Björn Brembs

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

Should you trust Elsevier?

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

 Front cover of

the now-vanished

 Australasian Journal of Bone &amp; Joint Medicine

. Source: Scan from the-scientist.com website

The trinity of failures

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

Algorithmic employment decisions in academia?

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

Who’s responsible for the lack of action?

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

Providing recommendations for Plan S implementation

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

After 24 years, when will academic culture finally shift?

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

Why academic journals need to go

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

The scholarly commons: from profiteering to servicing

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

Why can Elsevier keep insulting scholars without consequences?

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

Why did the moth fly into the flame?

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

Guest post: Why our Open Data project worked

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

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

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

Practical roads to infrastructure reform

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

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

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

Academic publishers: stop access negotiations

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

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

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

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

 et al.

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

Humanized FoxP2 and the timing of habits

The data clearly show that publications in

 Cell

,

 Nature

or

 Science

(

 CNS

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

No need to only send your best work to Science Magazine

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

 Science Magazine

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

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

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

Unquestioning dogma: the gatekeepers of science

Flashback: The brain creates something out of nothing

Scientists as social parasites?

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

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

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

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

SummerScienceVideo: fruit fly research

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

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

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

Solutions to the looming crisis in science

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

Flashback: The neurobiology of self-learning

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

The dysfunctionality of the scholarly literature: hyperlinks

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

One more reason to publish negative results

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

 Nature

,

 Science

, SfN and FENS.

PostDoc opportunity in our lab now advertized

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

Come and do research with us!

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

Do flies in groups make individual choices?

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

Why open access Big Deals are worse than subscriptions

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

 th

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

 st

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

Academic publishers and competition

This anecdote made my day today. On a

 Drosophila

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

#icanhazpdf more public than a publication?

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

 San Francisco declaration on research Assessment

), which I signed immediately.

Official call for an end to journal rank

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

 FoxP

locus of

 Drosophila

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

With CRISPRed FoxP and habit formation to #SfN19

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

Does academic freedom entail exemption from spending rules?

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

Maybe try another kind of mandate?

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

 Nature

or

 Science

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

How Nature Magazine consistently prefers anecdote over data

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

In support of subscripton cancellations

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

Are more retractions due to more scrutiny?

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

What goes into making a scientific manuscript public?

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

 Drosophila

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

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

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

 Library

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

Cut out the parasitic middle men!

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

Almost 80 years on, progress on operant and classical conditioning

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

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

 biocs

@

 google

Yes!

Tweetlog: neuroscience and #openaccess

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

 reader

, not all

 providers

of scholarly literature conform to every law in every country.

With the access issue temporarily solved, what now?

Amazing bead chain experiment

Random Science Video: The value of fly research

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

How about paying extra for peer-review?

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

No Evilsevier DEAL!

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

German funder DFG: Why the sudden inconsistency?

tl;dr:


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

Replacing the prestige signal

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

Academic publishing – market or collectivization?

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

How to convince faculty to support subscription cancellations

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

Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

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

Just how widespread are impact factor negotiations?

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

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

How much should a scholarly article cost the taxpayer?

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

How to write your grant proposal?

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

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

Why cutting down on peer-review will improve it

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

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

Data Diving for Genomics Treasure

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

Watching a paradigm shift in neuroscience

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


 UPDATE


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

Booming university administrations

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

Why this GlamMag will likely not ask for my review again

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

The

 F

orkhead B

 ox

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

 dFoxP

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

The Drosophila FoxP gene is necessary for operant self-learning

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

I cannot take it any more.

Publishers, stop torturing your reviewers!

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

 F1000 Research

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

The way academic publishing should be

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

Your university is definitely paying too much for journals

Yesterday,

 Science Magazine

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

 Science Magazine

reports that 157 journals accepted and 98 rejected the manuscript.

Science Magazine rejects data, publishes anecdote

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

Retiring from science?

The cost of knowledge – in 2003?

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

How to recharge in Sweden

Flashback: Noise in the brain?

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

SummerScienceVideo: science is real

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

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

The Conversation: The looming crisis in science

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

Trying a new feature: Tweetlog

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

Scholarly societies: like a cat chasing the laser dot

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

Improved Plan S principles raise hope of more effective policies soon

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

How gold open access may make things worse

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

Should public institutions not be choosing the lowest responsible bidder?

