Den norske legeforening, 140(11). https://doi.org/10.4045/tidsskr.20.0118