I found it difficult to glean the high-level points of this article without reading the whole thing. So here it my paraphrasing:
This is a highly opinionated article against recent ASA opposition to a law that would require them to release taxpayer funded research publications for free immediately. Currently there is a 12 month delay before they need to release which allows them to generate revenue via subscriptions. The ASA says this is bad because it removes the source of funding for peer review so there will be negative effects on academic integrity.
The author frames this as opposing open science and they allude to other integrity problems in academia such as plagiarism and cheating.
My opinion: Kinda seems like it boils down to a conflict between wanting an open and centralized system. I cant fault the ASA on one hand because this does fundamentally weaken them, but on the other hand maybe the best system doesn't include a central institution responsible for shaping the field. But thats not currently the case, and the ASA exists, so it seems like they're acting rationally.
> I cant fault the ASA on one hand because this does fundamentally weaken them, ... But thats not currently the case, and the ASA exists, so it seems like they're acting rationally.
But what is the utility that they provide?
They are no longer needed for distribution. They have never been able to validate works (despite the public perception thinking that's what they do). Scale makes them unable to effectively weed out low quality work (process is always noisy, scale increases noise). As far as I can tell, they only provide a metric that can be used by governments and academic institutions to evaluate their employees, but this gets noisier and noiser by the year. It also incentivizes "novel work" but work that isn't too novel because highly novel methods are often not effective at first despite being worth exploration. They also discourage replication studies, which is the cornerstone of science, as well as surveys, opinion papers, and more.
I really just do not see what they offer to us as researchers. They don't pay us to review. That time either comes from the academic institutions, gov money, or generally "free time". They don't pay area chairs, metareviewers, or others. They charge $30-$200 for a paper, on a shitty difficult to navigate website, where many open platforms like arxiv, openreview, and various *xiv host these works for free and are quite searchable with open APIs and many tools for easier navigation.
So what do they do? Because it looks just like a system that is really good at extracting money from academia and governments.
This makes sense to me. I feel like we need a lot more creative destruction in American society. The ASA doesn’t want open science because it threatens their business model. So what. We have too many organizations that are basically do nothing more than try to perpetuate their own existence. They’re acting “rationally”, but only from the perspective of a parasite or a tumor.
> The ASA doesn’t want open science because it threatens their business model.
> So what.
100% this. There are far too many things we just do because. There are far too many things where we actively create "harm" by not changing. Where that harm is more by continuing than were we to change. Momentum is a hell of a drug and lobbyists only make this more problematic. You're right that they are rationally acting in their own interest. But we have to consider the difference between public interest and business interest. That's the whole fucking point of a government, is to protect public interests from individual interests. Where is our fucking social contract?
Their mission to keep existing? Because at this point I can't tell what exactly their mission is beyond keeping the system going so that they maintain their position in it.
Basically the ASA (and ACS, and lots of other scientific societies) make money selling journal subscriptions and are against open access in general, because they see (to be fair, probably correctly) that not many institutions would subscribe to a journal if people could get the papers for free without a subscription. But obviously free access is better for science as a whole and will have to happen eventually. Scientific societies would be better off thinking about how they can stay funded without the journal subscriptions rather than rage against the incoming tide.
> Scientific societies would be better off thinking about how they can stay funded without the journal subscriptions rather than rage against the incoming tide.
Some of this depends on who you think the readership will be. Those scientific societies provide a sort of floor on the quality of what they publish, which allows non-experts like me to read the papers with some level of trust in the results.
Or, a layer of indirection away, it gives science journalists a source of stuff to write about that's at least somewhat validated. I do worry a bit about what happens to science journalism, which is already generally of poor quality, when they start reading random junk on arXiv.
Of course, there are alternatives where the papers could still be free. The government could fund the journals, arXiv could implement do their own peer review system with quality indicators. Probably more I'm not thinking of off the top of my head.
Based on what you have written, it kind of sounds like you are conflating the peer review process with scientific societies. Can you be specific about what kind of (productive) gatekeeping the society brings to the table that is not and cannot be fulfilled by a peer review process outside of their purview?