Earning credibility in post-factual science?

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

 Drosophila

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

If only all science were this reproducible

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

 status quo

today.

Whither now, Open Access?

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

The beginning of the end for academic publishers?

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

 As a reader:

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

What should a modern scientific infrastructure look like?

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

Prioritizing academic publishers

Barely a fortnight has passed since

 Science Magazine

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

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

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

Video: Free will as an evolved brain function

Flashback: What can the spine teach us about learning?

Flashback: The neurobiology of operant conditioning

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

A wonderful example of Open Science

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

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

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

Looking for a PhD student

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

Why I march

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

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

On the productivity of scientists

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

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

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

Predatory Priorities

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

12 year anniversary of angry letter to scientific journal editor

bjoern.brembs.blog

With about 2 years delay, US President Donald Trump hired [Kelvin
Droegemeier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_Droegemeier) as
director for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
(OSTP) in February 2019. In a recent
[interview](https://www.aip.org/fyi/2019/interview-ostp-director-kelvin-droegemeier)
Dr. Droegemeier made the following broad, categorical statement in
response to a PLan S question:

> One of the things this government will not do is to tell researchers
> where they have to publish their papers. That is absolutely up to the
> scholar who's doing the publication. There's just no question about
> that.  
>   
> \[...\]  
>   
> This goes back to the president's fundamental philosophy of let's not
> shackle people, let's let them be free to choose where they publish.
> Let's not put any administrative constraints on them.

As [Hanlon's razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)
requires to first rule out incompetence before attributing malice to any
action, one needs to assess the competence of Dr. Droegemeier with
regard to such sweeping policy statements. On his Wikipedia entry one
can find numerous political appointments for various policy posts since
2004. It is thus fair to assume that Dr. Droegemeier has a fair bit of
experience and expertise with regard to the long-standing policies of
the US government. Moreover, previous director Holdren and several other
scientists have spoken out in favor of Dr. Droegemeier's appointment.
Attributing any false statement to incompetence would thus seem
unlikely, even if he was appointed by Trump.

It is thus straightforward to conclude that the above statement was a
lie with the purpose of scoring political points, as his statements are
very easy to verify. For instance, one can have a look at job
advertisements of a federal agency, such as the NIH, top see if they
contain any language that implies that the government may "tell
researchers where they have to publish their papers". Such statements
are, of course, easy enough to find. Here are two examples:

In [this ad for a postdoctoral
position](https://jobs.sciencecareers.org/job/497983/postdoctoral-position-in-the-translational-allergic-immunopathology-unit-niaid-nih/)
in the NIAID/NIH Translational Allergic Immunopathy Unit it lists under
expected qualifications: "a track record of publication in peer-reviewed
journals". Clearly, you are not welcome at the NIH ("this government")
if you haven't published in these particular venues.

[This ad for a postdoctoral
position](https://jobs.sciencecareers.org/job/498501/post-doctoral-research-fellow-/)
at the NCI/NIH cancer center goes even further. It makes the explicit
expectation that the candidate, once hired, continues to publish in such
journals, as the candidate "is anticipated to complete this study with
one or more high-impact publications in peer review journals."

Clearly, one of the things this US government is doing is precisely
telling researchers in no uncertain terms where they have to publish
their papers if they want to be/stay hired by this government -- in a
clear contradiction to what Dr. Droegemeier has stated in the interview.
Surely a man with such ample experience in science policy is aware of
the policies of the US's largest scientific agency?  


With about 2 years delay, US President Donald Trump hired Kelvin Droegemeier as director for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in February 2019.

New OSTP director caught lying in interview

I usually don't write about politics, but there has been
[one](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n457.html) or the
[other](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n383.html) 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? I'm looking for
something like this:

"Sadly, it is very difficult to completely prevent casualties such as
those in the recent terror attacks in Madrid, London, Paris, Brussels or
elsewhere, without violating basic human rights and abandoning hard-won
liberties. Our ancestors have given their lives for these rights and
liberties and we, as a society, are equally willing to pay that price.
However, the victims of these horrific attacks have never been asked to
give their lives. They were forced to become martyrs for our human
rights and our civil liberties. It is infuriating and frustrating that
there seems to be only little we can do to prevent such deaths. However,
there are \~1.2M [preventable
deaths](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Amenable_and_preventable_deaths_statistics)
in Europe alone every year. We propose to do something about these lives
instead. These fatalities are due to causes such as lung cancer,
accidental injuries, alcohol related diseases, suicides and
self-inflicted injuries. With even in the 1970s and 1980s
terrorist-related fatalities
[never](https://www.statista.com/chart/4093/people-killed-by-terrorist-attacks-in-western-europe-since-1970/)
exceeding 500 per year, we will honor the lives of the victims of
terrorism by initiating a program that will save at least 100 lives for
every one that is being taken in a terrorist attack.

