Björn Brembs

Academia is under attack from two angles, which seems to suggest that we
may not have decades to get our house in order.

The first and older of this two-pronged attack comes from politics.
Around the world, anti-science movements seek to discredit reason and
abolish science. Be it [abolishing
tenure](https://www.texasobserver.org/dan-patricks-ban-on-tenure-could-devastate-texas-university-system/),
[doubting the value of publicly funded
science](https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/12/21/14012552/trump-budget-director-research-science-mulvaney)
or [forcing entire institutions to
close](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54433398), authoritarian
politicians around the globe strive to stifle and subjugate academia.
Creationists, anti-vaxxers, climate-deniers or anti-vivisectionists are
supporting and playing this political game, flush with funds from
special interests, broadening the political attack on reason. In some
cases, the attacks are explicitly launched
[referencing](https://www.wired.com/story/sciences-reproducibility-crisis-is-being-used-as-political-ammunition/)
[unreliable
science](https://undark.org/2018/04/18/national-association-of-scholars-reproducibility/),
others come from different directions. Anything that can be used against
scholarship will be used. In addition to these focused attacks on
science and often scientists, there is a more diffuse attack on facts,
aiming to undermine public trust in institutions, with the goal to
increase the effectiveness of campaigns designed to promote the personal
cult around certain individuals: when facts do not matter any more in
what has been called a post-factual world, opinions and feeling remain
as the only currency in public debate. The consequences of such
long-term efforts can be seen in neoliberal policies pushing the
corporatization of universities, entangling scholars around the world in
precarious working conditions, suffering from hypercompetition and
avoiding anything that could be seen as risky. Increased bureaucracy
imposing numbers games combine with tiny salaries and huge workloads to
create the vulnerable academic, caught in the iron fists of feudal PIs
and professional administrators. The degree to which academics must
endure such circumstances varies dramatically between institutions and
countries, but as a global phenomenon, they stifle innovation, critique
and promote not only questionable research practices, but the active
dissemination of "[hype and
hyperbole](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1912444117)":
misinformation, breeding distrust.

A second front was opened about ten years ago now from an entirely
different and mostly unanticipated direction. More than just flush with
funds, but this time financed by academia herself, academic publishers
started (escalated?) their own attack on science by gobbling up and
[developing](https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/spyware-in-libraries/)
[digital](https://elephantinthelab.org/when-your-journal-reads-you/)
[surveillance](https://zenodo.org/record/6399726)
[technologies](https://elephantinthelab.org/surveillance-publishing/).
To expand the sources of user data, these corporations bought digital
tools covering all aspects of academic life, from literature search,
data analysis, writing, citing or outreach, all the way to citation
analysis for research assessment. These corporations formerly known as
publishers are using their expanded digital surveillance network to
accomplish two separate goals. First, a copy of the data is aggregated
with private data from scholarly users and sold, either to advertisers,
to law enforcement agencies not allowed to collect such intrusive data
themselves, or to any authoritarian government interested in identifying
potential opposition intelligentsia. The second goal is to expand the
monopolies they enjoy on scholarly content, to a monopoly on all
scholarly services, i.e., the mother of all vendor lock-ins. Packaging
all the different tools in a single bundle and selling it to
institutions akin to subscription "Big Deals", would make it impossible
for any institution buying such a package to ever switch to a different
provider again. An analogy outside of academia would be a merger of
Microsoft, SAP, Google and Facebook. There are two corporations so far
that are standing ready to deploy such bundles, RELX (parent of
Elsevier) and Holtzbrinck (SpringerNature, Digital Science). A related
data analytics corporation specializing on scholarly data is Clarivate
(Web of Science, ProQuest).

Both onslaughts aim to undermine independent scholarship and subjugate
it for special interests, be it political or financial. To some extent,
both have been quite successful already. In fact, in the use of journal
rank and other citation metrics, the political and financial fronts have
closed ranks and are cooperating. The worst outcome of succumbing to
these attacks would be the destruction of publicly funded science. At
best, loosing on both fronts would entail academia finding itself
permanently strapped in neoliberal purgatory, with a vast precariate,
cut-throat competition and results nobody can take seriously any more,
in other words: Idiocracy.

It is starting to become clear that to defend against these attacks with
their multi-faceted consequences all over academia, it will take swift
and decisive counter-measures, both within academia and in cooperation
with initiatives outside. Inside academia, first and foremost, open
flanks must be closed to allow the enemy only the smallest attack
surface possible. Productivity and impact metrics have long been known
to be both flawed and counter-productive in that they tend to [reward
unreliable
science](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full).
Because this has been known for such a long time, calls for a reform of
the academic reward system are old and
[have](https://initiative-se.eu/paper-research-assessment/)
[recently](https://ec.europa.eu/info/news/process-towards-agreement-reforming-research-assessment-2022-jan-18_en)
[redoubled](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00056-z). Such
calls are, of course warranted, justified and appropriate. However,
implementation of a replacement may come too late, if these calls are
not supplemented with actions that operate on much smaller timescales.

With research assessment and peer-review taking place on all levels from
hiring and tenure decisions, promotion, funding and renewal, nearly all
scholars are involved, either as participants or as evaluators, often in
rotating roles over time. This means that grassroots movements striving
for a change in the reward system face the challenge of winning the
hearts and minds of every single researcher on the planet. Just how big
is this challenge? Citing OECD statistics, the [2018 STM
report](https://www.stm-assoc.org/2018_10_04_STM_Report_2018.pdf) lists
about 7.1 million full-time equivalent researchers globally. Given that
many of these will be part time employees and sites like
[ResearchGate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResearchGate) list about 17
million users, adding at least 50% to these 7 million or a total of
about 11 million currently active, individual researchers is probably
required for a lower bound estimate. Convincing all of them to change
how they assess science is not going to happen overnight.

How could one possibly increase the speed by which academia can replace
its reward system? A straightforward approach would be to take away the
means that prop up the current reward system, forcing academia to come
up with a replacement. Ideally, one would want to replace the technical
infrastructure that maintains the current reward system and replace it
with one that not just necessitates, but facilitates the creation of a
new reward system. There are several ways to do this. Last year, ten
experts have [proposed](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5526634) that
regulators and funding agencies generate incentives for institutions to
shift funds away from the journals upon which much of the current reward
system is based, and towards a modern journal replacement that
facilitates the development of novel reward solutions.

Such a replacement is capable of stopping the financial onslaught on
science and providing the means to guard data against corporate greed.
Inasmuch as the old reward system incentivized hype, hyperbole and
questionable research practices, the replacement also helps stem the
flow of irreproducible science. As such, academia has the power to set
these processes in motion in self-defense. If academia has the
collective will remains to be seen. To defend against the broader attack
on facts, such actions can ever only be necessary prerequisites that
need to be complemented by other initiatives engaging the broader
public.


Academia is under attack from two angles, which seems to suggest that we may not have decades to get our house in order. The first and older of this two-pronged attack comes from politics. Around the world, anti-science movements seek to discredit reason and abolish science.

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