Björn Brembs

So this is essentially what happened instead of us sitting down and thinking how we could spend our money in the most technologically savvy way to the benefit of science, scholars and society. A generation later, roughly US$300 billion poorer and none the wiser, it seems.

The ultimate Open Access timeline

tl;dr: So far, I can’t see any principal difference between our three kinds of intellectual output: software, data and texts.   I admit I’m somewhat surprised that there appears to be a need to write this post in 2014. After all, this is not really the dawn of the digital age any more.

What is the difference between text, data and code?

Lately, there has been some public dreaming going on about how one could just switch to open access publishing by converting subscription funds to author processing charges (APCs) and we’d have universal open access and the whole world would rejoice. Given that current average APCs have been found to be somewhat lower than current subscription costs (approx.

What happens to publishers that don’t maximize their profit?

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!

While the first day (day 2, day 3) was dominated by philosophy, mathematics and other abstract discussions of chance, this day of our symposium started with a distinct biological focus.

 Martin Heisenberg, Chance in brain and behavior

First speaker for this second day on the symposium on the role of chance in the living world was my thesis supervisor and mentor, Martin Heisenberg.

Chance in animate nature, day 2

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

*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.

Flashback: Programming Free Will – creative robots

For 14 years, the main research funding agency in Germany, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has stated in its guidelines that submitted grant proposals will be assessed primarily on the basis of their

 content

, rather than counting the applicants’ previous publications. However, not all of DFG’s panels seem to be on board.

Research assessment: new panels, new luck?

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

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

Over the weekend, I received the following short message from a Hotmail account:  This email is full of signs that the student may not have been all that interested in any information or discourse, but instead trying to make some sort of ‘gotcha’ statement. Curiously, the author first states that their scientific training is lacking and then they disagree with a scientific position.

How not to contact faculty as student

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?

In what area of scholarship are repeated replications of always the same experiment every time published and then received with surprise, only to immediately be completely ignored until the next study? Point in case from an area that ought to be relevant to almost every single scientist on the planet: research evaluation.

How scientific are scientists, really?

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

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

Yesterday, Alex Kacelnik published yet another fascinating discovery – one of many over the years out of his lab. This time, they show how birds can pick even five consecutive locks to get to a food reward:  According to the authors, the birds solve this problem by trial and error, i.e., in the operant, goal-directed way, which is the learning mechanism we study in our lab.

…and now for some lock-picking cockatoos

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?

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?

I usually don’t write about politics, but there has been one or the other exception to this rule in the last 12 years of this blog. This time, I’ve been missing one particular response to the various terrorist attacks in recent times, perhaps one of the few readers of this obscure blog has found it somewhere and can point me in this direction?

Have you seen this response to terrorism anywhere?

UPDATE

: I’m still not completely sure I understood Churchland accurately, but there are comments suggesting I may just have completely misunderstood her replies to the interviewer. Read the interview and judge for yourself! I really like Patricia Churchland.

[updated]Churchland: “Ignore science and live a make-believe life!”

In the process of migrating content from the old site to WordPress, I’m also moving some articles from there and re-publishing them here as posts. This one is such a case, originally published on December 7, 2006.

Brains as output/input systems

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 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

Rejection is one of the unpleasant but inevitable components of life. There are positive components to rejection: they build character, they force you to deal with negativity and sometimes they force you to change your life to avoid future rejections.

The cost of the rejection-resubmission cycle

At seemingly every possibility in a discussion on peer-review, people apparently feel the need to emphasize that in the current model reviewers (or most academic editors handling peer-review) are not being paid.

Peer-review is not free – it’s a subsidy for publishers

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?

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

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

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

Just before Christmas 2019, the Washington Post reported, based on “people familiar with the matter”, that the US Justice Department were investigating the Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan for potentially “working with Russian intelligence to steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors”. Besides such a highly unusual connection, the article also reiterated unsubstantiated (but mainly circulated by publishers) allegations that access

Is the SNSI the new PRISM?

Jeffrey “predatory journals” Beall famously catapulted himself out of any serious debate with an article in the journal TripleC, entitled “The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access”. In it, Beall claimed that OA proponents don’t care about access, but that they form an “anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with”. The article is so replete with similarly unhinged fairy

Is this Smits’ tripleC moment?

Open Access (OA) pioneer and OA journal eLife founding member and sponsor, the Max Planck Society just released a white paper (PDF) analyzing open access costs in various countries and institutions and comparing them to subscription costs. Such studies are fundamental prerequisites for evidence-based policies and informed decisions on how to proceed with bitterly needed reforms.

A study justifying waste of tax-funds?