To reach this ambitious goal, we will start with increasing our efforts
to prevent alcohol and tobacco-related deaths through effective
public-health intervention programs as well as basic and applied
biomedical research into the prevention, causes and treatment of these
diseases and disorders. With about 30.000 annual fatalities in
traffic-related accidents, we will also introduce European-wide speed
limits, strong enforcement via speed-traps and an increased police force
which collaborates across Europe. Drivers convicted of violating speed
limits or DUI will have their driver's licenses withdrawn for extended
periods of time. We will increase our investments in the development of
driverless vehicles. Should these activities fail to reach these goals,
we will start targeting more areas. The individual projects will be
named after the victims of terrorism, as a reminder of their forced
contribution to the improvement of our open society. This program will
be implemented on top of the intensified, heroic efforts of our law
enforcement and intelligence agencies working hard to prevent such
attacks within the bounds of our open society. We will strive to reach
these goals in addition to our enduring political and diplomatic
initiatives to mitigate the religious, socio-economic and political
circumstances which can be used to recruit and motivate terrorists.

This death prevention program will not only protect our basic human
rights and civil liberties, it will also benefit the economy in general
and increase employment in particular. Through the additional investment
in prevention, diagnosis and treatment, our public health systems will
benefit long after any terrorist groups have ceased to exist. Our extra
investment in basic and applied research will yield discoveries that
will benefit all of humanity long after the last terrorist has
sacrificed his life in vain. With our new program, every single
terrorist attack will save the lives of countless more citizens than it
has cost, turning terrorism into a net life-saving activity."

If you have found an advocate for such a program, or one like it, please
let me know where to find them, I'd like to support them.


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?

What do these two memes have in common?

[![falsememes](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes-1024x354.png){.aligncenter
.size-large .wp-image-1106 loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="520"
height="180"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes-1024x354.png 1024w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes-300x104.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes-768x265.png 768w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes-50x17.png 50w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes.png 1558w"
sizes="(max-width: 520px) 100vw, 520px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes.png){rel="attachment wp-att-1106"}While
they may have more than one thing in common, the point important for now
is that despite both having an air of plausibility or 'truthiness'
around them, they're both false: neither has Donald Trump [ever
said](https://withoutbullshit.com/blog/donald-trump-memes-and-the-dangers-of-post-factual-politics)
these words to *People* magazine, nor do gay canvassers [have such an
effect](https://retractionwatch.com/2015/05/28/science-retracts-troubled-gay-canvassing-study-against-lacours-objections/)
on people's attitudes (even though the quoted statement about this
research was indeed published in *Science* magazine).

The issue of false facts has become so rampant in current politics, that
some have
[dubbed](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/welcome-to-the-postfactua_b_42527.html)
our common era "post-factual". While on the surface, "post-factual
science" appears to be an oxymoron, recent evidence raises the
tantalizing possibility that at least the literature of the
life-sciences, broadly speaking, may be on track to leaving the
reality-based community (although more research is required):

::: {#attachment_1107 .wp-caption .aligncenter style="width: 530px"}
[![Sources:
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002165
and
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/irreproducibility-1024x515.png){.wp-image-1107
.size-large loading="lazy" decoding="async"
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1107" width="520" height="262"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/irreproducibility-1024x515.png 1024w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/irreproducibility-300x151.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/irreproducibility-768x386.png 768w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/irreproducibility-50x25.png 50w"
sizes="(max-width: 520px) 100vw, 520px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/irreproducibility.png){rel="attachment wp-att-1107"}

