Björn Brembs

[*This is a slightly edited (amended, essentially) version of* [my
article](https://theconversation.com/open-access-and-the-looming-crisis-in-science-14950)
published today at [The
Conversation](https://theconversation.com).]{style="font-size: 12px;"}

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. If one describes the problem too cautiously, the message will
be ineffective in rallying the community and collective action will not
happen. Describe the problem too drastically, and the community will not
be convinced by the alarmist rhetoric and also fail to take action.

Here are some data, together with a computed trend that indicates what I
think would be best described as a looming crisis for the scientific
community: not yet urgent, but if no action is taken, the trend will
threaten the entire scientific enterprise within the coming 30 years.

Currently, the number of scientific papers retracted from PubMed is a
mere 0.05%, an astonishingly low rate, given the vagaries of the job and
the common .05 statistical significance level in biomedicine. However,
recently this rate has been rising. The rise is exponential such that,
if the trend were to continue, by about 2045 almost all scientific
publications will have to be retracted. Apart from high-profile fraud
cases which since recently also make it into the general news media, the
numbers themselves are not yet alarming. Extrapolating the current
trend, we will not reach the .05-level, i.e. 5% of all published
articles in a given year will be retracted, before 2033 -- it will take
almost twenty years for this hundredfold increase, i.e. doubling about
every three years. If the current trend were to continue that far into
the future, 10% would be reached about 2036, 20% in 2039, 40% in 2042,
80% in 2045 and soon thereafter, for every new publication in PubMed, at
least one older one would have to be retracted.

### Causes

Usually, any problem at this scale will have a number of underlying
causes. Science, like any enterprise, is a complex affair. In this
special case, however, a large part of these causes can be traced to the
reward structure that scientists have built around them to make this
enterprise work. They are related to how scientists choose to publish
their results and how fellow scientists reward this publishing behavior.

Unfortunately, even with a clearly identifiable cause, in this case
there is no easy fix.

### History

Starting in the 1960s, the rising number of scholarly journals increased
subscription costs for libraries too quickly. Institutional libraries
and university faculty were faced with the problem of deciding which
journals to read and subscribe, keeping their budgets in mind. One
solution, it seemed, was to rank journals according to how many
citations each of its publication garnered on average.

Back then only a few realized that a generation later their future
colleagues would not only adjust their reading habits to journal rank,
but that those reading habits will translate into new publishing habits.
After all, every one wants their work to be read by as many as possible.

Today, where you publish matters more than what you publish. This
behavior may vary from country to country and field to field, but it is
quite widely known that tenure, promotion, grant funding, etc. all
depends on where in the hierarchy of journals one's research results
have been published.

What makes it worse is this feedback loop: more citations means more
attention. More attention more citations. As long as space is scarce,
more manuscript submissions mean higher rejection rates, for some
journals the rejection rates can be as high as 90%. Like long lines in
front of hip clubs, higher rejection rates mean more validation for the
few researchers that actually manage to get published in these journals
and hence more citations.

### Publishers

Not surprisingly, as researchers adjusted their behavior, so did
publishers. The top journals did not increase space for the increased
demand. Instead, they spawned ever more lower ranking offspring to
reinforce the ratchet and keep the demand high.

With the arrival of the internet, publishers went through a complete
reversal of their role in knowledge dissemination. Before the internet,
publishers would heed their profession, investing in printing presses
and delivery systems for a wide and efficient system of dissemination to
the public. Today, academic publishers have become the opposite. These
corporations are now "hiders": they invest in paywalls, hiding the
research from the public that paid for it.

But perhaps this is all fine and well? After all, publishers select the
very best science using professional editors and need to protect their
investment.

### Rankings

Superficially, one may assume that such strong selection would only
enable the most groundbreaking, methodologically sound research to clear
such monumental hurdles. However, [the data speak a different
language](https://www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full).
While indeed quantifications of 'novelty' and 'importance' have been
found to correlate significantly with journal rank, the correlation is
so weak, that for every publication correctly published in a
high-ranking journal, there is one that should not have been published
there. Conversely, such a large percentage of research findings that did
not manage to get published in a top journal end up being recognized as
deserving after being published in a lower journal, that the practical
value of journal rank as an evaluation signal is negligible, despite the
statistics. Even more damaging, however, quality-related metrics such as
technical quality, methodological soundness, reproducibility and so on
either failed to show any correlation with journal rank, or correlate
*negatively*. These data support the observation of decreasing intervals
between prominent scientific fraud scandals and the increasing range and
scope of each case, mostly based on fraudulent work published in top
journals.

