Björn Brembs

Data broker RELX is represented on Twitter by their Chief Communications Officer Paul Abrahams. Due to RELX subsidiary Elsevier being one of the largest publishers of academic journals, Dr. Abrahams frequently engages with academics on the social media platform.

Should you trust Elsevier?

More and more experts are calling for the broken and destructive academic journal system to be replaced with modern solutions. This post summarizes why and how this task can now be accomplished. It was first published in German on the blog of journalist Jan-Martin Wiarda.

 Front cover of

the now-vanished

 Australasian Journal of Bone &amp; Joint Medicine

. Source: Scan from the-scientist.com website

The trinity of failures

According to a recent study, employee surveillance is rampant in today’s corporate work environment. This study documents how, often under the pretense of cybersecurity or risk analysis (sort of like academic publishers, actually), companies analyze the behavioral data they collect from their employees to help them make “evidence-led”, i.e., algorithmic employment decisions.

Algorithmic employment decisions in academia?

There are regular discussions among academics as to who should be the prime mover in infrastructure reform. Some point to the publishers to finally change their business model. Others claim that researchers need to vote with their feet and change how they publish. Again others find that libraries should just stop subscribing to journals and use the saved money for a modern publishing system.

Who’s responsible for the lack of action?

Since cOAlition S is asking for recommendations from the community for the implementation of their Plan S, I have also chipped in. In their feedback form, they ask two questions, to which I have answered with the replies below.

Providing recommendations for Plan S implementation

It’s now been 24 years since Stevan Harnad sparked the open access movement by suggesting in his “subversive proposal” in 1994 that scholars ought to just publish their scholarly articles on the internet:  Since then, we have been waiting on the behavior of scholars to change, such that all our works indeed become accessible.

After 24 years, when will academic culture finally shift?

In his fantastic Peters Memorial Lecture on occasion of receiving CNI‘s Paul Evan Peters award, Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory described my calls to drop subscriptions as “radical” and “extremist” (starting at about minute 58):    Regardless of what Herbert called my views, this is a must-see presentation in which Herbert essentially presents the technology and standards behind the functionalities I have been asking for

Why academic journals need to go

These days, many academic publishers can be considered mere Pinos: ‘Publishers in name only’. Instead of making scholarly work, commonly paid for by the public, public, as the moniker ‘publisher’ would imply, in about 80% of the cases, they put them behind a paywall.

The scholarly commons: from profiteering to servicing

Academic publishers in general and Elsevier in particular have a reputation for their ruthless profiteering, using professional negotiators pitting hapless librarians against their own faculty during journal subscription negotiations.

Why can Elsevier keep insulting scholars without consequences?

Few insect behaviors are more iconic than the proverbial moths circling the lamps at night. Artist: Dave McKean  These observations are prime examples of the supposedly stereotypic insect responses to external stimuli. In contrast, in our new paper that just appeared today, we describe experiments suggesting that insects appear to make a value-based decision before approaching the light.

Why did the moth fly into the flame?

Why our Open Data project worked, (and how Decorum can allay our fears of Open Data).  I am honored to Guest Post on Björn’s blog and excited about  the interest in our work from Björn’s response to Dorothy Bishop’s first post. As corresponding author on our paper, I will provide more context to our successful Open Data experience with Björn’s and Casey’s labs.

Guest post: Why our Open Data project worked

With the start of the new year 2017, about 60 universities and other research institutions in Germany are set to lose subscription access to one of the main STEM publishers, Elsevier. The reason being negotiations of the DEAL consortium (600 institutions in total) with the publisher.

So your institute went cold turkey on publisher X. What now?

A recurrent topic among faculty and librarians interested in infrastructure reform is the question of whose turn it is to make the next move. Researchers rightfully argue that they cannot submit their work exclusively to modern, open access journals because that would risk their and their employees’ jobs. Librarians, equally correctly, argue that they would cancel subscriptions if faculty wouldn’t complain about ensuing access issues.

Practical roads to infrastructure reform

Around 2005, German politicians decided on a plan to circumvent a newly created amendment to the German constitution that prevents federal funds from supporting state-owned institutions such as universities.

Data show “excellence initiative” was a massive failure – help stop it

Three years ago, representatives of libraries, publishers and scholars all agreed that academic publishers don’t really add any value to scholarly articles. Last week, I interpreted Sci-Hub potentially being a consequence of scholars having become tired after 20 years of trying to wrestle their literature from the publishers’ stranglehold by small baby-steps and through negotiations and campaigning alone.

Academic publishers: stop access negotiations

tl;dr:
 
 Data from thousands of non-retracted articles indicate that experiments published in higher-ranking journals are less reliable than those reported in ‘lesser’ journals.

Vox health reporter Julia Belluz has recently covered the reliability of peer-review.

Even without retractions, ‘top’ journals publish the least reliable science

Last week, Elizabeth Pennisi asked me to comment on the recent paper from Schreiweis

 et al.

entitled “Humanized FoxP2 accelerates learning by enhancing transitions from declarative to procedural performance”. Since I don’t know how much, if anything, of my answers to her questions will end up in her article, I thought I might expand my answer into a post about this very interesting work.

Humanized FoxP2 and the timing of habits

The data clearly show that publications in

 Cell

,

 Nature

or

 Science

(

 CNS

for short), on average, cannot be distinguished from other publications, be it by methodology, reproducibility or other measures of quality. Even their citation advantage, while statistically significant, is so small that it is practically negligible.

No need to only send your best work to Science Magazine

By now, everybody reading this obscure blog knows about the so-called sting operation by John Bohannon in

 Science Magazine

last week. As virtually everybody has pointed out, the outcome of this stunt is entirely meaningless.

How embarrassing was the ‘journal sting’ for Science Magazine?

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away.

Unquestioning dogma: the gatekeepers of science

Flashback: The brain creates something out of nothing

Scientists as social parasites?

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This post is from April 19, 2011:

Flashback: Creationists, this is the evidence you have to beat!

As part of my scheduled re-posts during the summer break, I’ll also post some of the science videos from the archives. I originally posted these two on February 24, 2013:

The first one is a TED talk by Michael Dickinson on how flies fly: and the second one is on recording from fly visual neurons during flight and non-flight.

SummerScienceVideo: fruit fly research

Flashback: ‘stimulus-response’ concept based on artifacts?

This post was originally published on the London School of Economics “Impact of Social Sciences” blog, on July 30, 2013:

In various fields of scholarship, scholars accrue reputation via the proxy of the containers they publish their articles in. In most if not all fields, scholarly journals are ranked in a hierarchy of prestige.

Solutions to the looming crisis in science

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I want to use this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This is the first post in this series, just to see if it works and what needs to be tweaked.

Flashback: The neurobiology of self-learning

This morning I was reminded of the age of some of the technology we’re using. Hyperlinks were developed at Stanford University and first demonstrated by their inventor Douglas Engelbart (using the first mouse) in 1968:  On Tuesday, Douglas Engelbart died, even before the scholarly literature was able to fully implement the technology he invented, 45 years and counting.