Irreproducibility loosely defined as in "not replicated", or "difficult
to replicate with imprecise methods". Note that not all of these are
replication studies and not all of the replication studies are properly
published themselves, with data available etc. To my knowledge, only the
Open Science study is reliable in that respect. Sources:
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002165
and https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716
:::

Obviously, this data can only hold for experimental sciences and even
there I would expect huge differences between the different sub-fields.
Nevertheless, the frequency of retractions in biomedicine is rising
exponentially, the 'majority of research findings' was
[estimated](https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)
and more recently supported (at least tentatively for the findings
analyzed/replicated in the above six studies) to be false and the public
trust in science is
[eroding](https://chronicle.com/article/The-Water-Next-Time-Professor/235136).
Maybe it is not too early to start asking the question: if we can't even
trust the scientific literature, what information is trustworthy? Or,
put differently: if traditional (some would say legacy) strategies for
assigning credibility are failing us, are there more modern strategies
which can replace or at least support them?

Personally, I think this is one of the most urgent and important
challenges of the post-internet globalized society. It may well be that
science, which brought us the internet in the first place, may also be
the right place to start looking for a solution.

Truth has never been an easy concept. Some may even argue that a large
portion of humanity is probably quite happy with it being rather
malleable and pliable. It wasn't really until the 20th century that
[epistemologists](http://brembs.net/metabiology/) have explicitly
formulated a convention of what constitutes a scientific fact and how
they can be used to derive and test scientific statements. Obviously, in
life outside of science we are still far from an explicit convention,
which complicates matters even further.

Be that as it may, neither within nor outside of science can we expect
every individual to always fact-check, question and investigate every
single statement or bit of information ever encountered, no matter how
much that may be desired. There will always, inevitably have to be
shortcuts and we have been taking them, legitimately, I would argue,
since the beginning of humanity.

Initially, these shortcuts involved authority. With enlightenment and
the shedding of both religious, societal and political shackles, a
(competing?) more democratic and informal shortcut was conceived
(without ever completely replacing authority): popularity. If a
sufficiently large number of information outlets confirmed a statement,
it was considered sufficient for believing it. Both shortcuts are still
being used today both inside and outside of science, for very legitimate
reasons. However, in part because the choice of authority is often
arbitrary and may even be subject to partisan dispute, there are few, if
any, universal authorities left. Even in science, the outlets with the
most authority have been shown to publish the [least
reliable](https://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full)
science. This erosion of the 'authority' shortcut accelerated with the
dawn of the internet age: never before was it so easy to get so many
people to repeat so many falsehoods with such conviction.

The 'wisdom of the crowd' seems to suggest that a  sufficiently large
crowd can be at least as accurate as a small number of expert
authorities, if not more so. Social media have the uncanny ability of
always aggregating what subjectively feels like a "sufficiently large
crowd" to solidly refute any and all authority, whether that would be on
the moon landings, the 9/11 attacks, vaccination effectiveness/risk,
climate change, crime/gun control, or spherical earth. Obviously, this
not only constitutes a fatal misunderstanding of how the crowd becomes
wise, it also contributes to an unjustified, exaggerated distrust in
entities which do have significant expertise and hence credibility.

There are several reasons as to why social media, as currently
implemented are notoriously incapable of getting anywhere near an ideal
'wisdom of the crowd' effect. For one, social feedback loops tend to
aggregate people who think alike, i.e., reduce heterogeneity, when
[diversity](https://books.google.de/books?id=afqfFW8WV9cC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=micro-expertise&source=bl&ots=p-CtYBlgFM&sig=3BbQj7-n1ZICJ1qbPXONXvKsubk&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=micro-expertise&f=false)
is one of the most decisive factors in achieving crowd wisdom. Second,
with our stone-age concept of a crowd, we may intellectually understand,
but fail to intuitively grasp that any group of less than a few tens of
millions is more of an intimate gathering rather than a crowd, on
internet scales. With today's social media implementation, it is
comparatively easy to quickly gather a few million people who all share
some fringe belief.