### Marketing

Apparently, as the pressure mounts to publish in top journals, authors
race to find a way to present their work as important and
groundbreaking, no matter the actual content and quality. Science today
has become a rat race between authors marketing their research and
professional editors struggling to see through the fluff. It is the
perfect arrangement to bring our the worst in all participants:
scientists fear for their livelihoods and do what is necessary to
survive, with little regard to science. Publishers fear their business
model and do what is necessary to survive, with little regard to
science. And librarians are caught in the middle.

### Multiplicators

This straightforward, evidence-based analysis of the current state of
affairs suggests a slightly more alarmist suspicion. Exponential effects
are typical for social phenomena, where feedback is driving much of the
dynamics of the system. The already described, relatively fast feedback
loop propped up by journal rank supports a second, slower loop: after a
generation of increasing pressure to publish in top journals, many of
the now leading scientists are excellent at marketing their research to
top journals. After all, this is how they were selected. It may of
course happen that these researchers are also excellent scientists, but
this was often enough not the selection criterion. These scientists are
now training the next generation of scientists in how to be successful
in science. The anecdotal evidence suggests that -- intentional or not
-- marketing one's research to top journals may play a dominant role in
this training. If this were indeed the case, it would help explain the
exponentially increasing retraction rates in the scientific literature
and constitute cause for grave concern with respect to the looming
crisis in science.

### Reform

Of course, laziness, vanity, ambition, desperation, hubris,
self-aggrandizement, sleep deprivation or bad time management are not
going to disappear any time soon. Scientists are human too. The
realistic task can thus not be to altogether eliminate shoddy,
unreliable science, but to reform our infrastructure which currently
almost appears to be purposefully designed to exacerbate aforementioned
traits and bring out the worst in scientists, thereby wasting resources
and threatening lives. Scientific discoveries are unreliable enough even
under the best of circumstances, given the complexity of the matter,
there surely is no need to worsen the situation. Instead, we must design
an infrastructure that brings out the best in scientists and aligns
their incentives with that of science and the public.

### Technicalities

Given the current status quo, this is technically rather
straightforward: one has to remove the incentives for scientists that
encourage and reward marketing at the expense of science and instead
encourage and reward actions of scientists that benefit both science and
scientists. Given that scholarly communication is at the heart of the
scientific endeavor, this is where we should place most emphasis in our
infrastructure reform. What we need is to abandon the traditional idea
of journal publishing altogether, in favor of an institution-based
platform that allows every tax-payer, scientist or not, to access all
the literature, data and software that is being paid for out of the
public purse. For the past two decades, corporate publishers have proven
to have become exceedingly poor custodians of the public good that is
research results. From their continued and often shamefully backstabbing
and cunning resistance to change their business model to provide even
simple read-only access to the scientific literature to those who paid
for the research in the first place, to the current
[prohibition](https://www.nature.com/news/tensions-grow-as-data-mining-discussions-fall-apart-1.13130)
of text- and data-mining access for scientists to their own literature,
corporate publishers have proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that they
have forfeited every right to be perceived as partners of scientists.
Instead, the evidence weighs heavy that many if not most of these
corporations are now enemies of science.

### Solutions

Small versions of such open access platforms exist in many university
libraries today, in various forms. They need to be combined and made
interoperable using common standards. In less fortunate parts of the
world, where research billions are not as abundant, governments felt
forced, long before us, to realize how wastefully corporate academic
publishing treats tax-funds. These countries have very successfully been
running a multi-national platform,
[SciELO](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2013/06/cut-out-the-parasitic-middlemen/),
which, if implemented on a global scale and funded with only a single
digit fraction of what corporate publishing costs today, would eliminate
the pernicious incentives currently in place and provide full open
access to the public. Recent initiatives like
[SHARE](https://www.share-project.org/publications/journalarticles0.html),
the [DPLA](https://dp.la/) or the
[LPC](https://www.educopia.org/programs/lpc) could serve as nucleation
points for such developments in the rich countries. Provided that the
reputation system built into this platform is guided by the same
evidence-based reasoning and tested with the same scientific rigor we
commonly apply to our experiments, this kind of reform would not only
come for free, it would save billions in tax-funds every year and, by
virtue of its public accessibility, literally save countless lives.

It is a collective disgrace for the entire scientific community that
saved money and saved lives are apparently not sufficient incentives to
drive forceful and rationally designed reform right now. Instead, as in
many other communities, vested, not exclusively corporate, interests are
still keeping an upper hand.  
This must change.


