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"
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.