The dysfunctionality of the scholarly literature: hyperlinks

It might just save your life (via Upturned Microscope):    BTW, even if your life is not at stake, someone else’s may be. So you should publish your results if you are sure something definitely will not work, for instance in F1000 Research, where you can publish negative results for free until August 31, 2013. Your colleagues will be grateful.

One more reason to publish negative results

I have now posted the job ads for the PostDoc position in our lab at

 Nature

,

 Science

, SfN and FENS.

PostDoc opportunity in our lab now advertized

Trial and error is a successful problem-solving strategy not only in humans but throughout evolution. How do nervous systems generate novel, creative trials and how are errors incorporated into already existing experiences in order to improve future trials?

Come and do research with us!

This is our first poster at this year’s SfN meeting in San Diego. It’s about decision-making in fruit flies. We find a probabilistic form of decision-making that suggests that without understanding the mechanisms behind this fundamental uncertainty, we will never fully understand decision-making. Clicking on the image will let you download the PDF Version of the poster.

Do flies in groups make individual choices?

Notwithstanding the barrage of criticisms and warnings from every corner of the scholarly community, various initiatives, mainly in the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, France and the UK, continue their efforts for a smooth transition from subscriptions to open access without any further disruptions.

Why open access Big Deals are worse than subscriptions

Scholarly journals, on the face of it, emerged in the 17

 th

century as a medium to facilitate communication of scientific discoveries among interested scholars. In the 21

 st

century, it’s not all that different: researchers form communities around topics in which they share a common interest: Journal of Neuroscience, Pediatrics and Neonatology, Journal of Economics or the British Educational Research Journal.

Academic publishers and competition

This anecdote made my day today. On a

 Drosophila

researcher mailinglist, someone asked if anybody on the list had access to the Landes Bioscience journal ‘Fly‘. I replied by wondering that if #icanhazpdf on Twitter didn’t work, the days of ‘Fly’ are probably counted, with nobody subscribing.

#icanhazpdf more public than a publication?

While our own manuscript on journal rank is almost through the peer-review process, this morning I received several messages announcing the DORA (

 San Francisco declaration on research Assessment

), which I signed immediately.

Official call for an end to journal rank

Tomorrow we travel to the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and our diligent scientists have already printed their posters! Ottavia Palazzo will present her work on genome editing the

 FoxP

locus of

 Drosophila

with anatomical and behavioral characterizations of the various transgenic lines she has created.

With CRISPRed FoxP and habit formation to #SfN19

The recent publication of the “Ten Principles of Plan S” has sparked numerous discussions among which one of several recurring themes was academic freedom. The cause for these discussions is the insistence of the funders supporting Plan S that their grant recipients only publish in certain venues under certain liberal licensing schemes.

Does academic freedom entail exemption from spending rules?

Over the last ten years, scientific funding agencies across the globe have implemented policies which force their grant recipients to behave in a compliant way. For instance, the NIH OA policy mandates that research articles describing research they funded must be available via PubMedCentral within 12 months of publication. Other funders and also some institutions have implemented various policies with similar mandates.

Maybe try another kind of mandate?

Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as

 Nature

or

 Science

. After all, in this competitive and highly specialized days, where a scientist is published all too often is more important than what they have published.

How Nature Magazine consistently prefers anecdote over data

The recent call for a GlamMag boycott by Nobel laureate Randy Shekman made a lot of headlines, but will likely have no effect whatsoever. For one, the call for boycott isn’t even close in scale to “the cost of knowledge” boycott against Elsevier and even that drew less than 15,000 measly signatures, a drop in the bucket with 970,000 board members, reviewers and authors working for Elsevier largely for free.

In support of subscripton cancellations

In the last “Science Weekly” podcast from the Guardian, the topic was retractions.  At about 20:29 into the episode, Hannah Devlin asked, whether the reason ‘top’ journals retract more articles may be because of increased scrutiny there. The underlying assumption is very reasonable, as many more eyes see each paper in such journals and the motivation to shoot down such high-profile papers might also be higher.

Are more retractions due to more scrutiny?

Currently, our libraries are paying about US$5000 per peer-reviewed subscription article. What is more difficult to find out is where all that money goes. Which steps are required to make an accepted manuscript public?

What goes into making a scientific manuscript public?

This is the story behind our work on the function of the FoxP gene in the fruit fly

 Drosophila

(more background info). As so many good things, it started with beer. Troy Zars and I were having a beer on one of the ICN evenings, I think it was in Vancouver in 2007. I had recently learned about the conserved role of FoxP2 in songbirds, out of one of the labs in Berlin, where I was based at the time.

Why use fruit flies to study a gene involved in language?

Academic publishers have been parasitizing the public purse for long enough now. Steffen Böhm, director of the Essex Sustainability Institute, said it best: In his article, he mentions the successful SciELO project in South America. In a lot of ways, SciELO (scielo.org) is quite close to what I have been arguing for: SciELO means “Scientific Electronic

 Library

Online” and is supported by the Brazilian and Chilean government.

Cut out the parasitic middle men!

This year’s Winter Conference on Animal Learning and Behavior (WCALB) will be on one of my oldest and most central research projects, the commonalities and differences between operant and classical conditioning.

Almost 80 years on, progress on operant and classical conditioning

In which potatoes in France are like high-ranking journals in science

This is the tweetlog covering July 3-5: Interesting! We find something similar in flies: Live fast, die young: Long-lived mice are less active https://feedly.com/k/16RDz21 It smells fishy: Copper prevents fish from avoiding danger https://feedly.com/k/12gw14F @

 biocs

@

 google

Yes!

Tweetlog: neuroscience and #openaccess

After almost 25 years since Stevan Harnad’s “subversive proposal“, now, finally, scholars and the public have a range of avenues at their disposal to access nearly every scholarly article. Public access, while not the default, has finally arrived. Granted, while all of the current options are considered legal for the

 reader

, not all

 providers

of scholarly literature conform to every law in every country.

With the access issue temporarily solved, what now?

Amazing bead chain experiment

Random Science Video: The value of fly research

There are those who demand journal peer-review be paid extra on top of academic salaries. Let’s have a look at the financials of that proposal. The article linked above confirms common rates of academic consulting fees, i.e., anything between US$100 per hour for graduate students and US$350 per hour for faculty. Taking a conservative US$200 as an easy, lower-bound estimate for, say, a post-doc hour seems to cover most cases.

How about paying extra for peer-review?

No matter how well-intended (and we all know to which place the road leads that is paved with good intentions!), transformative agreements (such as DEAL in Germany) are generally the wrong tool at the wrong time for making publicly funded science accessible to the public.

No Evilsevier DEAL!

The DFG is a very progressive and modern funding agency. More than two years ago, the main German science funding agency signed the “Declaration on Research Assessment” DORA.

German funder DFG: Why the sudden inconsistency?

tl;dr:


 Evidence suggests that the prestige signal in our current journals is noisy, expensive and flags unreliable science. There is a lack of evidence that the supposed filter function of prestigious journals is not just a biased random selection of already self-selected input material.