I have no first-hand experience, but my intuiting would be that a lot of the gatekeeping these societies do is focused on reputations, organizational hierarchies, and funding considerations. Which I would not really consider productive, especially in light of the abysmal state of reproducibility and the apparent lack of incentives to tighten things up.
"what kind of (productive) gatekeeping the society brings to the table that is not and cannot be fulfilled by a peer review process"
I don't think "cannot" should be the standard. If the same or better standard of peer review isn't provided (empirically) by some other system, then that's a legitimate criticism of the other system.
> Can you be specific about what kind of (productive) gatekeeping the society brings to the table that is not and cannot be fulfilled by a peer review process outside of their purview?
There are certainly other ways of getting to the same thing, but what I think a peer review process in isolation lacks is a sense of trustworthiness of the peer review.
I.e. as a layperson, I'm not particularly qualified to gauge the quality of an arbitrary paper. I am implicitly not qualified to gauge the quality of peer reviews, because I can't gauge the paper itself.
I can defer to the opinion of experts, though. These societies unify the diffuse expertise of who knows how many people. I.e. I don't work in sociology, so I have no idea who is a reputable sociologist, but I have some degree of confidence that the peer reviewers they choose aren't total quacks.
It's a useful heuristic for non-experts. I don't know anyone or anything in rocket science, but I can defer to what NASA says. I'm not a marine biologist, but I can defer to the NOAA. Etc, etc. There's value in that heuristic, even if it's not perfect.
> I have no first-hand experience, but my intuiting would be that a lot of the gatekeeping these societies do is focused on reputations, organizational hierarchies, and funding considerations.
This is indirectly useful to my thinking. The society is focused on funding and income, which is largely predicated on them being trustworthy (theoretically), which gives them an incentive to provide quality peer reviews. I would imagine a society with 0 standards loses subscribers pretty quickly.
arXiv could certainly do the same thing, but my impression is that arXiv is more focused on making papers available than being an authoritative entity on anything. "This paper is on arXiv" doesn't imply the same level of trust that being in a journal does. They derive value from being open rather than from being trustworthy.
arXiv definitely has value as well, I don't mean to imply that it doesn't or is bad in some way. It just has different goals, from my limited knowledge. It's likely invaluable to people in their field, especially for those qualified to gauge the trustworthiness of an individual study.
arXiv could definitely build some kind of trust system like that if they were interested, but I really think their primary audience is experts who don't have a need for a trustworthiness score simple enough for a layman.
"But obviously free access is better for science as a whole"
That's not totally obvious without sorting out the details. Similar to copyright, it seems to be inefficient (in the sense that it artificially restricts supply) but certainly a lot of people think it helps improve the overall supply of creative works.
But that's not how science publication works (and I say this as a scientist). When someone makes a creative work they may (or may not) want to get paid for it, and copyright helps in this regard. Scientists don't get paid for their articles -- the only people who make money off of scientific publications are the publishers. This was needed in the days when dead tree journals were the only way to get scientific papers distributed, but this isn't true any more. And even if you are talking about peer review, it is important to understand that the reviewers aren't employed by the journals -- they are unpaid volunteers. It is really unclear what if anything journal publishers contribute to the scientific ecosystem at this point.
Hold up now, that's mistaking the people who take the outside cash (namely, the folks who actually do the research) for the people who want to "own" something (namely, the ASA wanting limited term exclusive publication right for papers that people submit to them).
It's not the ASA taking the public funding. The folks who do the research should make their research results available for free, irrespective of what the ASA wants to do: the value of an ASA or any other similar association is in "being a peer-reviewed publication platform" that publishes vetted research (well, ideally. We all know the problems here). For that, having a publication publishing right where you are the only periodical that gets to release a product consisting of collections of research results does not interfere with any law that says that if you, as researcher(s), take public funding to do research, your research data and results should be freely available.