For instance, if we round the incidence of schizophrenia to about 1% of
the population and assume, for simplicity's sake, that all of them
harbor either auditory hallucinations or some other forms of delusions.
Hence, if 1% of all [internet
users](https://www.statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-internet-users-worldwide/)
were delusional in some way or form and only half of them aggregated in
an online patient forum, we'd be talking about more than 15 million
individuals. I'm pretty sure that such a patient site would deliver some
quite astounding news feed with an amazing commentariat. And this is
just one of a growing list of psychiatric disorders. How many nominally
healthy users would feel compelled to believe the news from this site,
re-share items and comment approvingly? Most far-out-there communities
have orders of magnitudes less users but disproportionately large
visibility. Indeed, some of those communities may appear just like a
subforum of such a patient site, but without a single user actually
being diagnosed with any psychiatric disorder whatsoever.

So if we want to take advantage of the
[micro-expertise](https://books.google.de/books?id=afqfFW8WV9cC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=micro-expertise&source=bl&ots=p-CtYBlgFM&sig=3BbQj7-n1ZICJ1qbPXONXvKsubk&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=micro-expertise&f=false)
of the individuals in a crowd, that crowd needs to be not only
'sufficiently' large for the task at hand, it more importantly needs to
be sufficiently diverse, or size quickly becomes almost completely
irrelevant. From numerous examples in science and elsewhere, it seems
straightforward to argue that we need to harness the individual
micro-expertise that *anyone* can have, without making the mistake to
attribute this expertise to *everyone*. Authority alone cannot serve as
a reliable shortcut for credibility, but neither can popularity alone.
Here is an idea of how one might combine them.

I may be wrong, but at least for now I would argue that we probably
cannot start from scratch, assigning every institution, organization and
individual the same kind of credibility. We cannot and should not undo
history and track records based in evidence: there are information
sources that have a higher credibility than others.

Further, we probably need a score or at least ranks that get computed
iteratively and recursively. For any individual or piece of information
to gather points or climb ranks, there need to be arbiters that already
have some credibility -- another reason why we likely won't be able to
start with a level playing field. What is less clear is how such a
scoring/ranking system ought to be designed: I somehow have the
impression that it ought to be difficult to earn credibility, shouldn't
it? Of course, it's usually always "innocent until proven guilty", but
is this a practical approach when doling out credibility? Should we all
start with a credibility of 100 and then lose it? Or should we start
with 0 and then gain? Does such a score have to go negative?

So far, these ideas have been very vague and general. Here are my first
thoughts on how one may go about implementing such a system in science.
A prerequisite for such a system is, of course, a
[modern](https://csarven.ca/enabling-accessible-knowledge)
[scholarly](https://billmills.github.io/blog/full-stack/)
[information](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/04/what-should-a-modern-scientific-infrastructure-look-like/)
[infrastructure](https://cameronneylon.net/blog/principles-for-open-scholarly-infrastructures/).
This won't work with the 350 year-old technology we call 'journals'.

Because we need diversity and inclusiveness, one would never prevent
anybody from posting whatever they have discovered. However, if someone
described a discovery from a known research institution, that discovery
would receive more credibility than if it were posted by a layman
without a track record (even though both scores would still be
relatively low at the point of publication). Similarly, if the author
list contained professors, the article would receive more credibility
than if there were only graduate student authors. Yet more credibility
would be assigned if the data and code relevant for the discovery were
openly available as well. Once this initial stage had been completed,
the document and its affiliated authors and institutions can earn even
more credibility, for instance if the code gets verified, or the data
checked for completeness and documentation. Those doing the verification
and reviewing also need to be diverse, so also here there should not be
a principle limit. However, the weight given to each verification (or
lack thereof) will be different according to the scores of the person
doing the verification.  More credit for reproducible data analysis
(e.g. via [docker](https://www.docker.com/) et al.) and if the narrative
accompanying the data/code is supported by them. This whole process
would be similar to current peer-review, albeit more fine-grained,
likely by more people (each contributing a smaller fraction of the
reviewing work) and not necessarily on each and every article.

This process continues to accrue (or lose) credibility inasmuch as the
article is receiving attention with consequences, e.g., how many views
for each citation (in accordance with a citation typology, e.g.
[CiTO](https://purl.org/spar/cito/)), how many views for each comment,
endorsement or recommendation, etc. This is one possible way of
normalizing for field size, another could be by analyzing citation
networks (as in, e.g.
[RCR](https://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/10/22/029629)). Clearly,
most credibility ought to be associated with the experiments in each
article being actually reproduced by independent laboratories (i.e., a
special kind of citation).