Replacing the prestige signal

Last week’s podium on the commodification of open science entitled “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product?” was surprisingly unanimous on the need to radically modernize academic publishing and abolish the current publishing system relying mainly on corporate publishers with monopoly status.

Academic publishing – market or collectivization?

There have been repeated online discussions about my suggestion to libraries that now would be an excellent time to start cancelling subscriptions. Prime counter-argument is that librarians risked their jobs or at least face faculty backlash if they did that. Personally, I have witnessed many such cancellations and there has never been a riot or even a librarian reprimanded, let alone fired.

How to convince faculty to support subscription cancellations

Stevan Harnad’s “Subversive Proposal” came of age last year. I’m now teaching students younger than Stevan’s proposal, and yet, very little has actually changed in these 21 years.

Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

Over the last decade or two, there have been multiple accounts of how publishers have negotiated the impact factors of their journals with the “Institute for Scientific Information” (ISI), both before it was bought by Thomson Reuters and after. This is commonly done by negotiating the articles in the denominator.

Just how widespread are impact factor negotiations?

tl;dr:
 
 It is a waste to spend more than the equivalent of US$100 in tax funds on a scholarly article.

Collectively, the world’s public purse currently spends the equivalent of US$~10b every year on scholarly journal publishing. Dividing that by the roughly two million articles published annually, you arrive at an average cost per scholarly journal article of about US$5,000.

How much should a scholarly article cost the taxpayer?

Posting my reply to a review of our most recent grant proposal has sparked an online discussion both on Twitter and on Drugmonkey’s blog. The main direction the discussion took was what level of expertise to expect from the reviewers deciding over your grant proposal. This, of course, is highly dependent on the procedure by which the funding agency chooses the reviewers.

How to write your grant proposal?

Update, Dec. 4, 2015: With the online discussion moving towards grantsmanship and the decision of what level of expertise to expect from a reviewer, I have written down some thoughts on this angle of the discussion.

With more and more evaluations, assessments and quality control, the peer-review burden has skyrocketed in recent years.

Why cutting down on peer-review will improve it

This is a post written jointly by Nelson Lau from Brandeis and me, Björn Brembs. In contrast to Nelson’s guest post, which focused on the open data aspect of our collaboration, this one describes the science behind our paper and a second one by Nelson, which just appeared in PLoS Genetics.

Laboratories around the world are generating a tsunami of deep-sequencing data from nearly every organism, past and present.

Data Diving for Genomics Treasure

When I finished my PhD 15 years ago, the neurosciences defined the main function of brains in terms of processing input to compute output: “brain function is ultimately best understood in terms of input/output transformations and how they are produced” wrote Mike Mauk in 2000 (DOI: 10.1038/76606). Since then, a lot of things have been discovered that make this stimulus-response concept untenable and potentially based largely on laboratory

Watching a paradigm shift in neuroscience

This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do let us know if you find a mistake.


 UPDATE


 , 09/01/2015: A commenter made me aware of data rows in the raw data we had overlooked before.

Booming university administrations

I really loathe reviewing for GlamMagz for two main reasons. For one, it’s hard to remain neutral: publication of a paper in my field in such a journal is beneficial both for the field and for the young people who are authors on this paper. Second, the demands of some of my colleagues so often make my blood boil. At that point I’m very happy these reviews are anonymous and I really don’t want to know the names of these colleagues.

Why this GlamMag will likely not ask for my review again

See this post with the associated press releases on brembs.net.

The

 F

orkhead B

 ox

P2 (FOXP2) gene is well-known for its involvement in language disorders. We have discovered that a relative of this gene in fruit flies,

 dFoxP

, is necessary for a type of learning called operant self-learning, which resembles some aspects of language learning.

The Drosophila FoxP gene is necessary for operant self-learning

UPDATE
 
 , 10-02-2015: After a hint from a user on Twitter, I now know that it is possible to open a PDF document in several windows, one for text, one for legends and one for figures. Figures and legends occupy one virtual desktop and the text another. In this way, I can actually review on-screen, but it is one heck of a work-around and by no means convenient.

I cannot take it any more.

Publishers, stop torturing your reviewers!

Today, our most recent paper got published, before traditional peer-review, at

 F1000 Research

. The research is about how nominally identical fly stocks can behave completely differently even if tested by the same person in the same lab in the same test.

The way academic publishing should be

There is an interesting study out in the journal PNAS: “Evaluating big deal journal bundles“. The study details the disparity in negotiation skills between different US institutions when haggling with publishers about subscription pricing.

Your university is definitely paying too much for journals

Yesterday,

 Science Magazine

published a news story (not a peer-reviewed paper) by Gonzo-Scientist John Bohannon on a sting operation in which a journalist submitted a bogus manuscript to 304 open access journals (observe that no toll access control group was used).

 Science Magazine

reports that 157 journals accepted and 98 rejected the manuscript.

Science Magazine rejects data, publishes anecdote

I just got the nicest decline to review ever: That’s how you retire from science: you get to work like normal people. Awesome!

Retiring from science?

The cost of knowledge – in 2003?

Since the birth of our daughter, we spend our summers in Sweden, just like I used to, when I was little. This not only allows her to get more practice in Swedish then she gets talking with just me or her grandmother, but we also get to really recharge our batteries in the fabulous wilderness up there.

How to recharge in Sweden

Flashback: Noise in the brain?

As part of my scheduled re-posts during the summer break, I’ll also post some of the science videos from the archives. I originally posted this one on Agust 31, 2011:

SummerScienceVideo: science is real

This is a slightly edited (amended, essentially) version of

my article published today at The Conversation. In cases where a problem within a community is detected and collective action is required to address the problem. one needs to strike a fine line or any efforts to convince the community that action is required will fail.

The Conversation: The looming crisis in science

Following the example of Glyn Moody, I thought I’d start a log on the tweets I send around. One never knows what’ll happen to Twitter and besides, this provides a neat place to store and find everything. So here are the tweets for July first and second: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Trying a new feature: Tweetlog

You may have seen a neutered version of this post over at the LSE blog. This post below, however, puts the tiger in the tank, as it was enhanced by CatGPT:  Maybe scholarly societies have taken “the instruction“follow the money!” a tad too literally?

Scholarly societies: like a cat chasing the laser dot

Yesterday, cOAlition S published their updated principles and implementation guidelines for #PlanS, together with the rationale behind the update. This constitutes a very much welcome effort, as evidence of the increasing awareness among funders as to their potential leverage in infrastructure modernization, at a time when institutions have apparently abandoned their faculty completely.

Improved Plan S principles raise hope of more effective policies soon

Due to ongoing discussions on various (social) media, this is a mash-up of several previous posts on the strategy of ‘flipping’ our current &gt;30k subscription journals to an author-financed open access corporate business model. I consider this article processing charge (APC)-based version of ‘gold’ OA a looming threat that may deteriorate the situation even beyond the abysmal state scholarly publishing is already in right now.

How gold open access may make things worse

Public institutions the world over are required to spend their funds responsibly. Commonly, this is done by requiring them to host bids for purchases or services above a certain threshold. If you work at a public institution and have wondered, e.g., why you are only allowed to buy a computer from your computing facility which only sells one particular brand, then the answer likely is that this brand won the bidding contest.