Sure, but laws around publicly funded research allow for that specifically in the context of peer-reviewed periodical publication (preventing folks from publishing in many different periodicals) while at the same time mandating that the research data and results should be freely available to the public. Because those two contexts are worlds apart.
What is this comment implying? I don't think it was meant as a retro-active implementation. Future research funded by tax dollars would be impacted, not past research. So it seems to align just fine with what you're saying.
Which I agree is the appropriate way to move forward. However, I see a lot of retroactive bitterness about research when this was not the case. e.g. posters in this thread calling for journals and scientists to crushed like parasites, ect.
That's because it is--more precisely, it's opposing open taxpayer-funded science. We the taxpayers already paid for the research once. Then we have to pay again to read the papers sooner than 12 months after publication?
Scientific journals are a racket anyway. My dad used to explicitly violate the journals rules and put up his articles on his homepage for free. He reasoned, correctly, that they journals would never call his bluff, because that would threaten the entire corrupt system.
The whole crux of the argument is that this is research that is federally funded
Whether or not a cartel is “rational” completely misses the point. It’s publicly funded research so it should be public data. Full stop no caveats or attempts to maintain the current system.
Everyone is just kind of assuming that sociological research is "federally funded," but what do we mean by that? Surely, not all research is federally funded. I work in an adjacent field with a similar grant structure, and "funding" is a combination of faculty salary and grants, which typically come from both federal organizations and foundations like Mellon, ACLS, etc.
While I'm all for open access (so long as authors don't need to pay to publish, which is often the case with open access journals), it would be a mistake to think research is publicly funded in the US to the same extent that it is in Europe or Latin America.
The memorandum calls for this to apply to unclassified research funded "wholly or in part" by federal funds. So, even a partial contribution by any of those mechanisms you identified may mark it for open access, although individual agencies are tasked with developing their own implementation policies.
What I'm afraid of occurring is over-leveraging classification of research as a means around this, if for no other reason than it's easier to implement/publish.
> "funding" is a combination of faculty salary and grants, which typically come from both federal organizations and foundations like Mellon, ACLS, etc.
This can also be a form of money laundering, though. You can easily end up completely government funded, but only through indirect means.
There's no "full stop", that's entirely a negotiated between the researches and the state, as is happening here. You can strong arm researchers into accepting worse terms, but that just means you'll get less research done, unless funding is increased.
> You can strong arm researchers into accepting worse terms, but that just means you'll get less research done, unless funding is increased.
Many of the researchers are absolutely fine with this rule. It's only the top ASA leadership and the rent extracting journals that have a problem with no longer facilitating journal's rent extraction from publicly funded research.
Try to pay attention, we're talking about commercial journals. Scientists don't need them except insofar as their bosses expect them to publish in them. The parasitic nature of these journals is evident from the fact that some disciplines have successfully moved away from them.
The delayed access "embargo" scheme is not that bad… if you are not chasing the latest stuff in the field. It works well enough for casual Wikipedia editing and junior researchers.
I don’t deal with the ASA much, but I do use the PNAS a lot — their HTML paper layout isn’t bad and they do maintain a nice archive. The National Academy of Science deserves some money for good web work, I just don’t know whether it’s just for them to take it from the embargo.
Also, how much marginal utility does "the public" gain when you reduce or remove an embargo?
> Despite a petition signed by many ASA members, and a resolution from its own Committee on Publications “to express opposition to the decision by the ASA to sign the December 18, 2019 letter” — which the ASA leadership never even publicly acknowledged — ASA has not uttered a word to alter its anachronistic and unpopular position.
This isn't a "centralized vs. open", it's "rent extracting journals vs. scientists"
> Universities and academic societies faking statistics, rewarding plagiarism and other scientific misconduct, restricting data, and otherwise mucking up the process of scholarly inquiry . . . that barely registers on the scale of institutionalized evil.
I'd lump it in the same category as the other things mentioned earlier: being hypocrites.
Like religion preaching one thing, practicing another. Or politicians being for the people, yet willing to enact policies or stir up wars resulting in the death of their people.