<em>
 This is a slightly edited (amended, essentially) version of
</em>
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

The recently released [development
draft](https://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/share-proposal-07june13.pdf)
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](https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf)
to federally funded research in the US sounds a lot like the
library-based publishing system I've
[been](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2013/06/cut-out-the-parasitic-middlemen/)
[perpetually](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n856.html)
[arguing](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n841.html)
[for](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n835.html). It's even in our
[paper on the pernicious consequences of journal
rank](https://www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/abstract){target="_blank"}.
Could this be the initial step to break the stranglehold publishers have
on scholarly communication? Here some key excerpts from the document:

> universities have invested in the infrastructure, tools, and services
> necessary to provide effective and efficient access to their research
> and scholarship. The new White House directive provides a compelling
> reason to integrate higher education's investments to date into a
> system of cross-institutional digital repositories that will be known
> as SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE).
>
> \[...\]
>
> Universities already own and operate key pieces of the infrastructure,
> including digital institutional repositories, Internet2, Digital
> Preservation Network (DPN)2, and more.These current capacities and
> capabilities will naturally be extended over time. Universities have
> also invested in recent years in working with Principal Investigators
> and other campus partners on developing digital data management plans
> to comply with agency requirements.
>
> \[...\]
>
> University-based digital repositories will become a public access and
> long-term preservation system for the results of federally funded
> research. SHARE achieves the mission of higher education by providing
> access to and preserving the intellectual assets produced by the
> academy, in particular those that are made openly available.
>
> \[...\]
>
> Agencies that choose to develop their own digital repositories, or
> work with an existing repository such as PubMed Central, could simply
> adopt the same metadata fields and practices to become a linked node
> in this federated, consensus-based system. Discipline-based
> repositories, some of which are housed at universities, will be
> included.
>
> \[...\]
>
> The SHARE workflow is straightforward, and using existing protocols
> can be fully automated.
>
> 1.  PI or author submits manuscript to journal as currently occurs.
> 2.  Journal publisher coordinates peer review, accepts, and edits
>     manuscripts as currently occurs.
> 3.  Journal submits XML version of the final peer reviewed manuscript
>     (including the abstract) to the PI's designated repository, or the
>     author submits the final peer-reviewed and edited manuscript
>     accepted for publication (including the abstract) to the PI's
>     designated digital repository.

In principle, this sounds almost verbatim like the system I advocate,
with a few exceptions. Clearly, SHARE is still a 'green' OA route,
meaning that regular journal publishing still occurs. I see no major
issue with this, as some transition period will inevitably be required.
The import part is that we wrestle at least some control over our
literature back from the publishers.

I also find it important to point out the combined effort of these
organizations to integrate the data mandates with the literature. Now we
are only missing software requirements -- I wonder why these are
missing?

Another task not mentioned will be to integrate the back-archives of all
the published literature into SHARE. Once we could get that
incorporated, we'd potentially be able to offer a superior search,
filter and discovery system than anything currently on the market -- a
system which I would guess to be crucial for weaning ourselves from
publishers altogether, eventually.

In conclusion, this might be a very first, baby-step of our emancipation
from corporate publishers. If we [take the example of
SciELO](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2013/06/cut-out-the-parasitic-middlemen/),
and inspire  concerted action of a critical mass of institutions of
higher education and research, we might just be able to achieve a fully
functional scholarly communication system, perhaps even within this
generation. Now is the time to provide our feedback to this draft. I
think open access activists should get together and tell them what needs
to happen.


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](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n820.html "A fistful of dollars: why corporate publishers have no place in scholarly communication")
the public purse for long enough now. Steffen Böhm, director of the
Essex Sustainability Institute, [said it
best](https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/open-access-initiatives-to-benefit-the-academy/2004174.article){target="_blank"}:

> By cutting out the parasitic publishing middle men, the academy could
> reclaim control of its knowledge, funding and labour.

In his article, he mentions the successful
[SciELO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciELO){target="_blank"} project
in South America. In a lot of ways, SciELO
([scielo.org](https://www.scielo.org)) is quite close to what I
[have](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n906.html)
[been](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n856.html)
[arguing](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n835.html)
[for](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n841.html): SciELO means
"Scientific Electronic *Library* Online" and is supported by the
Brazilian and Chilean government. It currently publishes about 900
scientific journals which are all fully openly accessible. The Latin
American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information
([BIREME](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC198880/) --
*Biblioteca* Regional de Medicina)
[spearheaded](https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/cjhe/article/view/479/504)
conception, design and implementation of SciELO, with special assistance
from the US [National *Library* of Medicine](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/).
Ten of SciELO's 15 national collections are funded more or less directly
by governments, five by universities. SciELO publishes and archives
everything in marked-up full-text, meaning that the entire full-text is
machine-readable and hence exquisitely (re-)useful. In essence, with a
decentralized database like SciELO, any and all possible metrics (if one
really wants/needs them) are just a few lines of code away.