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 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

In her recent editorial on Sci-Hub (an initiative I support), editor-in-chief of

 Science Magazine

Marcia McNutt wrote: The editorial is essentially trying to make the somewhat tenuous but not implausible case that using sci-hub may lead to subscription cancellations which, in turn, may lead to scholarly societies (like those of Dr. McNutts employer, AAAS) to miss revenue they need in order to pay for important services (such as paying

In which a Science editorial demonstrates the ineffectiveness of OA activism

Over the years, publishers have left some astonishingly frank remarks over how they see their role in serving the scholarly community with their communication and dissemination needs. This morning, I decided to cherry-pick some of them, take them out of context to create a completely unrealistic caricature of publishers that couldn’t be further from the truth.

How do academic publishers see their role?

You’d be forgiven if after reading the title of this post, you thought scholars have started to revolt against journal rank. Unfortunately, while there is DORA and of course the evidence that journal rank is like homeopathy, most researchers are still fine with ex-scientists rejecting 92% of all submitted articles and charging a grand sum of more than US$30,000 per article that they select on a whim.

Publisher selects the best open access science – authors complain

Earning credibility in post-factual science?

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

Scientists as social parasites?

Time and time again, academic publishers have managed to create the impression that publishing incurs a lot of costs which justify the outrageous prices they charge, be that US$11M p.a. for an

 Elsevier

Big Deal subscription or an article processing charge (APC) of US$5,200 for a

 Nature Communications

article.

How publishers keep fooling academics

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

As a regular user of the scholarly literature since before the internet (I started reading primary scientific literature for a high-school project around 1989), I have closely followed its digitization.

7 functionalities the scholarly literature should have

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

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?

The cost of knowledge – in 2003?

It’s the time of the year again where 30,000 neuroscientists head to the US to talk neuroscience. This year the big annual conference is in Washington, DC, one of the three cities able to host this large event. Our first poster will be up on Tuesday morning and shows results from operant self-stimulation experiments using optogenetics and dopaminergic neurons.

Heading for #SfN23 with two posters

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?

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

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?

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

“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 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

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?

Until today, I was quite proud of myself for not caving in to SIWOTI syndrome like Mike Taylor did. And then I read his post and caved in as well. What gets us so riled up is Elsevier’s latest in a long list of demonstration of what they think of the intellectual capacities of their customers. It’s precisely because it is only one in a long row that I initially didn’t feel like commenting.

Is this supposed to be the best Elsevier can muster?

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?

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

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

Random Science Video: The value of fly research

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

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?

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

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

The other day I was alerted to an interesting evaluation of international citation data. The author, Curt Rice, mentions a particular aspect of the data:  The context here is that the “bottom” refers to scientific articles that aren’t cited, assuming that no citations mean low scientific quality of that article.

Citation inflation and incompetent scientists

Genetically Separable" href="https://www.slideshare.net/brembs/wcalb14" target="_blank"&gt;Pavlovian and Skinnerian Processes are Genetically Separable

Two evolutionary conserved, fundamental learning mechanisms

Sven Fund, CEO of the German publishing house de Gruyter was recently interviewed by Richard Poynder in his widely read interview series on open access. In the interview, he first avoided answering the question if de Gruyter had ever lobbied against open access.

Is de Gruyter’s lobby-by-proxy not lobbyism?

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?

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

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

A fistful of dollars: why corporate publishers have no place in scholarly communication

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

Flashback: All brains possess free will because there is no design in biology

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.

Science, red in tooth and claw

*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 February 9, 2011: *     In this week’s journal club, we talked about an old paper from 1918!

Flashback: Nothing new 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’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 this one on Agust 31, 2011: *

SummerScienceVideo: science is real

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

The recently released development draft for SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE), authored by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in response to the OSTP memo on public access to federally funded research in the US sounds a lot like the library-based publishing system I’ve been perpetually arguing for.

SHARE: Library-based publishing becoming a reality?

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

Amazing bead chain experiment

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:
 
 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?

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

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!

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

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

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

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?

Talk about egg on face!

 Nature

“the world’s best science”

 Magazine

sets out to publish back-to-back papers on – of all topics – stem cell science.

Even the most thorough peer-review at the ‘best’ journals not up to snuff?

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?

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?

Flashback: What can the spine teach us about learning?

Flashback: The neurobiology of operant conditioning

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

After Mike Taylor kept complaining about how horrible my old e107 platform was (which obviously it isn’t: I love this CMS), I finally gave in and moved everything over to a new home. The entire brembs.net domain with all its subdomains is no longer hosted in the good old US of A, where its home was since about 2000, when I moved there myself. After almost ten years back in Germany, I’ve now brought my online presence back home as well.

