Blute Blog

What started the degeneration was the “open access” movement. The modern “open access” scientific movement that began in the early two thousands, like other left-wing movements, claimed that people should get something for free. Of course, the ‘something’ is never free, there are always costs involved, so in this case it began a shift from reader pays (subscription model) to writer pays (open access model), a trend which continues to this day. Copilot estimates that while subscription model journals are still more common, if you count by articles published, open access is more numerous and still growing – they publish more articles. Hybrid models are in between, some requiring you to declare before acceptance which way you will publish if accepted, others allowing you to choose after.

Another trend is toward monopolization. How many journals do you think the biggest scientific publishers, Springer-Nature and Elsevier, publish – dozens? hundreds? – actually some 3,000 each! Of course, such publishers, part of for-profit companies, do not publish in the traditional sense, printing copies and mailing them out to subscribers whether individuals, libraries or other institutions. Instead, they draw and paint a picture of a pretty cover, attach pictures of the articles, and send them out electronically. Not surprisingly, refereeing has become a disaster. Getting a referee and a report from the commonly single reviewer, often takes not weeks but months. Hence again, not surprisingly, authors often post their articles without or before an acceptance to pre-print servers like arXiv,HAL or bioRxiv, hoping to get earlier attention, maybe even citations.

Who would you suppose publishes more in open-access journals or by the open-access route in hybrid journals, both of which commonly charge some two or three thousand dollars an article? It is the poor who most often pay of course. The majority of courses in American universities and in Canadian colleges are taught by people on contract for the course – they have no longer-term job stability. It is the young, those starting out, the less well established that have to flit from term to term, even place to place, and pay to publish. For the well-established, libraries and other institutions including granting agencies sometimes pay open-access fees.. And now, another level has begun – open access books. I wonder how much one will pay to publish a book as opposed to a paper.

Hence came all of the abuses by which some try to get a start at becoming an established scientist. Some of the most notorious are cases in which data and graphs are taken from on-line papers and claimed to be the results from research on some other topic, research that was never done. Bless them, the science journalists in the front part of the journal Nature have taken to systematically exposing various kinds of abuses. And if scientists can commit fraud, then they can be defrauded as well – for example by fake journals who collect, even solicit articles simply to collect the open-access fees.

My conclusion is that the problems exists not just because of old farts like me who “would rather get news than noise” (a CBC slogan), or who might even rather not use the internet, but because society needs to be able to rely on a consensus of scientists with specialized knowledge in a field and increasingly in too many cases they cannot do so.