Should public institutions not be choosing the lowest responsible bidder?

Earning credibility in post-factual science?

For our course this year I was planning a standard neurogenetic experiment. I hadn’t ever done this experiment in a course, yet, just two weeks ago I tried it once myself, with an N=1. The students would get two groups of

 Drosophila

fruit fly larvae, rovers and sitters (they wouldn’t know which was which). About ten larvae from each group would be placed on one of two yeast patches on an agar plate.

If only all science were this reproducible

The recently discussed scenario of universal gold open access brought about by simply switching the subscriptions funds at libraries to have the libraries pay for author processing charges instead, seemed like a ghoulish nightmare. One of the few scenarios worse than the desolate state we call the

 status quo

today.

Whither now, Open Access?

On May 23, the Council of the EU adopted a set of conclusions on scholarly publishing that, if followed through, would spell the end for academic publishers and scholarly journals as we know them. On the same day, the adoption was followed by a joint statement of support by the largest and most influential research organizations in Europe.

The beginning of the end for academic publishers?

For ages I have been planning to collect some of the main aspects I would like to see improved in an upgrade to the disaster we so euphemistically call an academic publishing system. In this post I’ll try to briefly sketch some of the main issues, from several different perspectives.

 As a reader:

I’d like to get a newspaper each morning that tells me about the latest developments, both in terms of general science news (aka.

What should a modern scientific infrastructure look like?

The debate over how publishers use the large “non-publication costs” (Fig. 1) that they incur and academic libraries, mainly, are funding has been going on for some time now. Above and beyond the cost items we discuss in our paper on publication costs, it has been established that investments in surveillance technology are also part of the publisher spending academic libraries are financing.

Prioritizing academic publishers

Barely a fortnight has passed since

 Science Magazine

published the outcomes of a hoax perpetrated by one of their reporters, John Bohannon. Not surprisingly, the news article was widely criticized, not the least on this obscure blog. The content was simple enough: Bohannon picked a swath of largely fake journals, submitted fake manuscripts and boasted that more than 60% of his submissions were accepted.

Not to be outdone, Nature Magazine rejects data, publishes opinion

It is one of these rare events when I can post a video of one of my own talks. This one was in Berlin earlier this year, organized by The Lost Lectures in a very unusual venue, the Stattbad Wedding:    I’m planning to work more closely together with our computing center here to be able to record at least the lectures I give in English here at the university. So maybe there will be some more videos here, soon.

Video: Free will as an evolved brain function

Flashback: What can the spine teach us about learning?

Flashback: The neurobiology of operant conditioning

In our new lab here in Regensburg, we are currently re-establishing the method of confocal microscopy. To start with, we used the fly lines which show a defect in the temporal structure of their spontaneous behavior (a project of one of our graduate students). this fly line uses two transgenic constructs (c105 and c232) to drive expression in specified neurons in the fly brain, i.e., the merged expression patterns of c105 and c232.

A wonderful example of Open Science

To my knowledge, no neuroscientist hypothesizes that there is magic in our heads. However, it appears this is a hypothesis that flies by the editors at the New York Times.

Free will:  it’s not what you think it is

Our lab is looking for a PhD student interested in the molecular mechanisms of operant self-learning, a form of motor learning.

Looking for a PhD student

There have been many discussions about the march for science, pro and con. Some of them have made me doubt the utility of the march, some have made me fear unintended consequences, again others seemed tangential and petty. In these past months, I have struggled to articulate my own reasons why I feel the urge to march for science. Today, I start to see two main reasons to march for science.

Why I march

“an academic career, in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts, creates a danger of intellectual superficiality”

Albert Einstein Isaacson W (2008) Einstein (His Life and Universe) (Simon and Schuster, New York), 1st Ed, p 79

On the productivity of scientists

This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we pay on average US$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO’s 900 journals costs only US$90 on average. Subtracting about 35% in publisher profits, the remaining difference between legacy and SciELO costs amount to US$3160 per article.

Are we paying US$3000 per article just for paywalls?

Over the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about so-called “predatory publishers”, i.e., those corporations which publish journals, some or all of  which purport to peer-review submitted articles, but publish articles for a fee without actual peer-review. The origin of the discussion can be traced to a list of such publishers hosted by librarian Jeffrey Beall.

Predatory Priorities

This year marks the 12th anniversary of the publication of this legendary letter to the editor in the Journal of systems and Software:  Nothing really has changed in a dozen years, it seems

12 year anniversary of angry letter to scientific journal editor

bjoern.brembs.blog

##### More and more experts are calling for the broken and destructive academic journal system to be replaced with modern solutions. This post summarizes why and how this task can now be accomplished. It was first [published](https://www.jmwiarda.de/2021/10/06/die-dreifaltigkeit-des-versagens/) in German on the blog of journalist Jan-Martin Wiarda. {#more-and-more-experts-are-calling-for-the-broken-and-destructive-academic-journal-system-to-be-replaced-with-modern-solutions.-this-post-summarizes-why-and-how-this-task-can-now-be-accomplished.-it-was-first-published-in-german-on-the-blog-of-journalist-jan-martin-wiarda. .wp-block-heading}

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**Front cover of**  the now-vanished  *Australasian Journal of Bone &
Joint Medicine* . Source: Scan from the-scientist.com website  

SOMETIMES PAPER IS USEFUL: The [gritty
scan](https://images.the-scientist.com/pdfs/blogs/MSD0503540027.pdf)
above from The Scientist's website is one of the few traces left of the
Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine. The journal was part of a
bundle of [fake
journals](https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/06/elsevier-fake-journal-tally-now-9.html)
that the academic publisher Elsevier offered as peer-reviewed journals,
but which were actually paid advertisements -- including for the drug
Vioxx from the pharmaceutical company Merck, which was withdrawn from
the market [after unreported deaths surfaced and were
litigated](https://www.drug-injury.com/druginjurycom/2009/04/the-tale-of-mercks-fake-medical-journal-as-told-at-vioxx-trial-in-australia.html). 

The nine fake magazines are just one example of decades of exploitation
of science by academic publishers: From their attempts to either
criminalize Open Access via the *[Research Works
Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act)* or [discrediting
it with PR](https://www.nature.com/articles/445347a), to
[fighting](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160718/02211935003/just-as-open-competitor-to-elseviers-ssrn-launches-ssrn-accused-copyright-crackdown.shtml)
*green open access*, to [going behind the backs
of](https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-uc-split-publishing-giant-elsevier)
negotiating partners, or, currently,
[surveilling](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2021/09/algorithmic-employment-decisions-in-academia/)
scientists by installing tracking technologies on their publishing
platforms -- as well as constructing a new Silk Road of Science
Communication through
[collaboration](https://unherd.com/2021/06/beijings-useful-idiots/) with
Chinese authorities. At a time when the political culture (and tribal)
wars have spilled over into the field of science and when trust in the
honesty and reliability of research has become more important than ever,
the scholarly publication system through which science enters the
public, is becoming more and more dubious.

Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, for the biggest publishers, their
publications have only played a relatively minor role for about ten
years now. Long-term pricing schemes have provided them with steady
revenue that exceed publication costs by [around a factor of
ten](https://f1000research.com/articles/10-20/v2). This windfall has
been filling their war chests for numerous acquisitions that have
enabled the publishers to rebrand themselves as *data analytics
businesses*, analogous to the large Internet companies. The purchased
tools now span the entire research life cycle: Databases, electronic
laboratory notebooks, analysis tools, authoring systems and
bibliometrics are linked with the publishing platforms to create a
"[live trap for
researchers](https://www.forschung-und-lehre.de/politik/das-schicksal-von-open-science-steht-auf-dem-spiel-3902/)"
from which data can be continuously extracted in order to monetize them.

Ireland's Science Foundation, for example, has just [signed
Elsevier](https://www.irishtimes.com/sponsored/innovation-partner-profiles/propelling-ireland-to-first-mover-status-in-research-and-innovation-1.4655112)
to analyze its future direction, and no one asked where the "vast array
of data" that the company brought with it, actually came from.

## A trinity of failures: reliability, affordability, functionality {#a-trinity-of-failures-reliability-affordability-functionality .wp-block-heading}

This development leads to a trinity of failures in the academic
publication infrastructures:

**o The systemic pernicious incentives of *publish or perish* fuel the
replication crisis in many disciplines:** publications in the most
renowned journals promote careers, but at the same time the most
[unreliable
science](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full)
is published there.

**o The commercialization of Open Access turns the long-standing
[serials crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis) into an
article crisis:** the costs rise inexorably if only the direction of the
payments is turned from reading to publishing and the system otherwise
remains under the regime of monopolists (which have long since outgrown
the status of major publishers), and continues to provide profits free
from competition.

**o The focus of the ex-publishers on user data, of researchers on
publications and of institutions on cash flow and rankings led to a
functionality crisis** in which some of the most basic digital
functionalities remain out of reach for research objects.

## We can now switch at any time {#we-can-now-switch-at-any-time .wp-block-heading}

Precisely because the scientific journals are at the center of this
trinity of failures, experts have been calling for a modernization of
information infrastructures in science for at least 15 years. In fact,
the first calls for radical reform can be traced
[all](https://richardpoynder.co.uk/Hilf_Interview.pdf)
[the](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2012.00019/full)
[way](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11878057.pdf)
[back](https://www.physik.uni-oldenburg.de/conferences/crisp97/roosendaal.html)
to the the late 1990s. Several possible alternatives are now available,
such that we could switch at any time now.

Out of these alternatives, let's pick the publication platform "Open
Research Europe" (ORE) as only one example. Researchers funded by the
European Union publish in ORE free of charge and open access. ORE is a
platform owned by the EU and not by a publisher. The EU can replace the
publication service provider with a different one if it is not satisfied
with the provider. This creates real competition for publication
services that is impossible in the reputation-based journal system. ORE
is part of the "Open Research Central" (ORC) service, in which
publication platforms such as ORE are aggregated into a common
literature corpus, so that all institutions can, in principle, find
their place here. 

The academic publishers were already a platform economy long before the
well-known Internet companies adapted this principle in order to secure
their dominant market position. Also the legacy publishers abuse their
unassailable position in the scientific system, which links publications
with the collection of metrics of prestige. Long before services like
ORC were developed, it was therefore clear that a journal replacement
would have to make a clean cut with this logic of the platform economy:
because it locks-in scientific communication in a similar way how
WhatsApp and other messengers lock-in private communication -- even
though before these messengers there were already protocols and
standards for e-mail that enabled the exchange of service providers. The
recent Facebook downtime again [reminds us
all](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211005/11290647705/facebooks-downtime-why-protocols-are-more-resilient-than-centralized-platforms.shtml)
that [protocols and
standards](https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech)
are superior to platforms.

Consequently, the traditional magazines must be replaced by a
decentralized, resilient, evolvable network where everything is
connected by open standards and protocols, that much has been clear for
at least two decades now. Such a network allows for seamless switching
from one provider to another under the control of the scientific
community and would allow the journal article as the only scientific
output that "counts", to fade into the background. Instead, the focus
would then be on the interwoven web of [text, data and
code](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2014/03/what-is-the-difference-between-text-data-and-code/),
which would provide a much better orientation function for scientific
knowledge than the journals have ever been able to do. The concept
behind services like ORC is aimed precisely at developing such a
decentralized information infrastructure.

## It can work without slaughter {#it-can-work-without-slaughter .wp-block-heading}

Academic journals are far from such an infrastructure and are therefore
either considered [already
dead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhIEkq2PSF0&t=1325s), or one would
like to ensure that they will be soon: "[Slaying the
journals](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GFISlF5TieCuA6jDYkYlNWaEpuEYrr_zTmaVpTfBg4A/edit)"
is the slogan of one initiative, and in view of the painful experiences
with journals over the decades, this version of "*eat the rich*" will
certainly sound attractive to a number of scholars.

Not invoking any kind of slaughter, we have recently posted our own
[detailed proposal for a
solution](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5526634) that contains two
novel approaches for tackling the trinity of failures:

- First, we propose that research funders expand the existing minimum
 requirements for the infrastructure of recipient institutions, namely
 by the decentralized information infrastructures mentioned above. In
 that way, the journal alternatives become the staple of good (and
 ultimately more prestigious) scientific practice. The decades-long
 standstill in digital infrastructures at academic institution evinces
 that these modernization incentives are obviously needed in order to
 phase out funding of the overpriced and outdated journals and instead
 invest in modern technologies. 
- Second, we suggest to establish open standards and open source norms
 that guarantee an efficiently functioning market and prevent further
 monopolies on scientific tools or output. This is elementary because
 so far the solutions developed from the scientific community have been
 bought up by the relevant players so that no alternative ecosystems
 can develop. Such open standards already exist and promise, like the
 FAIR principles, to ensure scientific quality and good practice. In
 order to expand, secure and enforce these standards and norms, we
 propose setting up a standardization body like the World Wide Web
 Consortium (W3C) -- under the governance of the scientific community,
 to enable the development of open scientific infrastructures that
 support the entire research process.

In the long-standing discussion about an academic journal replacement,
opposition has traditionally been voiced by referring to journal
prestige, the guidance it offers, and how this issue could not be
resolved without journals. However, this argument misses two essential
aspects: First, the reputation of the journals lacks any [empirical
basis](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full)
and therefore does not represent a valid source for evaluations. To
combat the wide-spread misuse of journal prestige, initiatives have
sprung up such as the San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessment,
to which now both the German funder DFG and the European Research
Council are now signatories. Second, we know from the data that the
ex-publishers sell, that there is, of course, an endless number of
quantitative and qualitative evaluation options that are based entirely
on the researchers' daily interactions with their digital research
objects. However, these fine-grained data are not in the hands of
science, but in the possession of the ex-publishers, who, as the
chairwoman of the German Council for Information Infrastructures, Petra
Gehring, [recently
wrote](https://www.forschung-und-lehre.de/politik/das-schicksal-von-open-science-steht-auf-dem-spiel-3902/),
"consider the entire intellectual cycle of publicly funded and hence
free research, as their future product". Soon, such [algorithmic
employment
decisions](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2021/09/algorithmic-employment-decisions-in-academia/)
may make the misuse of journal rank seem benign in comparison.