Academia is supposed to be about learning, knowledge, and growth, but locking down research and not calling out cheating and plagiarism speaks to the same rot; many at the top are just as selfish and negligent as the worst politicians and religious leaders.
But they sit at the top of their ivory towers and since we assign sacrosanct status to academic institutions (at least for the most part), they are never accountable.
Attribution of systematic failures to individuals typically overlooks the power of incentives.
Academics need funding, funding allows them to keep going. Institutions that academics work for have bloated overheads typically going to admins who are tiered in such a way that there is just a single admin at every level.
As the overheads go up, the pressure to publish and win awards does too. Most awards for public research say you can take up to 7% of the award as unobligated funds. The result is that institutions want higher operating costs, to push the bottom line and increase their 7% share.
So then using this logic, as long as an organization doesn’t claim to have any ethical standards then there’s no need to hold them accountable to any ethical standard?
The point of having laws is to resolve the problem: not everyone in society has ethics, let alone the same ethics, or ethics that are compatible with each other.
> The point of having laws is to resolve the problem
This statement is normative and has no relation to how laws are actually created.
Can you name a framework of laws that was implemented by a sovereign, explicitly developed to resolve the problem of heterogeneous goal vectors for a defined political population?
I’m unaware of one.
All foundational “constitutions” I’m aware of were written - not as treaties that were negotiated as partners during peace that have explicit and well defined ethical principles that need to be accommodated for - rather each side claim discrete and finite sovereignty and only at the point that one group shows overwhelming violent dominance is imminent do groups grudgingly carve out their own territory.
So no, there is no coherent process for lawmaking that does anything other than encode the desires of the dominant political arm into the structures of its own making.
Wasn't this the whole point of the Bill of Rights? Without it, some states wouldn't have ratified the Constitution. This was a concession (a weakening of federal power) made for a non-dominant political arm that nevertheless needed to be brought into the fold. That seems to me like it was "explicitly developed to resolve the problem of heterogenous goal vectors for a defined political population."
More broadly, "resolve etc." in the above quote sounds like a mathy expansion of "compromise", which happens in almost every legislative body every day. Although maybe that's done implicitly and not explicitly.
In any case your framing is off point AND uneccesarily caustic. This is a business. They are worried about their revenue. They make a specious argument in an effort to save that revenue. I've never seen this so called Ivory Tower of academia, but that is besides the point.
The open letter says that "open access" would "[threaten the] financial stability that enables us to support peer review that ensures the quality and integrity of the research enterprise."
Fact: peer reviewers are mostly unpaid. Journals might have some paid staff, but the way peer review works is academics are expected to do the actual reviewing work for free. Doing this a lot and being famous in your field gets you a fancy title like "editor", but that doesn't usually come with money attached.
Peer review itself would work just as well in an arXiv + easyChair model like some of STEM does it, replicating the value of journals for a much lower cost (and saving some trees in the process).
Public access to publicly funded research is long overdue.
I may not know the particulars of his actions, but I think there may be an important and subtle distinction here. Did Schwartz limit his actions to only releasing publically funded research?
IIRC: Schwarz "never got that far," being apprehended quite quickly [while he was still mid-DL on-campus]... because a trap had been set for him after the massive datatransfer was first observed.
BUT I personally support lib-gen, so I absolutely do not respect the concept of "Intellectual Property." I have contracted for several opensource projects which still find ways to become profitable (usually by distributing code with hardware).
"Privatize profits, subsidize losses" == take taxpayer funds, charge taxpayers for access IMHO
>I absolutely do not respect the concept of "Intellectual Property."
I think it's perfectly fine to selecting to work on open source projects based a principle of not respecting intellectual property rights. But it's another think to flaunt those laws and not be expected to be held accountable. What you can't expect IMO is think your lack of respect for a law somehow means you're above it. (That's not saying the govt didn't overreach in the Schwartz case; I'm not familiar enough with all the details to form a strong opinion.)
My ultimate "take" on the entire US v Schwarz is one of Misunderstanding.