The success of SciELO demonstrates that our institutions, our libraries,
big and small, collectively have all it takes to cut out the parasitic
middle men that annually gobble up billions and tax funds that are
dearly missed in our budgets. We have the know-how, the infrastructure,
that funding, the workforce, the technology and even plenty of examples
where such a take-over (actually, take-backs) has worked on a smaller
scale. All we need to do is to get some coordination among major players
going and there will be many birds hit with one stone:

- Immediate, fully open access to all publicly funded research world
  wide -- text, data and software
- The equivalent of approximately 4 billion US dollars saved annually
- An incredible market for innovation, e.g.
  - what are the best ways to present scientific data in the most
    flexible way?
  - can we write programs that construct (and test) hypotheses by
    crawling this vast scientific space?
  - What possible additional uses can be developed from such a resource?
- A single place to find scientific information
- Long-term archive security
- Any functionality of the current journal system still deemed relevant
  is easily copied.

The only thing keeping us from this digital utopia are commercial
publishers and the politicians they buy with our money (either
[directly](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n840.html) or via
[lobbying](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n819.html)). Oh and
then, of course, there is the tiny issue of [journal
rank](https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3748){target="_blank"}. ![Big
Smile](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/plugins/ultimate-tinymce/addons/emotions/img/popobig/big_smile.png "Big Smile"){decoding="async"
border="0"}

------------------------------------------------------------------------

**UPDATE**: Approximate cost for a paper in SciELO is
\~[90US\$](https://t.co/82a7FkXLb6). Given an annual world-wide
publication output of roughly [two million papers per
year](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n891.html), that would
amount to a total cost of publishing new articles of around 180 million
US\$ for the entire planet. Add to that [approximately
200k](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n896.html) US\$ annually for
infrastructure and related costs, and you are still way below 200m total
annual costs for academic publishing, fully open access. If that were
shared only between the roughly 9000 universities world-wide (i.e.,
without additional contributions from governments directly), the total
average cost per university and year would amount to just over 20,000
US\$. With every German library spending, on average [\>600k on
subscriptions](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n900.html), this
would entail windfall savings for each institution.

Compare that to the current academic publishing market running at an
estimated 12 billion in sales. With about 30% or 4b in publisher
profits, current costs of academic publishing are inflated by more than
7.8b. In other words, switching to a library/institution-based
publishing system akin to that realized in SciELO would provide savings
closer to 11b than to 4b.


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
<em>
 Library
</em>
Online” and is supported by the Brazilian and Chilean government.

Cut out the parasitic middle men!

Cameron Neylon

Two things caught my attentions over the past few days. The first was
[the text of a Graduation Address from Dorothea
Salo](http://dsalo.info/we-aim-to-misbehave/) to the graduating students
of the Library and Information Sciences Program at the [University of
Wisconsin-Madison](http://www.wisc.edu/ "University of Wisconsinâ€“Madison"){.zem_slink
target="_blank" rel="homepage"}. The second was [a keynote from Chris
Bourg](http://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/beyond-measure-valuing-libraries/),
whose blog is entitled "Feral Librarian", gave at The Acquisitions
Institute.

Both focus on how the value of libraries and the value of those who
defend the needs of all to access information are impossible to
completely measure. Both offer a prescription of action and courage, in
Dorothea Salo's case the twin messages that librarians "aim to
misbehave" and that "we've got each others back", in Chris Bourg's text
quoting [Henry
Rollins](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Rollins "Henry Rollins"){.zem_slink
target="_blank" rel="wikipedia"} also speaking to librarians "What you
do is the definition of good. It's very noble and you are very brave."

What struck me was the question of how well we are helping these people.
We seek to make scientific information free, for it flow easily to those
who need it. What can we do to create a world where we need to rely less
on the bravery of librarians and therefore benefit so much more from it?

::: {.zemanta-pixie}
[![Enhanced by
Zemanta](http://img.zemanta.com/zemified_e.png?x-id=9d61aa5c-f7c7-473a-a643-3d874dcaa7fd){.zemanta-pixie-img
decoding="async"}](http://www.zemanta.com/?px "Enhanced by Zemanta"){.zemanta-pixie-a}
:::


Two things caught my attentions over the past few days. The first was the text of a Graduation Address from Dorothea Salo to the graduating students of the Library and Information Sciences Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The second was a keynote from Chris Bourg, whose blog is entitled “Feral Librarian”, gave at The Acquisitions Institute.

Rogue Scholar Beiträge

The Conversation: The looming crisis in science

SHARE: Library-based publishing becoming a reality?

Cut out the parasitic middle men!

The bravery of librarians