In this iterative process, each participant receives credit in various
ways for their various activities. Credibility would be just one of
several factors being constantly monitored. Points can be awarded both
for receiving (and passing!) scrutiny from others as well as
scrutinizing other people's work. The resulting system is thought to
allow everyone to check the track record of everyone else for some data
on how reliable the work of this person (or institution, or community)
has been so far, along with more details on how the track record was
generated.

Obviously, there are plenty of feedback loops involved in this system,
so care has to be taken to make these loops balance each other. The
feedback loops found in many biological processes would serve as
excellent examples of how to accomplish this. Complex systems like this
are also known to be notoriously difficult to game.

Those are still very rough ideas, without a clear picture of the most
suitable or effective implementation, yet, or whether the desired
outcomes can actually be achieved in this way. I also have no good idea
how one would take such a system to leverage it outside of science. I
would like to hope, however, that by starting on the easier case of
science, we may be able to approach a related system for the society at
large.


[*This is a post loosely based on an
[article](https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/forschung-und-lehre/verbesserung-der-arbeitsbedingungen-an-unis-13354907.html)
appearing today in the German newspaper "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"
by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is
[available](https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1285319). Please do
let us know if you find a mistake.*]{style="font-size: 10pt;"}

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

[**UPDATE**]{style="font-size: 10pt;"}*[, 09/01/2015: A commenter made
me aware of data rows in the raw data we had overlooked before. In our
analysis, we evaluated all non-scientific professional staff, e.g., also
technical support or library staff. As I'm actually quite fond of the
libraries and the technical support we have, I looked at the trends for
the 'pure' permanent administration staff and found and increase of 17%
from 2005 to 2012, while permanent scientist positions increased only by
0.04%. Taking only these two groups of employees, the ratio between
scientists and administrators shrinks to 0.57 in 2005 and 0.64 in 2012,
i.e., the average administrator has to support less than two permanently
employed scientists. In my opinion, this would have been the better data
to use, but my co-author is not quite as convinced. Either way, even
focusing on 'pure' admin staff conveys essentially the same message as
the full overall data, albeit perhaps less dramatically. This is
precisely why I am an open science advocate: making your data open
allows you to discover more and improve your
science!]{style="font-size: 10pt;"}  
*

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

[**UPDATE***, 16/03/2015: I was just made aware of very similar numbers
from the USA, published in this [article by Jon
Marcus](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584.html).*]{style="font-size: 10pt;"}

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

Noam Chomsky, writing about the [Death of American
Universities](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/the-death-of-american-universities/),
recently reminded us that reforming universities using a corporate
business model leads to several easy to understand consequences. The
increase of the precariat of faculty without benefits or tenure, a
growing layer of administration and bureaucracy, or the increase in
student debt. In part, this well-known corporate strategy serves to
increase labor servility. The student debt problem is particularly
obvious in countries with tuition fees, especially in the US where [a
convincing argument has been made](https://www.takepart.com/ivorytower)
that the tuition system is nearing its breaking point. The decrease in
tenured positions is also quite well documented (see e.g., an [old
post](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n683.html)). So far, and
perhaps as may have been expected, Chomsky was dead on with his
assessment. But how about the administrations?

To my knowledge, nobody has so far checked if there really is any growth
in university administration and bureaucracy, apart from everybody
complaining about it (but see update above with link to similar numbers
from the US). So [Axel
Brennicke](https://sites.google.com/site/axelbrennicke/) and I decided
to have a look at the numbers. In Germany, employment statistics can be
obtained from the federal statistics registry,
[Destatis](https://destatis.de). We sampled data from 2005 (the year
before the [Excellence
Initiative](https://www.excellence-initiative.com/) and the [Higher
Education
Pact](https://www.research-in-germany.de/en/research-landscape/r-and-d-policy-framework/higher-education-pact.html))
and the latest year we were able to obtain, 2012.

The aim of the Excellence Initiative and the Higher Education pact was
to improve the funding situation for universities to increase scientific
competitiveness and to allow them to cope with the rising student
numbers. Student numbers increased from 2005-2012 by 25% to 2.5 million.
The number of full-time university employees in research and teaching
also increased, but only by 18% to just over 142,000, i.e., not keeping
up with student numbers. Looking at the type of contracts, we can
confirm the US trend of an increasing precariat also here in Germany: in
2005, 50% of all full-time employees were on short-term contracts. This
fraction increased by about one percentage point per year to now more
than 58%.