Thank you for this discussion in fostering better understandings [e.g. your perspective].
----
One of my sick optimisms about generative AI being trained upon all this human creation, is that it may actually lead to the disolution of IP ownership... one can dream =P
> Peer review itself would work just as well in an arXiv + easyChair model like some of STEM does
I've been advocating for a model where we publish to OpenReview.
It supports revisions, comments, links to GitHub, link to community implementations, tags/keywords, data linking, and more. It seems like the most complete platform for migrating to a system of true peer review. Where peer review actually refers to review from peers and not "3-5 random people in your field incentivized to reject your work adversarially complaining about your work who may or may not know anything about your subdomain." Venue reviewing is a joke and our methods don't scale, as they depend entirely on good faith efforts and consideration of nuance. People see service and reviewing as a chore and there's little to no incentive to provide quality reviews.
There are still things I think need work to make this model successful. I think it is a bit silly that we require our communication system to be printed on a piece of paper. We should have ways to embed media like videos and demonstrations (even if it is an API call to hugging face). But the current system feels like we're still in the 1700's with a sprinkling of 21st century because now we don't have to hand draw figures.
The arXiv model worked well for LK-99. The preprint went up. It got some buzz from authoritative sources. Different labs tried to reproduce, some succeeded but some failed. Through this process we've learned much more about the object in question, and what else but this learning itself is the point of the scientific endeavor? How does an anonymous and inscrutable committee help in this process?
Keeping research results secret for national security reasons is very different from paywalling it just so journals can make money selling access to something the taxpayers already paid for.
I have a friend who works at one of these scientific societies (not the ASA). It's a complete scam - the organization hasn't done anything to advance the field since before any of use were born, and basically just exists to pay the salaries of the people who run it, none of whom are actually scientists. The money comes from a long-ago established monopoly on publishing some books that everybody needs to buy (which are, of course, written by actual scientists, who don't get paid).
So to be clear, I fully believe that the leadership of the ASA would try to undermine open-access publishing for no other reason than it threatens their own cushy jobs.
As an academic both the article and the ASA get things wrong.
Obviously making science available for everyone is good, and the ASA has no argument.
But the article minimizes the fundamental problems in academia.
> 2. Academia is more open than much of business, government, and organized religion, so it’s easier for us to see the problems.
That's not even remotely true. Academia is more closed, more obscure, more small network, with fewer sunshine laws, than any business, government or organized religion. It's far harder for us to see the real problems.
> 3. So much of the enabling of cheating in academia just seems so pointless. It’s not cool when companies pollute, but, hey, you can see the reason$ they’ll want to do so. But what does the American Sociology Association get out of fighting against open science, what does the University of California get out of tolerating research misconduct, what do the American Statistical Association and American Political Science Association get out of giving rewards for plagiarists? Nothing. That’s what so damn pitiful.
Cheating in academia has great rewards! The ASA gets money. UC gets prestige, donors, etc.
The fundamental mistake the author makes is that academia is not one thing. There are academics as we've always known then and then there is the administration class.
The people who do the work mostly want to get to the truth and get things done. The administration is into face-saving, donations, endowments, insanely expensive buildings, adding another VP of something, yet another layer of paperwork for every action, etc. the truth and what's right isn't aligned at all with the administrative class.
I put about 5% of my effort into peer review. The journals have never sent me a dime.
I peer review because it is what I do: I am a scientist. My university takes it into account while conducting merit reviews, but whatever extra I earn through merit pay raises, is paid for by my University and NIMH grants.
The journals are complaining that my donated labour won't be as valuable to them anymore, even as it becomes more valuable to the scientific community.
This is what baffled me. The claim that access restrictions are justified because they enable peer reviews is absurd given that peer review is entirely a non-profit exercise.
Indeed. It looks to me more like some for-profit journals and other "gatekeepers" are worried that people could run academia just as well without them.
when you review a paper, where does your "review" go? Is your review some sort of written document? Why doesn't arXiv have a place for reviews? I.e, if I trust a reviewer and says paper is good I'm likely to go read it.
