Pod: Scientific Publishing’s Double Bubble
With a shared “inevitability” narrative and utopian visions, both may pop soon
For skeptics of the AI bubble, the “inevitability” narrative added to suspicions that advocates didn’t trust the product enough to let it sell itself — after all, if your technology is superior, why do you need to proclaim it is inevitable? Shouldn’t it just be adopted by users who find it solves problems or serves purposes?
In scientific publishing, we’ve seen an “inevitability” narrative before — about 25 years ago, around open access (OA). This narrative was so strong for a while that it cast anyone questioning the assumptions or skeptical of the value as a blocker to be removed, even an enemy. Gatekeepers, copyright, paywalls, even norms like peer-review and disclosure — all had to be razed or abandoned in order for allow content to flow across the network.
As with this round of AI hype, there was also “a scale narrative” with OA — it was always about percentage adoption, not quality of the works to science.
Free content via OA was an early enabler of visions of “intelligent machines” and the Singularity. The shared history passed straight through our town with the original Meta, acquired in 2017 by CZI LLC and ultimately absorbed into Facebook before being stripped for parts with its brand elevated for “the Metaverse” — now a distant memory.
The ties between OA and AI run deep both conceptually and practically, something we’ve tried to capture in the illustration below (not done with AI, by the way):
For a variety of reasons we explore in the podcast, the OA bubble is not arriving in the AI era as something as all-encompassing or healthy as imagined — in fact, it appears to be deflating and is certainly dirtier than expected. It also does not possess sufficient surface tension to repel elements of the AI bubble from mixing in — OA papers with OA citations and text are often found, and many more are suspected to exist throughout preprint servers, predatory publishers, and opportunistic Gold OA publishers.
The increasingly conjoined bubbles may share a fate in some manner, one we speculate about.
There are also some common business aspects — funding that dries up, circular financing operations, and bad actors aplenty.
Will both bubbles pop in spectacular fashion? Will they slowly deflate? Will one pop, leaving the other unharmed? Or are there another scenarios?
In any event, both bubbles appear incongruous with scientific discovery.
Where do we go from here?
We finish with our “Discoveries of the Week.”
- Article on the New York Times’ “Connections” game.
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