We wanted to make a contribution by offering a freely available resource to others. When we first started thinking about what to do for the 20th meeting of the MIND Group, we knew we wanted it to be something special, some way of sharing with the interested academic public some of the expertise and collegial atmosphere we had built up over more than 10 years of working together. Initially we considered inviting everyone to a big four-day conference at an attractive location. But then we decided that we would do something more substantial and innovative - rather than creating a transient event and an enormous CO2 footprint. We wanted to create a resource of lasting value that will subsist for years to come, and most importantly something that really is accessible for everybody—not only for people in affluent parts of the world, like ourselves. There seemed no better way to do this than by providing a large, open-access collected edition showcasing the work of our senior and junior members.
It quickly became clear that because of the scope of the project, and also because we had specific ideas about how it should be realized, this was going to be an experiment in autonomous open-access publishing. The MIND Group is an independent body, and apart from evening lectures by our invited speakers, its meetings are not open to the public. One goal of the Open MIND project was to first publish our scientific work without the support of a publisher, who would eventually sell our own intellectual property back to us and our peers and simultaneously make it inaccessible to students in Brazil, India or China by locking it behind a paywall. We wanted to see if we could successfully establish a professional form of quality control via a systematic, journal-independent peer review process—and also if we could make it happen faster than existing and established institutions of academic publishing. We gave authors a deadline of 1st March 2014, and planned to publish the entire collection (including commentaries and replies) on January 15th 2015. We knew that these two pillars—speed and quality control—would be crucial to the success of the project. Academics are sometimes reluctant to publish their work in edited collections that often only appear years after the manuscripts have been submitted. We suspected that we would only succeed in obtaining state-of-the-art research papers if we could guarantee that the research discussed within them would not be out-of-date by the time the collection went online.
This publication format is also novel in another sense. Because a selected subset of junior group members acted as reviewers and commentators, the whole publication project is itself an attempt to develop a new format for promoting junior researchers, for developing their academic skills, and for creating a new type of interaction between senior and junior group members. Many of the reviewers and commentators in this edited volume have never actively participated in any scientific review process before, and, for many their commentary is their first ever publication. Throughout the project, all junior members were able to play different roles: they acted as reviewers, trying to improve and constructively criticize the target articles submitted by senior group members and commentaries submitted by their peers. Sometimes, reviewers were asked to go back and revise their reviews—and sometimes their reviews also led to the rejection of target papers altogether. They also acted as authors; and because their commentaries also went through a review process, they got to experience the review process from the other side as well.
This collection, therefore, is the result of a three-layered interaction between junior and senior members: personal (through meetings), editorial (through implementing a common publication project), and philosophical and scientific (through writing commentaries and replies). Throughout this process, we were often surprised and impressed by the results—and we hope that you will be, too.