When I write a review, I write several paragraphs to pages pointing out strengths and weaknesses, asking for clarification, new approaches, etc. I then send that to the editor who packages all the reviews together in the form of a letter to the authors. The authors in turn respond to that letter point by point in their own letter. Its more like email than a publication.
In terms of whether reviews should be public, there are pros and cons to anonymous review. The cons are easy to see. When I read a paper I don't know whether the reviewers asked a question and gotten a response about a concern I have about the paper. Often clarifying results in response to a reviewer's inquiry can be shared in the letter but never make it into the paper. I always ask for a brief sentence describing those additional checks to be put into the paper briefly or in supplemental, but that is me.
The pros of anonymous unpublished reviews are slightly more nuanced. Sometimes stupid but innocent mistakes happen, and these can be embarrassing. Part of the value of review is having the chance to have fresh eyes on it, but doing so in public view can push people to get grounded in their position as a matter of reputation. Another issue is that criticizing a paper from a well known research is a bit harder when it will be published, and especially when it isn't anonymous.
Some of these academic preprint/archive sites are experimenting with "a place for reviews".
There's a couple of issues (I hesitate to say "problem" but it could be seen that way):
1. How do you choose who does reviews?
2. Why should the archive service host those reviews?
Currently, in general, an editor asks reviewers to review, they review, and it's part of the editorial process leading to publication. This is a sort of "gatekeeping" model, for better or worse.
If you let reviews into an archive service, how do you do that? If you let everyone do it, that's fine, but then do you need arXiv etc to host those reviews? Should arXiv etc host those reviews? If you do have reviewers selected, how do you do that?
I'm not saying there aren't answers to these questions, but it does get a little complicated. Pay-to-publish has its own huge problems imho for example.
In general, academics don't know what to do to mark value in the absence of a "stamp of approval" from an "endorsed expert". I think that's what's underlying all of this.
Publicly funded research should be publicly available as soon as it’s published. Simple as that. Why should any tax payer have to pay twice for the research when they’ve paid for it already with their taxes?
I don't feel like taking a stand on "sociological research".
I'm all for publicly-funded research being publicly available; but I have never regared sociology as a rigorous discipline, so in this case I don't care very much.
Many of these associations exist to perpetuate the profile of a few dozen people at the top. Be wary of any group that's generations old, has ridiculous real estate, and people in the related industry are afraid of disparaging. They're academic pyramid schemes.
> In comparison, universities and academic societies faking statistics, rewarding plagiarism and other scientific misconduct, restricting data, and otherwise mucking up the process of scholarly inquiry . . . that barely registers on the scale of institutionalized evil.
Isn't this a significantly bigger issue because of how much these various studies are used to drive public policy that affects everyone?
It seems that everyone is in agreement that these changes would result in less money going to the ASA. That money is used for something. What is it? What would happen if the money stopped flowing? Is there another way that they can recoup the lost income?
According to their published annual reports they make like $1.5m in profit from their publications ($2.8m rev - $1.3ish direct exp). That profit looks like it basically pays for their administration and 'governance' line items which total $900k.
Less money short time maybe. But look at the reverse situation when lotteries were legalized and used as funding for schools. Which happened short term, but then not.
It is fun to take a hard line on soft "sciences" but hey, human beings are live product that can't ethically be tampered with for useful experimentation.
Great on Biden for standing firm on this, at least so far. I certainly approve that they need to end this sociology civil war.
APA and friends have been in civil war for like 15 years. Certainly not 2019, but yes they oppose open science. Surely it has to come to an end at some point?
Really started in 2005 when you must declare your biases. Sociology has never been the same. You can basically ignore any sociology pre-2005, and oh look some classic names like Jung as coming back?
But holy crap has the replication crisis slapped sociology in the face.
The minor update to the dsm5 and the expected major delay of the dsm6 will be huge. Practically an entire rewrite at this point is needed.