## Will scholarship keep repeating the same mistakes? {#will-scholarship-keep-repeating-the-same-mistakes .wp-block-heading}

The Irish example can serve to illustrate Gehring's tough statement:
"The globalized struggle for profitable markets that these new forms of
value creation offer, was not recognized." It would be downright absurd
for publicly funded science to repeat the same mistake now also with
research and user data, as it did with publications: first the taxpayer
pays for the production and then again when science buys back its own
product. If the current system were to be continued, scholars would
again be at the mercy of the corporations, and neither could the funding
agencies ensure that society benefits from the knowledge and the
potential for added-value in the data.

The current debate about digital sovereignty makes no sense without a
decisive redirection of funds away from journals and towards open
infrastructures and their upgrade towards a basis for building
reputation. After 30 years of stagnation, this redirection would finally
put an end to the trinity of failures in the academic publication
system.

*I am grateful to Renke Siems who drafted the first version of the
German article and who insisted on more diplomatic language than I
usually use.*

In his fantastic Peters Memorial Lecture on occasion of receiving
[CNI](https://www.cni.org/)'s Paul Evan Peters award, Herbert Van de
Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory described my calls to drop
subscriptions as "radical" and "extremist" (starting at about minute
58):

Regardless of what Herbert called my views, this is a must-see
presentation in which Herbert essentially presents the technology and
standards behind the
[functionalities](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/04/what-should-a-modern-scientific-infrastructure-look-like/)
I have been asking for and have been trying to get implemented for the
last decade or so. Apparently, where we differ is only that I actually
want to use the functionalities and concepts he describes in his
presentation and, consequently, I am naive or idealistic enough to think
of ways to get there. If this makes me a radical, so be it: *radix* is
Latin for 'root' and I try to tackle the root of our problems.

Right before he talks about me, he also mentions David Lewis' [2.5%
Commitment](https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/14063), which I
also support. In Cameron Neylon's
[critique](https://cameronneylon.net/blog/against-the-2-5-commitment/)
of Lewis' approach one can find an important realization that bears
quoting and repeating as it is one of the main obstacles why Herbert
thinks we will never have the tools he describes in his presentation.
Cameron writes:

> That in turn is the problem in the scholarly communication space. Such
> shared identities and notions of consent do not exist. The somewhat
> unproductive argument over whether it is the libraries responsibility
> to cut subscriptions or academics responsibility to ask them to
> illustrates this. It is actually a shared responsibility, but one that
> is not supported by sense of shared identity and purpose, certainly
> not of shared governance. And notably success stories in cutting
> subscriptions all feature serious efforts to *form and strengthen*
> shared identity and purpose within an institution before taking
> action.

Cameron very astutely dissects one of the main sociological issues
holding us back: scholars do not share a common identity any more, just
as librarians and faculty do not and just as different scholarly
institutions do not share an identity with each other. So pernicious an
effect have the neoliberal mantras of "competition" and "every man for
himself" had on scholarship, that it has all but completely
disintegrated into either warring factions or competing careerists.
University rankings provide a clear metaphor for scholarly institutions
as players in a competition for whatever the neoliberal ideologues want
them to compete for: funds, human resources or prestige (aka. the
scholarly fetish
"[excellence](https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms2016105)"). If you
talk to current university presidents, deans or provosts or read what
they have written, it seems as if most of them have completely absorbed
the neoliberal cool-aid and made themselves the defenders of
individuality, competition and external 'incentives', with the
underlying assumption that without those concepts, everybody in academia
would just sit in their comfy chairs and collect tax funds, twiddling
their thumbs. Apparently, carrots and sticks are the only way to squeeze
excellence out of otherwise lazy, selfish and parasitic scholars.
Ironically, election data suggest that a large section of these
scholarly politicians, if they are representative of their academic
peers at large, may go on to vote for left-of-center parties or
candidates who vow to combat exactly the neoliberal policies they so
ardently defend in their day jobs.

Be that as it may, apparently even for an advocate and expert like
Herbert, asking scholars to cooperate in order to achieve a greater,
public good, has now become sufficient grounds to label someone who
strives for cooperation as a "radical" or an "extremist". If indeed he
is correct and in 2018 asking scholars to behave cooperatively, rather
than competitively, is something so exotic and outrageous, scholarship
has deserved the state it currently is in.

These thoughts have reminded me of an old cartoon I've been showing in
many of my presentations. Now, I'm posting a disambiguated version of
the cartoon (sorry, I can't provide a source for the cartoon, created it
from a photograph I once was sent) that I hope explains in an
entertaining way why dropping all subscriptions and buying Herbert's
solutions from the money instead isn't extreme at all (click for larger
image):

[![](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/busy2.png){.aligncenter
.wp-image-1678 loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="602" height="308"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/busy2.png 802w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/busy2-300x153.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/busy2-768x393.png 768w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/busy2-50x26.png 50w"
sizes="(max-width: 602px) 100vw, 602px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/busy2.png)All
scholars and those working to support scholars share a common identity.
Cameron is spot on in that all too few are realizing that we all strive
for better scholarship, for more knowledge. Acquiring knowledge for its
own sake is one of the very few behaviors that humans do not share with
other animals and all scholars share a particular enthusiasm for
knowledge. In fact, the German word for scholarship is "Wissenschaft",
literally translated with "knowledge creation". In this argument, it
doesn't matter if scholar A is at institution X and librarian B is at
institution Y -- they are all scholars.

I must assume (not having been there) that this sense of communalism (to
use Merton's term) and shared identity (to use Cameron's term) must have
been much more prevalent in the early 1990s when institutions invested
in routers, cables, computers and other hardware (and time!) for
something that nobody knew what it could do: the WWW. I often wonder
what faculty would have said around 1992 (first time I had an email
address), when asked by a computing center employee: "wouldn't you like
a new service, let's call it 'email' by which your students could reach
you 24/7?". I would tend to believe that if that had been the mindset of
infrastructure experts at the time, we would not have any internet
today.

Instead, infrastructure experts at the time embraced the new technology,
were competent enough to realize which standards worked and would be
sustainable long into the future and started spending some serious money
-- regardless of whether faculty expressed any interest in using any of
this technology. In contrast, today, we stand to save money from
adopting the standards Herbert talks about and yet thinking about how to
practically achieve adoption of such common standards is grounds for
being labeled an extremist. How dare I suggest implementing modern
technology without asking faculty first! Today, we have similarly
competent experts like Herbert, but they seem to despair, expecting this
modern technology to never arrive for scholarship, instead of doing what
their predecessors have done: embrace the new technology and the
potential it brings and implement it. What a difference 25 years make:
the common good was sufficient cause for spending money in the 1990s,
when today it is seen as 'extremist' just to try and save money while
promoting the common good.