University leadership and politicians often argue that such short-term
employment benefits research as scientists constantly need to learn new
skills in different places and the short-term contracts keep the
work-force up-to-date and flexible. However, this argument also holds
for administrations: fluctuating student numbers, a constantly changing
funding landscape and the constant turnover of university employees
ought to mandate a flexible and slim administration as well.

However, the numbers speak a different language. Every full-time
university scientist is administrated by 1,28 employees in
administration. Of these 182,255 administrative and professional
employees, only 25% are on fixed-term contracts. The remaining 75% are
virtually tenured: it is almost impossible to make them redundant,
according to German laws and regulations for public employees.

Perhaps the two initiatives have improved on this situation? Maybe in
2005, the situation was even worse? Alas, the fraction of 'tenured'
administrative personnel and professional staff was only 70% in 2005. In
fact, for every permanent position that was created in research and
teaching between 2005-2012, 3.7 such positions were newly created in the
university administrations. This means that the average German scientist
now supervises 7 more students than in 2005, while the burden on
administrators and professional staff has only increased by 2.7
students.

These numbers show the real winners and losers of the increased cash
flow in this past decade: the students and scientists lose out, while
university administrations benefit the most from the billions. At this
point, to support the work of 60,438 permanently employed scientists in
German universities, it is apparently required to permanently employ
135,897 administrative and professional employees.

In fact, for every permanent position that was created in this time, ten
fixed-term positions were created, exacerbating the already abysmal job
prospects of German early-career scientists. This parallels the
development in many other research nations such as the US or the UK. The
situation is most dramatic for early-career scientists. The tip of this
huge iceberg are increasing number of science scandals, such as the
recent case of the young Haruko Obukata whose mentor committed suicide
after the manipulations of his student became known, or Felisa
Wolfe-Simon, who called her arsenic-less strain of bacteria "GFAJ1":
give Felisa a job.

As I [remarked](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n683.html) long
ago, the trend to corporatize higher education parallels the rise in
retractions. This rise in retractions is so rapid, that by about 2045
every published article will be accompanied by the retraction of another
article, if the current trend continues. Back in 2010, Amy Bishop killed
three of her colleagues at University of Alabama in a shooting spree
after she was denied tenure because her publication rate was deemed
insufficient. Scientists on non-permanent positions today need to
publish many articles in journals ranking high in a hierarchy that is
[devoid of any empirical
justification](https://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/fullhttps://).
On top of that, they need to devise and find funding for especially
expensive experiments, as the higher the funding, the higher the
so-called 'overhead' that the universities receive. Last year, professor
Stefan Grimm committed suicide after his employer, Imperial College
London [told
him](https://www.dcscience.net/2014/12/01/publish-and-perish-at-imperial-college-london-the-death-of-stefan-grimm/)
he had 12 months to pull in 200,000 Pounds in research funding or be
fired.

Today's top scientists thus have been selected by their marketing
competence to sell their work to hi-ranking journals and by their
ability to come up with expensive experiments. If their research is
actually reliable and sound, it is pure coincidence. There exist no
incentives today for just doing reproducible science.

The trends are clear on all fronts: business as usual has become
untenable. There needs to be reform and it has to be international and
far-reaching. Tinkering a little here and there is not going to cut it.
On the up side, a lot can be established by universities themselves,
without outside assistance: administration funds can be siphoned into
research/teaching positions, and the billions now tied up in
subscriptions can be used to develop a digital infrastructure which
comprises a reputation system that rewards scientists for doing reliable
science, once all subscriptions have been canceled. This is technically
and financially feasible and within a sufficiently short time-frame. But
action has to be taken now and it has to be decisive. The downside? It
has to be [collective
action](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action).

P.S.: We have made the raw data on which we have written our article
[available](https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1285319) for everyone
to check. Mistakes happen and we would not want to end up like
[Reinhardt and
Rogoff](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/16/is-the-best-evidence-for-austerity-based-on-an-excel-spreadsheet-error/).

P.P.S.: Two related articles, one in
[English](https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/) and one in [German
(PDF)](https://www.kritiknetz.de/images/stories/texte/Wolf_Professorendaemmerung.pdf).