A new home for bjoern.brembs.blog

I recently was sent a report from a university-wide working group on the publishing habits within the Freie Universität Berlin. I don’t think this document is available online, but I think I’m not doing anything illegal if I publish some of the survey results here. The working group polled all faculty members of the university on various questions concerning scholarly publishing.

How important is the Impact Factor?

Think, check, submit: who hasn’t heard of this mantra to help researchers navigate the jungle of commercial publishers? Who isn’t under obligation to publish in certain venues, be it because employers ask for a particular set of journals for hiring, tenure or promotion, or because of funders’ open access mandates?

How academic institutions neglect their duty

The academic journal publishing system sure feels all too often a bit like a sinking boat: we have a reproducibility leak an affordability leak a functionality leak a data leak a code leak an interoperability leak a discoverability leak a peer-review leak a long-term preservation leak a link rot leak an evaluation/assessment leak a data visualization leak … … … and even a tiny access leak still remains even after 30 years of trying to fix it.

Scholarly publishing in three cartoons

bjoern.brembs.blog

There have been repeated online discussions about my suggestion to
libraries that now would be an excellent time to [start cancelling
subscriptions](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/05/why-havent-we-already-canceled-all-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. Not even when a library once had
to cut 50% of all subscriptions. In fact, there is now a [growing list
of reports](https://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/3/tag/oa.cancellations) of
painless big deal subscription cancellations. Faculty understand, there
are limits to budgets. Faculty are resourceful in finding the
literature, even before we had so [many new
tools](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/12/so-your-institute-went-cold-turkey-on-publisher-x-what-now/)
at our disposal.

However, things are different in different countries and different
institutions and with different faculty. My experience may not be
representative. In either case, it doesn't hurt to have faculty on your
side. In fact, I strongly advocate much more close collaborations
between faculty and their librarians than we have now. At this point in
time I consider librarians our closest allies and most important
institutional partners. After all, who else would be more qualified,
predestined, even, to help us implement a [modern
infrastructure](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/04/what-should-a-modern-scientific-infrastructure-look-like/)?

I have [outlined
before](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/09/practical-roads-to-infrastructure-reform/),
why librarians are in an excellent position right now to take the next
step: the hands of faculty are pretty much tied at this point. Moreover,
that goes without saying, librarians are the most competent people in
this matter (maybe together with the few computer science faculty who
actually work in this field).

Here's a short, non-exhaustive list of arguments I think ought to be
very convincing for all but perhaps the most Luddite faculty,  in
defense of a budget shift from subscriptions to in-house infrastructure.
Of course, one would preface such a list with a short explanation as to
what is being argued:

"Dear faculty member,

as you may have heard in the news, our institution has joined a global
initiative of hundreds of other scholarly institutions which strives to
modernize our scholarly infrastructure. Our infrastructure has not
undergone extensive modernization since its inception in the early
1990s, so the modernization is long overdue. One part of the
modernization entails moving subscription funds over to infrastructure
funds. Above and beyond the technical limitations of subscription
literature (with which you are likely more than familiar), there are
many other reasons why subscriptions are among the worst technologies to
subsidize with tax funds. Here are some of the reasons why we now have
to cancel subscriptions and how you will directly benefit from the
consequences of these cancellations:

- subscription funds go to corporations that
  [waste](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2014/07/are-we-paying-us3000-per-article-just-for-paywalls/)
  \>90% of the public moneys
  [spent](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/01/how-much-should-a-scholarly-article-cost-the-taxpayer/)
  on them. Only their shareholders benefit
- you have likely endured many cancellations in the past that came
  without any added benefit to you, beyond saving your institution
  money. This time, we will use the saved money to implement
  [services](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/04/what-should-a-modern-scientific-infrastructure-look-like/)
  that will benefit you directly: they will minimize your tedious work
  with writing, reading, data management and code, so you can focus on
  your research even more. Stay tuned, these services will be presented
  shortly.
- once we have successfully transitioned, there will likely be funds
  left over, which will flow right back into your research budget
- oh, and if you use our [shiny new
  tools](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/12/so-your-institute-went-cold-turkey-on-publisher-x-what-now/),
  you won't even notice that we're canceling subscriptions, as these
  tools will fetch (almost) all your literature for you
- please pardon the dust while we remodel
- for a more exhaustive list of benefits, please see \[list of
  benefits\]
- please feel free to contact us at any time in case you feel your
  personal needs have not been addressed satisfactorily"

Of course, one would formulate these arguments a little more
professionally than I have done here, but I wanted to convey the gist of
where the thrust of the argument might go.


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

With the start of the new year 2017, [about
60](https://www.solarify.eu/2016/12/19/270-elsevier-verlag-versucht-wissenschaft-zu-erpressen/)
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](https://www.projekt-deal.de/)
consortium ([600
institutions](https://www.boersenblatt.net/artikel-elsevier_informiert_ueber_nationallizenz-gespraeche_mit_hrk.1260428.html)
in total) with the publisher. In the run-up to these negotiations, all
members of the consortium were urged to not renew their individual
subscriptions with the publisher and most institutions apparently
followed this call. As the first Elsevier offer was
[rejected](https://www.hrk.de/fileadmin/redaktion/hrk/02-Dokumente/02-02-PM/02-02-01-Englische-PM/Allianz_Verhandlungen_Elsevier_EN.pdf)
by DEAL and further negotiations have been [postponed until
2017](https://www.boersenblatt.net/artikel-elsevier_informiert_ueber_nationallizenz-gespraeche_mit_hrk.1260428.html),
the participating institutions whose individual contract runs out this
year will be without continued subscription access -- as long as they
don't cave in and broker new individual contracts.

At first, this may seem like a massive problem for all students and
faculty at these institutions. However, there are now so many
alternative access strategies, that the well-informed scholar may not
even notice much of a difference. Here are ten different options, in no
particular order (feel free to offer more in the comments):

[Keep trying to access the publisher's
site]{style="text-decoration: underline;"}: In many cases, the
institutions have signed subscription contracts with archival rights,
meaning you have access to content that once was subscribed. Moreover,
many journals offer a 'hybrid' option, meaning that some articles are
made available open access by the authors paying an extra fee. In both
cases, the publisher site will still provide you with access to the
article in question, even though your institution has not extended the
subscription.

[LOCKSS](https://www.lockss.org/): This is a solution for libraries
which did not obtain archival rights with the publisher. It keeps local
copies of subscribed content precisely for such cases. Ask your friendly
librarian if you encounter content that you know was once accessible but
is now inaccessible -- your library will likely be able to assist you to
get access via LOCKSS

[Google Scholar](https://www.lockss.org/): Most entries in a GScholar
search come not only with a non-publisher version of the article, but
even with several different access options.

[![](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/gscholar-1024x440.png){.aligncenter
.size-large .wp-image-1441 loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="520"
height="223"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/gscholar-1024x440.png 1024w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/gscholar-300x129.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/gscholar-768x330.png 768w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/gscholar-50x21.png 50w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/gscholar.png 1106w"
sizes="(max-width: 520px) 100vw, 520px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/gscholar.png)

[PubMed](https://pubmed.gov): For those of you who use PubMed, they link
to various versions, including the PMC version in their search results.
I've also asked them if they can link to other freely available
versions. In many cases, these version only become available after some
embargo period.

[![](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/pubmed-1024x291.png){.aligncenter
.size-large .wp-image-1442 loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="520"
height="148"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/pubmed-1024x291.png 1024w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/pubmed-300x85.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/pubmed-768x218.png 768w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/pubmed-50x14.png 50w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/pubmed.png 1180w"
sizes="(max-width: 520px) 100vw, 520px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/pubmed.png)

[DOAI](https://doai.io/) / [oaDOI](https://oadoi.org/): You can copy and
paste the digital object identifier (DOI) of any article into services
which locate a freely available version for you. DOAI and oaDOI search
preprint archives, researchgate or institutional repositories for
accessible versions.

[![](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/doai-1024x253.png){.aligncenter
.size-large .wp-image-1443 loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="520"
height="128"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/doai-1024x253.png 1024w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/doai-300x74.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/doai-768x190.png 768w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/doai-50x12.png 50w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/doai.png 1674w"
sizes="(max-width: 520px) 100vw, 520px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/doai.png)

[\#icanhazpdf](https://twitter.com/hashtag/icanhazpdf): For Twitter
users, this hashtag attached to a link to the article will alert other
users of your need for this article. If someone has access, they can
send you the article.

[![](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/icanhazpdf-227x300.png){.aligncenter
.size-medium .wp-image-1444 loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="227"
height="300"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/icanhazpdf-227x300.png 227w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/icanhazpdf-38x50.png 38w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/icanhazpdf.png 601w"
sizes="(max-width: 227px) 100vw, 227px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/icanhazpdf.png)

[Article payment]{style="text-decoration: underline;"}: For quick (but
not free!) access to an article, just grit your teeth and pay for the
article (buy or rent). Some institutions are already reimbursing such
costs.

[![](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rent-300x268.png){.aligncenter
.size-medium .wp-image-1445 loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300"
height="268"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rent-300x268.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rent-50x45.png 50w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rent.png 657w"
sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rent.png)[Contact
author]{style="text-decoration: underline;"}: A less speedy option is to
contact the corresponding author and ask them for a copy of the article.
I remember doing this via snail mail in the days before the internet --
and receiving "offprint-requests" as pre-printed postcard forms (filled
in with type-writer) for my articles. That's how old I am.

[Inter-library-loan]{style="text-decoration: underline;"}: Even if [more
and more
institutions](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/05/why-havent-we-already-canceled-all-subscriptions/)
are [dropping](https://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/3/tag/oa.cancellations)
their big deal subscriptions, there are still many subscriptions around.
Your library can likely get you the article via the many different
versions of inter-library-loan ("Fernleihe" in German. In Germany, there
is also a fee-based library service called
[subito](https://www.subito-doc.de/) which operates on a network of
libraries. Very convenient and effective -- and cheap if your
institution is paying for it). If you don't know how to use this
service, ask your friendly librarian for assistance.

[Sci-Hub](https://sci-hub.io/): If all else fails, there still is the
option of obtaining the article from Sci-Hub. It covers roughly 50% of
all articles, so there is a pretty good chance you'll get what you need
there. I have written before why I find Sci-Hub to be a [necessary and
effective form of civil
disobedience](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/02/sci-hub-as-necessary-effective-civil-disobedience/).
There is a catch, however. In many countries Sci-Hub is considered
illegal as it offers copyrighted content for download. While there is no
definitive, generally accepted decision, there is a lawsuit pending
brought by Elsevier against Sci-Hub. Legal opinions vary, but an early
consensus seems to emerge according to which individual downloads, while
infringing, are unlikely to be prosecuted, but institutions which fail
to follow up on publisher complaints may at some point become liable.
Use at your own risk.

[![](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/sci-hub-1024x386.png){.aligncenter
.size-large .wp-image-1447 loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="520"
height="196"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/sci-hub-1024x386.png 1024w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/sci-hub-300x113.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/sci-hub-768x289.png 768w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/sci-hub-50x19.png 50w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/sci-hub.png 1319w"
sizes="(max-width: 520px) 100vw, 520px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/sci-hub.png)

These are ten different options (9 of them completely legal) to obtain
scholarly content without a current subscription to the scholarly
journal in question. The statistics on article availability as well as
my personal experience suggest that almost every article will be
available via at least one or more of these options.

[[**Importantly**]{style="text-decoration: underline;"}:]{style="background-color: #008000; color: #ffffff;"}
if you find that you can indeed access most of the content you need to
read via such means, **let your librarian know that you are fine with
dropping subscriptions** -- it will eventually allow your institution to
be able to afford providing you with a [modern digital
infrastructure](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/04/what-should-a-modern-scientific-infrastructure-look-like/).

**UPDATE** (Dec. 21, 2016): There were several questions as to the
legality of
[\#icanhazpdf](https://bjoern.brembs.net/tag/icanhazpdf/){.hashtag
.u-tag .u-category rel="tag"}. Sharing of scholarly articles among
scholars has been standard practice for decades, if not centuries.
Hence, sending individual articles to individual scholars has never been
illegal and still is not to this day. The Twitter hashtag merely brings
two scholars togather for this age-old standard practice. Even Elsevier
explicitly
[allows](https://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/55654/AuthorUserRights.pdf)
such sharing (PDF):

> Scholarly sharing of articles \[8 above\]  
> Current ScienceDirect subscription agreements permit authorized users
> to transmit excerpts of subscribed content, such as an article, by
> e-mail or in print, to known research colleagues for the purpose of
> scholarly study or research. Recipients of such scholarly sharing do
> not themselves have to be affiliated with an institute with a
> ScienceDirect subscription agreement.

h/t to [Jochen
Johannsen](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jochen_Johannsen) and
[Bernhard
Mittermaier](https://www.fz-juelich.de/SharedDocs/Kontaktdaten/Mitarbeiter/M/Mittermaier_b_mittermaier_fz_juelich_de.html?nn=934008)
for the source.

**UPDATE II** (Jan.27, 2017): The latest version of the [Open Access
Button](https://openaccessbutton.org/) also retrieves publicly available
versions  of paywalled articles, much like DOAI or oaDOI. However, it
comes with a critical improvement over these two services: it allows you
to send a request for any articles that isn't already covered and the
OAButton team will try to make it available. In that way, the OAButton
not only provides you with the articles, but also expands the coverage
of publicly accessible research, such that ever more content becomes
available without subscriptions.

[![](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/oabutton-300x159.png){.aligncenter
.size-medium .wp-image-1470 loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300"
height="159"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/oabutton-300x159.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/oabutton-768x408.png 768w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/oabutton-50x27.png 50w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/oabutton.png 989w"
sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/oabutton.png)This
is a wonderful development. More and more services providing you with
scholarly articles without a subscription. Remind me again, why do we
even have subscriptions? Subscriptions probably are the worst value for
money of any subsidized service our scholarly institutions provide us
with. We should cancel all subscriptions now, there is no need for them
and paying them constitutes fiscal irresponsibility, as far as I'm
concerned.

***UPDATE III** (Feb 16, 2017):*

It's now more than six weeks since the German institutions lost all
access to the journals of publisher giant Elsevier. You may wonder how
they have fared? According to a [news
report](https://www.nature.com/news/german-scientists-regain-access-to-elsevier-journals-1.21482?utm_content=buffer2bea8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer):

> The loss of access to Elsevier content didn't overly disturb academic
> routines, researchers say, because they found other ways to get papers
> they needed

It's official. It works. We don't need subscriptions.

***UPDATE IV** (Mar 17, 2017)*:

[Impactstory](https://impactstory.org/) has come out with their browser
add-on "[Unpaywall](https://unpaywall.org/)" that lets you find open
versions of paywalled articles with the click of a button. It's never
been easier to drop subscriptions than now!

***UPDATE V** (Mar 25, 2017):*

On twitter, I've been sent two more methods of accessing paywalled
scholarly content. On is called [OpenDOAR](https://opendoar.org) and
somewhat similar to DOAI/oaDOI or the open access button in that it
accesses content in 'green' repositories. The other is [Scholar on
Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/) and works similarly to
[\#icanhazpdf](https://bjoern.brembs.net/tag/icanhazpdf/){.hashtag
.u-tag .u-category rel="tag"} on twitter: you post a request and some
good soul with access provides the content. So many ways to get access
and it just keeps getting better. [**Have you already talked to your
librarian and told them that you are ok with subscription
cancellations?**]{style="text-decoration: underline;"}


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.

The idea here is, to quote from an old (1942)
[document](https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4546&context=clr)
from the US:

> The awarding of contracts by municipal and other public corporations
> is of vital importance to all of us, as citizens and taxpayers.
> Careless and inefficient standards and procedures for awarding these
> important community commitments have increased unnecessarily the tax
> burdens of the public. To secure a standard by which the awarding of
> public contracts can be made efficiently and economically, and with
> fairness to both the community and the bidders, the constitutions of
> some states, and the statutes regulating municipal and public
> corporations provide for the award of public contracts to the lowest
> responsible bidder.

As far as I know, most countries have such purchasing rules in place for
essentially every service or purchase. However, it seems one area of
services is exempt from this rule: scholarly publishing services, in
particular journal article publishing (not sure about books). While
every major plumbing operation, every ventilation improvement and every
cleaning contract needs to be signed after a competitive bidding
procedure, we negotiate subscription deals behind closed doors and the
signed contracts are often hidden behind non-disclosure agreements. It
seems to me that the second sentence in the quote above describes the
consequences of these back-room dealings quite accurately. What evidence
is there to support this view?

If one looks at the
[costs](https://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676)
of these subscription deals, one finds that they amount to about
US\$5,000 per published subscription article. However, open access
publishing costs (not article processing charges, APCs!) range from
below US\$100 to around US\$500, depending on a
[variety](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/01/how-much-should-a-scholarly-article-cost-the-taxpayer/)
of
[factors](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/06/what-goes-into-making-a-scientific-manuscript-public/).
Hence, publishing services which let everybody access our literature
would blow out any subscription publisher if a competitive bidding
process would take place! (Note that some publishers charge their
customers much more than their bare-bones publishing costs for a variety
of reasons)

As everyone knows, the justification for subscriptions purchases is that
the subscribed content can only be obtained at this one publisher, so
there cannot be any bidding. The subscription business is essentially
one of monopolies, obviously. This argument is about as superficial as
it is vacuous. Institutions currently spend huge sums acquiring large
collections of journals only few of which are heavily used. From a
single article perspective, these collections provide a massive
oversupply: institutions pay for access to many more articles than their
faculty actually read. If our institutions were instead to focus on
serving their faculty's publishing rather than reading needs, the money
would arguably be spent much more effectively.

For quite some time now, we have observed the development new business
models such as those of [Ubiquity](https://www.ubiquitypress.com/) or
[Scholastica](https://scholasticahq.com/). These service providers allow
their clients to switch services if they are not satisfied. Let's say
we, University of XYZ,  find Scholastica's US\$100/article service is
the lowest responsible bidder. After a year or two we get so many
complaints from our faculty about what a horrible service this is, that
we decide to have another round of bidding, where we include a more
extended range of services. Let's say the US\$500 per article service of
Ubiquity wins the bidding this time. University of XYZ can easily
switch, without losing access to any of the published articles, simply
because the articles remain under the control of University of XYZ. From
one year to the next, the service provider switches and our faculty are
much happier than before. University of XYZ can make a good case that it
is getting a better value for money now than it did with the nominally
cheaper option, because it still went with the lowest responsible
bidder. Such a situation would create a truly competitive service market
(as long as anti-trust regulations remained in effect).

Conversely, does this technical possibility mean that public
institutions who are still negotiating with individual subscription
publishers without a competitive bidding process could now be sued ?

Phrased differently, now that we no longer have to hand over our
manuscripts to publishers for them to create a monopoly with our work,
aren't we legally required to make sure there can be a competition?

Phrased yet differently: Every single subscription to scholarly journals
can be seen as an anti-competitive act that keeps a new business model
that allows for competitive bidding from emerging. Shouldn't there be
some legal pushback against this perpetuation of tax-waste?

**UPDATE --** an analogy due to online questions:

Suppose University of XYZ needed all their windows cleaned. For some
historical reason, faculty decided to all sign over their rights to
access their windows to any company of their choosing, such that no
other company could come and clean them. Afterwards, the university had
to pay outrageous fees for the various cleaners chosen by faculty,
because only they had the rights to clean the particular windows the
faculty had given to them. You could only get Window X cleaned by
Cleaner Y. This is analogous to how we currently publish scholarly
works. Shouldn't we instead keep the rights to our works and have
'publishers' compete for our business?


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. And so the discussions usually keep turning
around and around, not getting anywhere.

Both groups are correct, of course, and so it boils down to which of the
two obstacles is easier to overcome.

As tenured faculty myself, the only way to solve the problem on our side
is to remove or at least decrease the pressure to publish in
subscription journals. Many have realized this, for instance there is
[DORA](https://www.ascb.org/dora/), the REF
[explicitly](https://www.ref.ac.uk/about/guidance/faq/researchoutputsref2)
excludes impact factors for evaluation and my colleagues and I have
[published](https://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full)
a review of how top-ranked journals publish the [least
reliable](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/01/even-without-retractions-top-journals-publish-the-least-reliable-science/)
science. I would argue that we have taken all the steps we currently can
reasonably take. However, there is still a long and tedious road ahead
of us where many important factors are out of our control. For one, the
hypercompetition for positions and funding, due, in large part, to
allocation of funds on a project rather than ongoing basis, leading to
an overproduction of early career scientists and cash-strapped labs, is
largely beyond faculty control. Second, even if public statements
eventually were to manage to effectively devalue journal rank, in an
atmosphere of hypercompetition, the obvious risk-averse strategy is to
[keep
assuming](https://svpow.com/2015/07/10/how-can-next-ref-more-strongly-emphasise-the-unimportance-of-impact-factor/)
that journal rank is instead used on an informal basis: having a paper
in a top journal would never hurt, while one in a 'lesser' journal
could. Hence, as long as there are journals and hypercompetition,
faculty will continue to risk their own jobs, their employees' jobs or
the lights going out in their labs if they refuse to submit to
subscription journals.

In brief, the obstacles for faculty radically changing their submission
strategy are a) human nature, b) government-induced hypercompetition and
c) the existence of journals.

While all three obstacles can (and perhaps should) be overcome in
principle, there is probably a decent argument to be made that c) may be
easier to master than either a) or b). Which brings us to the obstacles
for eliminating journals by simply starving them of money. As all agree
that paywalls have to go, subscriptions will have to run out at some
point. The discussion is no longer about "if", it's about "when". As it
appears, for the above reasons, unlikely that scholars will
substantially change their ways within my lifetime, I would argue that
right now is the time to let subscriptions run out as the logical next
step. I have two reasons for my argument, one is technical and one is
logistical.