Today, librarians and other infrastructure experts dare not implement
modern technology without fear of reprisals: after all, faculty are not
colleagues any more who share a common identity, they are customers and
librarians are service providers in this corporation only called
'university' for dusty historical reasons. Clearly, single institutions
cannot act without risking league table standings or the competitiveness
of their labor force. Everyone is busy chasing prestige in an absurd
artificial competition where "excellence" is the only thing that counts,
but can't itself be counted. Some of Monty Python's most absurd sketches
appear rational in comparison.

When done competently, dropping subscriptions today doesn't risk
anybody's livelihoods or league standings any more. Thanks to a [growing
set of
tools](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/12/so-your-institute-went-cold-turkey-on-publisher-x-what-now/),
journals remain accessible during the transition period. The old adage
"everybody who needs access has access", once used to resist open access
campaigning, has finally become true -- without subscriptions. We just
need to take advantage of the [new
circumstances](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2017/09/with-the-access-issue-temporarily-solved-what-now/).
After the transition, nobody needs access to journals that do not exist
any more, so the enabling properties of this toolset are decisive here
and the set not comprising a solution becomes irrelevant: we have the
solutions, as Herbert so eloquently explains. What we need are enabling
technologies. We have those now, too. Most journals won't survive being
cut off from all funding.

And yet, faculty continue to chase journal spots as vehicles for their
discoveries from which they hope to harvest sufficient prestige just to
keep going. Without removing this source of prestige, faculty and
students/postdocs have little other choice than to reject the better
vehicles we now could offer. This is the main reason why 25 years of
campaigning for scholarly infrastructure reform have barely brought
scholarship to embrace the web of 1995 (in the words of Jon Tennant).
Journals, the square wheels, are the main physical obstacles to the
technology Herbert describes in his presentation. They need to go. That
is a rational solution that targets the root of the problem. If scholars
can find the Higgs Boson, I'm confident they can find other sources of
prestige once journals have ceased to exist -- should they decide that
chasing prestige is a functionality they wish to replicate.

Coincidentally, journal subscriptions also usurp most of the funds
required for implementing Herbert's solutions -- the round wheels.
Canceling subscriptions hence serves two main purposes: removing the
main obstacle for scholars using modern information technology and
freeing up funds to implement said technology: removing the square
wheels and replacing them with round wheels. Subscription journals are
the keystone in the current scholarly communication arch: remove them
and it all falls apart. Any journal-like functionality that scholars
value is easily recreated with modern technology, but with [new
functionalities](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/04/what-should-a-modern-scientific-infrastructure-look-like/)
and few, if any, of the current
[disadvantages](https://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full)
and [unintended
consequences](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/01/even-without-retractions-top-journals-publish-the-least-reliable-science/).

Finally, with scholars so busy chasing excellence, chances are slim to
none they will ever ask for round wheels, as so many librarians I speak
to seem to hope for.


There can be little doubt that the defunding of public academic
institutions is a main staple of populist movements today. Whether it is
Trump's budget director [directly
asking](https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/12/21/14012552/trump-budget-director-research-science-mulvaney)
if one really needs publicly funded science at all, or the planned
defunding of the endowments of [arts and
humanities](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/donald-trump-budget-cuts-arts-humanities-nea-neh-npr-cbs-president-a7536741.html)
or the initiatives to completely
[abolish](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/02/donald-trump-plans-to-abolish-environmental-protection-agency)
the EPA and other science agencies. Also across the pond, there are
plenty of populist parties and other Trump fans who certainly also
strive to mimic their idol and rid their countries of intellectuals who
may see through their shenanigans, or use evidence to oppose their
policies.

For decades, these anti-intellectual forces have been fighting science
tooth and nail around the globe. Recently, in the UK, a website, whose
former boss is now the main advisor to Trump in the White House, titled:
"[When you hear a scientist talk about 'peer-review', you should reach
for your
Browning](https://web.archive.org/web/20170222013105/https://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/10/28/hear-scientist-talk-peer-review-reach-browning/)"
(link to archive.org snapshot). The author argues that the scholarly
literature we refer to when making scientific claims was written by
"charlatans and chancers".

The horrifying aspect of this article is that from their perspective,
this isn't even 'fake news'. Already in 2005, John Ioannidis found that
"[most published research findings are
false](https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)".
Since then, numerous reports have been published which seem to suggest
that our scholarly literature is much less reliable than one would
desire. While the scope of irreproducibility is not yet clear, the
overwhelming [majority of scientists
believes](https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970)
the problems are bad enough to justify the term 'replication crisis':

[![](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/reproducibility-graphic-online11-300x255.jpeg){.aligncenter
.size-medium .wp-image-1517 decoding="async" width="300" height="255"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/reproducibility-graphic-online11-300x255.jpeg 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/reproducibility-graphic-online11-50x42.jpeg 50w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/reproducibility-graphic-online11.jpeg 630w"
sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/reproducibility-graphic-online11.jpeg)

Besides criminal intent and inadequate training, one major factor in the
potential unreliability of our scholarly literature is socioeconomic in
nature. The two factors [deemed to contribute
most](https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970)
to irreproducible research were selective reporting and the pressure to
publish:

[![](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/reproducibility-graphic-online41-202x300.jpg){.aligncenter
.size-medium .wp-image-1516 decoding="async" width="202" height="300"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/reproducibility-graphic-online41-202x300.jpg 202w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/reproducibility-graphic-online41-34x50.jpg 34w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/reproducibility-graphic-online41.jpg 630w"
sizes="(max-width: 202px) 100vw, 202px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/reproducibility-graphic-online41.jpg)

In an attempt to provide accountability and to combat biases in
scholarship, we have introduced quantitative measures to assess
individual scholars. Most widely used in hiring, promoting and funding
scholars are two general aspects: quality and productivity of scholars.
To quantify quality, individuals are commonly assessed by where they
publish, for productivity, how much they publish. Both of these
quantifications have been shown to be highly problematic, especially in
today's hyper-competitive scholarly environment.

In the fields where scholars publish their experiments in journals, it
has been shown that the most [prestigious journals publish the least
reliable
science](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/01/even-without-retractions-top-journals-publish-the-least-reliable-science).
So by preferentially hiring, promoting and funding scientists who
publish in these journals, we are also rewarding unreliability, to some
extent. Similarly, if we count the number of journal articles with novel
findings, we are selecting for [underpowered
studies](https://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/9/160384)
with [erroneous
conclusions](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2000995).

Taken together, these data suggest that even if the reliability of our
current literature turns out to be higher than the initial reports
suggest, we are currently running a system poised to make it less
reliable every year. Consequently, inasmuch as anti-science forces seize
on the unreliability of the scholarly literature to support their
defunding plans, the horrifying possibility emerges, that every
stakeholder -- academic, librarian or publisher -- who, willingly or
not, props up the current journal system, may be inadvertently
supporting anti-intellectual agendas.


