For decades, academic publishing has followed a familiar script: Conduct research → write a paper → submit to a journal → (wait) → peer review → (revise) → maybe get accepted → finally, publish. Yet, this traditional model is increasingly under scrutiny, as several structural issues have become difficult to ignore including limited access, costs shift to authors, filtered content, narrow credit, opaque peer review and so on. As a result the term alternative publishing has gained momentum within open science communities.