I expect there will be a new diagnosis called 'neurodivergent' which will be defined as 'not bad, but different'
Science publications are a business. Most results can’t even be reproduced, are paid by taxpayers yet the researchers or university gets to patent it.
This is a joke. Public funding ought to equal public results. Both to the claims, the paper, the raw data and the peer reviews.
Having said that; peer reviewers and disproving older papers should earn more money than making claims that cannot be reproduced.
Also the practice of ranking scientists and universities by citations is moronic. I could in theory write a paper that claims the earth is square. Now a 1,000 friends and colleagues quote me, explaining I don’t make sense, but somehow both I and my university will RISE in ranking?!
It's a common joke in Mathematics that the way to get lots of citations is to publish a paper with a subtle error - then every "someone was wrong on ~the internet~ _a paper_" type will cite you with suggested corrections.
Yeah. Everyone claiming peer-review and publishing is broke, are completely discounting this effect. That people like finding things wrong in other papers.
> Public funding ought to equal public results. Both to the claims, the paper, the raw data and the peer reviews.
One of my biggest gripes with academia. More and more are universities and those who run it act like private corporations than non-profit research institutions
Disproving old papers is done by people attempting replication, not by peer reviewers. Peer review doesn't typically entail replication attempts, it's just a sniff test for obvious errors that would embarrass the journal if let through.
I didn’t claim it was. I merely said both peer reviewers and people disproving results ought to get paid more.
Peer reviewers usually don’t even get paid at all, and getting funding for trying to replicate results is often non-existent, meaning at best it gets done by a couple of undergrads
The research is publicly funded by US tax payers, but releasing it without any restrictions or delays makes it public for everyone, even for those countries who had nothing to do with funding it and are sworn enemies of the US and it's allies.
Those countries can already pirate that data with minimal effort. The only way to keep that kind of data out of your rivals' hands is via trade secrets.
There's nothing about the academic publishing system preventing "sworn enemies of the US" from getting access to journals. If you're conducting research on something that the US federal government deems a matter of national security, it means you've received a security clearance. You're not publishing anything in a journal unless you fancy a long prison sentence.
If everybody has X then someone I dislike will is a terrible argument.
It does not cost $1k a year to have access to these publications as an individual, anything our "enemies" would want could be obtained for effectively zero dollars.
Are we really going to pretend that America's "sworn enemies" can't get behind a $150 paywall for article access? This effectively only keeps poor people out and severely limits access for the struggling middle class scientists/hobbyists/students (including grad students and adjuncts) who lack institutional access.
Generally speaking, science (and particularly publicly funded science) is an internationally collaborative process. Anything that would be of material harm in the hands of a rival government should either be classified or kept well protected within the bowels of private industry.
Is there any reason the believe that science publisher's gatekeeping has ever been a significant roadblock to nation-states that are already capable of industrial espionage and intelligence activity?
If something needs to be classified for national security reasons, that's another matter entirely. Putting papers behind a journal's $100 paywall won't deter China!
Who do you mean by "... those countries ..."? If we are talking state level, will a paywall really make any difference? Could it be that enemy spies already have their finger on the pulse for interesting research, unless it is very secret? And indeed the most secret stuff is often the primary target... Or is the target only scientists and students?
That’s the rational way of doing things. But emotionally humans strive more for the honor and glory that comes from making a big discovery so I’m happy with the status quo.
This is a highly opinionated article against recent ASA opposition to a law that would require them to release taxpayer funded research publications for free immediately. Currently there is a 12 month delay before they need to release which allows them to generate revenue via subscriptions. The ASA says this is bad because it removes the source of funding for peer review so there will be negative effects on academic integrity.
The author frames this as opposing open science and they allude to other integrity problems in academia such as plagiarism and cheating.
My opinion: Kinda seems like it boils down to a conflict between wanting an open and centralized system. I cant fault the ASA on one hand because this does fundamentally weaken them, but on the other hand maybe the best system doesn't include a central institution responsible for shaping the field. But thats not currently the case, and the ASA exists, so it seems like they're acting rationally.