There can be little doubt that the defunding of public academic institutions is a main staple of populist movements today. Whether it is Trump’s budget director directly asking if one really needs publicly funded science at all, or the planned defunding of the endowments of arts and humanities or the initiatives to completely abolish the EPA and other science agencies.

Are we inadvertently supporting the defunding of public science?

Over the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about so-called
"predatory publishers", i.e., those corporations which publish journals,
some or all of  which purport to peer-review submitted articles, but
publish articles for a fee without actual peer-review. The origin of the
discussion can be traced to a list of such publishers hosted by
librarian [Jeffrey Beall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Beall).
Irrespective of the already questionable practice of putting entire
corporations on a black list (one bad journal and you're out?), I have
three main positions in this discussion:

1\. Beall's list used to be a useful tool tracking a problem that nobody
really had on their radar. Unfortunately, Jeffrey Beall himself recently
opted to [disqualify
himself](https://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525) from
reasoned debate, making the content of the list look more like a
[political hit
list](https://walt.lishost.org/2016/01/trust-me-the-apparent-case-for-90-of-bealls-list-additions/)
than a serious scholarly analysis. It appears that this approach may
still be rescued if it were pursued by an organization more reliable
than Beall.

2\. There are many problems with publishers that eventually need to be
solved. With respect to the pertinent topic, at least two main problem
areas spring to mind.

2a. There is a group of publishers which publish the
[least](https://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full)
[reliable](https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002273) science.
These publishers claim to perform a superior form of peer review (e.g.
by denigrating other forms of peer-review as "[peer-review
light](https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080702/full/454011a.html)"), but
in fact most of the submitted articles are never seen by peers (but
instead by the professional editors of these journals). For this
minority of articles that are indeed peer-reviewed, acceptance rate is
about 40%. Sometimes this practice keeps other scientists unnecessarily
busy, such as in replicability projects or \#arseniclife. Sometimes this
practice has deleterious effects on society, such as the recent LaCour
or Stapel cases. Sometimes this practice leads indirectly to human
death, such as in irreproducible cancer research. Sometimes this
practice leads directly to human death, such as in the MMR/autism
case.  
These publishers charge the taxpayer on average US\$5000 per article and
try to use paywalls to prevent the taxpayer from
[checking](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1516564) the
article for potential errors.

2b. There is a group of publishers which similarly claim to perform
peer-review but in fact do not perform any peer-review at all.
Apparently, it seems as if they aren't even performing much editorial
review. The acceptance rate in these journals is commonly a little more
than twice as high as in the journals from 2a, i.e. \~100%. Other than
the (likely very few) duped authors, to my knowledge there are no other
harmed parties, but I may have missed them.  
These publishers charge the taxpayer on average \~US\$300 per article
and do allow the taxpayer to check the articles for potential errors.

3\. Clearly, both 2a and 2b need to be resolved, there can be no debate
about that. Given the number and magnitude of issues with regard to
infrastructure reform in general and publishing reform in particular, it
is prudent to prioritize the problems. Given the larger harm the
publishers in 2a inflict on the society at large as well as the
scientific community, I would suggest to prioritize 2a over 2b. In fact,
looking back over what little we have accomplished over the past 10
years of infrastructure reform, it doesn't appear we have too many
resources left to waste on 2b at this particular time. Moreover, if
focusing on 2a were to lead to the demise of the journal container as so
many of us hope, 2b will be solved without any further efforts.


There is an interesting study out in the journal PNAS: "[Evaluating big
deal journal
bundles](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/11/1403006111)". The
study details the disparity in negotiation skills between different US
institutions when haggling with publishers about subscription pricing.
For *Science Magazine*, John Bohannon [of "journal sting"
fame](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2013/10/science-magazine-rejects-data-publishes-anecdote/),
wrote a [news
article](https://news.sciencemag.org/economics/2014/06/how-much-did-your-university-pay-your-journals)
about the study, which did not really help him gain any respect back
from all that he lost with his ill-fated sting-piece. While the study
itself focused on journal pricing among US-based institutions,
Bohannon's news article, where one would expect a little broader
perspective than in the commonly more myopic original papers, fails to
mention that even the 'best' big deals are grossly overcharging the
taxpayer. Here is the figure of the article, apparently provided by the
PNAS authors:

[![Journal subscription
prices](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/si-JournalPricing.jpg){.aligncenter
.size-full .wp-image-588 loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="600"
height="518"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/si-JournalPricing.jpg 600w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/si-JournalPricing-300x259.jpg 300w"
sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/si-JournalPricing.jpg)

This graph shows that some universities pay more for subscriptions than
others. I'm not sure what exactly -130% is supposed to mean. I take it
that UMass didn't receive money from Springer, but still paid \$168,224.
So I take this graph to mean that there are differences of up to 200%
between what libraries are paying publishers, i.e, one university may
pay up to 200% on top of what another library is paying for the same
content, e.g. when one pays one million, another has to pay three. I'm
not entirely sure that this is the correct reading of the Y-axis, but
it's the best I can do for now.

Being charged 200% more than other libraries for the same service may
hurt, but consider what we would be paying if we wouldn't use
publishers, but instead published all our papers in a system like
[SciELO](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2013/06/cut-out-the-parasitic-middlemen/):

::: {#attachment_582 .wp-caption .aligncenter style="width: 490px"}
[![Comparison between legacy subscription publishers and SciELO in US\$
prices per article
published.](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/scieloprice.png){.size-full
.wp-image-582 loading="lazy" decoding="async"
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-582" width="480" height="548"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/scieloprice.png 480w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/scieloprice-262x300.png 262w"
sizes="(max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/scieloprice.png)

Comparison between legacy subscription publishers and SciELO in US\$
prices per article published.
:::

According to a [*Nature* article citing
Outsell](https://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676),
we currently pay US\$5,000 per article to prevent public access to it,
while the overall cost of a publicly accessible article in SciELO is
only
[US\$90](https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/cjhe/article/view/479).
Try to explain that to a taxpayer on the street: you pay \$5,000 for
each article you're not allowed to read, instead of just \$90 for each
article you could read. In the light of such numbers, it is a sign of a
truly warped perspective when people can still discuss a few percentage
points more or less for what they pay to block public access to
research. Because this is what libraries do by paying subscription fees:
they pay to block public access to research.

Be that as it may, if I were to calculate any percentages from these
differences, I could say that subscriptions are in excess of 5000% more
expensive than SciELO or that SciELO would only cost institutions 1.8%
of what they are currently paying for the same service, or that we are
overpaying legacy publishers by 98.2%. So either way you see it, we
could pay less than 2% of the current cost or are currently paying more
than 5000% too much -- compared to these figures, the 200% seems like a
totally negligible number to me. In the words of *Science Magazine*: no
matter what your university paid for subscriptions, they definitely got
a horrible deal -- even if it was the best deal in the country.

Nevertheless, given the effective distraction machine that *Science
Magazine* is turning into, I expect people will discuss the irrelevant
200% much more extensively, than the crucial 1.8% or 5000%.

What we should instead discuss is the following:

Why are we paying to block public access to research, when we could save
billions by allowing access?
