Bad Obsessions Persist

Writing about this space recently has become a litany of sadly predictable topics. A lack of genuine, consumer-focused innovation and clear, moral thinking seems to have caged us into a realm of bad ideas, shady influences, and dead-end options. Watching the struggles of those in thrall — people who are unwilling to simply drop bad ideas — is more than a little bewildering. For them, it seems decades-old and counterproductive obsessions persist.

Last week, four such obsessions reared their ugly heads again:

1. A fixation on funders as sources of salvation
2. A belief that data are perhaps more valuable than articles
3. Participation in empty-headed AI hype
4. A tolerance of immoral behavior by the rich

Allow me to attempt to stir you from these obsessions . . .

Obsession #1 — Funders Are Our Future

It’s been puzzling how funders and others have become involved in publishing, from OA mandates to starting their own publications and publishing initiatives. However, there is a common thread here — the expansion of a patronage economy.

I wrote that back in 2018. In 2019, Robert-Jan Smits would utter these words at a meeting about Plan S — which is “Plan Smits,” by the way, as he admits in his memoir:

Who holds the key to the solution? And that’s, of course, a group of players who has [sic] not really taken the responsibility of the last 30 years. And these are the funders, the ones who hold the purse.

Then last week, a story about Plan S retreating from strict requirements gave us this from an academic:

“Funders are exactly the ones in the role to do that. They have the power. They call the shots.”

In a recent preprint with an inaccurate interpretation of the history of scientific and scholarly publishing and many other egregious problems, the authors write this:

The Open Access movement has brought funders back to the table. They are not yet wielding their influence as much as they could, but they need to.

As noted in an interview on the “Scholarly Kitchen” with Melinda Baldwin, peer review was introduced as a circuit breaker on the patronage of scientific research:

. . . the idea that a grant or journal article has to be peer-reviewed to be scientifically respectable arose as scientists grappled with the consequences of increased public funding for their work. There were a number of observers who wanted scientists to be more accountable to legislators and members of the public because they were receiving public money. Scientists, however, didn’t really want congressmen weighing in on which grant proposals they liked best. So scientists pushed the idea that peer review — evaluation by experts — was the only legitimate way to distinguish good science from bad science.

Academics are used to patrons determining their funding. However, publisher independence to serve as disinterested arbiters of quality, novelty, and relevance requires us to treat funders as potential threats to our independence.

Dancing with funders is a form of corruption for publishers.

Obsession #2 — Data Have Meaning

In a recent article in Publisher’s Weekly, Elsevier/RELX’s YS Chi talked up the importance of data, calling it crucial to publishing’s survival.

Chi’s story about starting to turn Elsevier into a data shop 16 years ago is a little romanticized, to say the least: