So many symptoms, only one disease: a public good in private hands

[bananas]

http://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/09/many-symptoms-one-disease/

So many symptoms, only one disease: a public good in private hands
September 17, 2015

Science has infected itself (voluntarily!) with a life-threatening parasite. It has given away its crown jewels, the scientific knowledge contained in the scholarly archives, to entities with orthogonal interests: corporate publishers whose fiduciary duty is not knowledge dissemination or scholarly communication, but profit maximization. After a 350-year incubation time, the parasite has taken over the communication centers and drained them of their energy, leading to a number of different symptoms. Symptoms for which scientists and activists have come up with sometimes quite bizarre treatments:

<snip some symptoms>


• These coveted top-rank journals also publish the least reliable science. However, it’s precisely the rare slots in these journals which eventually help the scientist secure a position as a PI (that’s the whole idea behind all the extra work in the previous example). This entails that for the last few decades, science has preferentially employed the scientists that produce the least reliable science. Perhaps not too surprisingly, we are now faced with a reproducibility crisis in science, with a concomitant exponential rise in retractions. Perhaps equally unsurprisingly, scientists reflexively sprung into action by starting research projects to first understand the size and scope of this symptom, before treating it. So now there exist several reproducibility initiatives in various fields in which scientists dedicate time, effort and research funds to find out if immediate action is necessary, or if corporate publishers can drain the public teat a little longer.
  
  <snip more symptoms>
  

What is it, that keeps us from being ‘radical’ in the best sense of the word? The Latin word ‘radix‘ means ‘root’: we have to tackle the common root of all the problems and that is the fact that knowledge is a public good that belongs to the public, not to for-profit corporations. The archiving and making accessible of this knowledge has become so cheap, that publishers are now not merely unnecessary, on top of the pernicious symptoms described above, they also increase these costs from what currently would amount to approx. US$200m world-wide per year to a whopping US$10b in annual subscription fees.

I’m not the only one, not even the first to propose taking back the public good from the corporations, as well as the US$10b we spend annually to keep it locked away from the public. If we did that, we would only have to spend a tiny fraction (about 2%) of the annual costs we just saved to give the public good back to the public. The remaining US$9.8b are a formidable annual budget to ensure we hire the scientists with the most reliable results.

This plan entails two initial actions: one is to cut subscriptions to regain access to the funds required to implement a modern scholarly infrastructure. The other is to use the existing mechanisms (e.g. LOCKSS) to ensure the back-archives remain accessible for us indefinitely. As many have realized, this is a collective action problem. If properly organized, this will bring the back-archives back into our control and provide us with sufficient leverage and funds to negotiate the terms at which they can be made publicly accessible. Subsequently, using the remaining subscription funds, the scholarly infrastructure will take care of all our scholarly communication needs: we have all the technology, it just needs to be implemented. After a short transition period, at least in the sciences, publications in top-ranked journals (to which then only individuals subscribe, if any) will be about as irrelevant for promotion and funding as monographs are today.

<snip>