Björn Brembs

Most academics would agree that the way scholarship is done today, in
the broadest, most general terms, is in dire need of modernization.
Problems abound from counter-productive incentives, inefficiencies, lack
of reproducibility, to an overemphasis on competition at the expense of
cooperation, or a technically antiquated digital infrastructure that
charges to much and provides only few useful functionalities. Many a
scholar have expressed the issue in terms of a [social
dilemma](https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i9.5381): the proximate interests
of each individual actor, be it institution or individual are not
aligned with the distal interests of the collective knowledge creation
process. In other words, collective action is needed, where multiple
actors act collectively in order to mitigate against the potential
detrimental effects for each individual actor. This insight has been
articulated for various aspects of scholarly reform, be it our
[literature](https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/viewFile/16581/18027),
[research quality](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03750-7),
or [scholarship in
general](https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1130&context=scholcom).
Collective action solutions can have various implementations from a
simple aspiration such as "if only everybody would do X" to a
contractual agreement among individuals to form a collective with a
specific purpose, goals and means or strategies to achieve them. They
all have in common that a sufficient number of actors need to act
simultaneously enough in order to overcome the proximal obstacles.

Most of the numbers to express the size of this collective action
problem are not so difficult to obtain. The main actors in this problem
are of course individual researchers, but also the institutions at which
they work and here in particular their libraries which hold the purse
strings for much of the digital infrastructure that is in need of
reform. Finally, research funding agencies (funders) not only provide
key incentives for researchers but also decide which institutions are
eligible for funding.

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.

The number of universities is likely a reasonable approximation for the
number of libraries. [Webometrics
lists](https://www.webometrics.info/en/distribution_by_country) about
30,000 universities globally.

The number of funding agencies is less easy to estimate. There is no
list of funding agencies. The organization of research funding varies
between countries such that research funds come both directly from the
research institution and from funders that are often national, but also
international in reach. Funders can be governmental or philanthropic.
With about 200 countries in the world and each country with at least
one, possibly more funding agencies, 400-500 funding agencies with at
least roughly comparable influence over institutions and individual
researchers is probably a reasonable estimate.

Taken together, we are looking at more than ten million researchers,
30,000 institutions but not even 1,000 funding agencies. These numbers
only denote relative sizes as only the end of the collective action
problem is given by the absolute size of the collective. The number
required to start collective action in a way that leads to pervasive
reform is not known. Given the massive disparities between research
intensive countries and the rest of the world, whatever the this
theoretical fraction of the collective joining the "early movers" will
likely by further reduced if the "early movers" were largely composed of
actors from leading research nations. Thus, if one considered only the
most 'influential' 10% of all actors needing to be involved for a
snowball effect of change to sweep the globe, the numbers change to one
million researchers, three thousand institutions or just 40 funders.
Thus, even at such dramatically reduced sizes, both individual
researchers and their institutions appear as unreasonably large targets
for any meaningful short to mid-term impact. Funders, however, not only
represent a manageable size for a collective action problem, they ought
to also have an intrinsic interest that their money is spent with the
interest of the public in mind and not necessarily that of the
individual researchers as long as it remains at odds with that of the
public that provides the funds.

All of these numbers corroborate a well-known realization, flippantly
formulated below:  
![](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/everyone_will_not_just.png){.wp-image-2435
loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1282" height="620"
style="width: 600px;"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/everyone_will_not_just.png 1282w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/everyone_will_not_just-300x145.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/everyone_will_not_just-1024x495.png 1024w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/everyone_will_not_just-768x371.png 768w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/everyone_will_not_just-50x24.png 50w"
sizes="(max-width: 1282px) 100vw, 1282px"}

What could funders do in order to initiate collective reform? Clearly,
the mission of funding agencies is to fund research projects, not
infrastructure. Just spending their money on infrastructure instead of
research projects would be contrary to their mission and deteriorate the
already in many places already precipitously low funding rates. If
anything, funding agencies should increase their funding rates and not
decrease them even further below already unhealthy levels. Funding
agencies have a range of orthogonal options to shape research policies
at institutions at their disposal. For instance, funders set very
specific [eligibility
criteria](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uG1mcOEkLFFaJm9PDvink_Tabjzsb4aIiNf4pw7LJOg/edit?usp=sharing)
that institutions need to fulfill in order for their members to receive
grant funding. If these eligibility criteria were to exclude
institutions which fund or otherwise support counter-productive
incentives, irreproducible science or wasteful and dysfunctional
infrastructure, these institutions would be incentivized to become
eligible again. Funding agencies could thus use their eligibility
criteria to reward and penalize desired and counter-productive
institutional policies, respectively. Historically, such eligibility
criteria have been used very effectively to ensure minimum
infrastructure standards. Today, just like seemingly everything in this
domain, these criteria just urgently need an overhaul. Some funders are
already updating their policies in this regards, such as the DFG, the
[Wellcome
Trust](https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/guidance/open-access-guidance/open-access-policy)
or the [Templeton World Charity
Foundation](https://www.templetonworldcharity.org/research-assessment-policy).

The question remains whether other funding agencies are aware of their
power and willing to initiate the procedures required for modernizing
their eligibility criteria? The formation of initiatives such as "Plan
S" shows that the general understanding of the need for modernization
together with a willingness for collective action is present in some of
these funders. The general feasibility of such a "[Plan
I](https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4468511)" (for infrastructure) was
also already
[acknowledged](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2021/01/can-funders-mandate-institutions/).
With understanding, general willingness and feasibility established, it
remains to be seen if funding agencies consider the current threats to
publicly funded science serious and urgent enough to warrant the effort
to improve their eligibility criteria.

Thus, institutions need to modernize their infrastructure such that
researchers are enabled to modernize their scholarship. They have now
had more than 30 years for this modernization and neither of them have
acted. At this point it is fair to assume, barring some major
catastrophe forcing their hands, that such modernization is not going to
magically appear within the next three decades, either. Funders,
therefore, are in a position to *incentivize* this long overdue
modernization, not by mandating 11 million individuals, but by
[mandating
institutions](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2018/11/maybe-try-another-kind-of-mandate/)
to finally implement long overdue modernizations -- modernizations which
institutions and hence researchers have been too complacent or too
reticent to tackle.

If we are faced with a collective action problem, as I would tend to
agree, and the size of the collective is the major determinant for
effective problem solving, then it is a short step to realize that
funders are in a uniquely suited position to start solving this
collective action problem. Conversely, then, it is only legitimate to
question the motives of those who seek to make the collective action
problem unnecessary difficult by advocating to target individual
researchers or institutions. What could possibly be the benefit of
making the collective action problem numerically more difficult to
solve?


Most academics would agree that the way scholarship is done today, in the broadest, most general terms, is in dire need of modernization. Problems abound from counter-productive incentives, inefficiencies, lack of reproducibility, to an overemphasis on competition at the expense of cooperation, or a technically antiquated digital infrastructure that charges to much and provides only few useful functionalities.

Messages de Rogue Scholar

Minimizing the collective action problem