The technical argument, spelled out in more
[detail](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/12/so-your-institute-went-cold-turkey-on-publisher-x-what-now/)
[elsewhere](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/05/why-havent-we-already-canceled-all-subscriptions/)
is that we now have a whole slew of solutions at our disposal to create
something jokingly referred to as "legal Sci-Hub". Much as the actual
Sci-Hub, it would provide convenient but patchy access to the scholarly
literature, only this version would be legal (with, as now, actual
Sci-Hub filling the patches not covered by legal Sci-Hub). As the
current subscription-based system is also patchy, but often
inconvenient, there is little reason for faculty to complain if they
instead get something similarly patchy but maybe more convenient.
Moreover, as the change entails an upgrade that comes with massive
savings, faculty need not even be involved in the decision, as hardly
any of them would know any of the involved technicalities anyway --
faculty hardly know the publishers behind their journals, let alone what
a link-resolver, DOAI or LOCKSS is. The only thing required is, of
course, to inform them that there are a few upgrades running behind the
scenes and that they are asked to pardon the dust for a while. In the
same letter, faculty would also be informed that the upgrades come with
such savings, that they will receive a whole host of new services that
such a [modern
infrastructure](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/04/what-should-a-modern-scientific-infrastructure-look-like/)
will enable.

The logistical argument involves looking at the number of people who
have to be convinced to act. If researchers are asked to act next, this
would entail convincing just under [8
million](https://data.uis.unesco.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SCN_DS&popupcustomise=true&lang=en#)
researchers at [\~10,000 institutions](https://univ.cc/) to risk their
jobs. What are the number of infrastructure experts who need to be
convinced that now is the time to bring their institutional
infrastructure from the 20th into the 21st century? A large fraction of
subscriptions are by now bundled up in so-called "[Big
Deals](https://www.infotoday.com/it/sep11/The-Big-Deal-Not-Price-But-Cost.shtml)".
These Big Deals, in turn, are often negotiated by regional, national or
supra-national consortia. These consortia constitute existing
collaborations between institutions in order to solve an infrastructure
problem: paying for [increasingly overpriced
subscriptions](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2014/06/your-university-pays-too-much-for-journals/).
There are currently about 200 of these consortia organized in the
"[International Coalition of Library
Consortia](https://icolc.net/about-icolc)". Hence, one would have to
convince the leading individuals at only a few hundred organizations
that now is the time to shift their infrastructure from
subscription-based solutions to modern solutions. Clearly, this would
not cover all subscriptions, but it would be so widespread, that every
institution on the planet would contribute in some way or another and
hence all institutions would at least receive notice of the upgrade.
Starting with these consortial Big Deals should bring in several
billions (US\$ or €) annually, which would easily cover implementing the
more advanced components one would expect from a modern scholarly
infrastructure during this transition period. Any individual researcher
who would still like to read a subscription-based journal (who would
submit to these journals to make them worth reading?) can still
subscribe with their own funds, just as they can still write their
manuscripts on type-writers or dictate them to their secretary, if they
so choose. Subscriptions simply do not belong to the canon of solutions
any more, that tax-funded public institutions can afford to subsidize.

Condensing these estimates to an (admittedly very simplified, but rather
pointed) dichotomy, asking researchers to  submit exclusively to OA
journals entails convincing just under 8M individuals at \~10k
institutions to risk their jobs, while asking librarians to let
subscriptions run out entails asking maybe 1k individuals at \~200
organizations to do their job.

While I wouldn't dare to imply that any of these two options were
trivial or even just easy, from my faculty perspective, the second
option seems to be the technically and logistically less difficult one.

This insight of course does not entail shifting responsibility for
change away from me personally or any of my colleagues, towards
librarians. Librarians and faculty are fundamentally on the same side in
this issue and share the same interests in a scholarly commons. As such,
there is no way around symbiotic cooperation if we strive to overcome
the significant social hurdles set up by a self-reinforcing system
towards a major shift in the overall research culture. We all need to
change and adjust and here I have laid out just a few of [many
reasons](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n835.html) why libraries
are in a unique position to now take the second step -- after faculty
have started to boycott publishers like Elsevier, created OA journals,
are submitting more and more of their manuscripts to them, created
preprint servers and are constantly increasing their
preprint-deposition. At this point, there is very little further action
I can see faculty can take. Librarians have already embraced the open
access movement many years ago by creating repositories at almost every
institution, a vital component of a modern infrastructure. Librarians
have a many centuries-long tradition of providing services for faculty.
Now is the time for maybe their most critical service yet, completing
the modernization of our scholarly infrastructure, a necessary next step
to halt further commodization of scholarship and to keep working towards
a scholarly commons.


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.

bjoern.brembs.blog

How to convince faculty to support subscription cancellations

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

Should public institutions not be choosing the lowest responsible bidder?

Practical roads to infrastructure reform

Why haven’t we already canceled all subscriptions?