STM Renews Gambling License
The business? Science as a casino where the customers are the patsies
The integrity of the scholarly record has never mattered more.
So begins the application to renew STM publishing’s casino license, an institution where everyone except the owners are paying for the honor of taking their chances with the scientific literature.
The renewal is disguised as something called “Safeguarding Scholarly Communication,” and was released by STM International last week to some fanfare, complete with a talk at the APE meeting in Berlin.
It would be fine if STM were talking about integrity while doing something to actually ameliorate the risks of playing their information casino, but the erosion of trust in science first introduced by Gold OA and its spawn — predatory publishers, paper mills, and special issues, to name a few — has been accelerated by an increasingly AI-driven crapshoot. Yet, STM’s first priority on its casino renewal application?
Capacity.
This seems to be about putting in more slot machines, which isn’t exactly reassuring given the “automated box of confusion” already running out of control and the way the casino owners are profiting while well-meaning local worrywarts write letters to the editor.
We don’t need more capacity to handle the speed and scale we can’t handle already, but the casino owners want it. The slots need to ka-ching all day.
- Speaking of slot machines and useless papers, if you heard about the “study” linking Alzheimer’s to nose picking on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, it’s a 2023 non-study in an MDPI journal funded by a slot machine company’s money.
- Of course, it’s crushing it on Altmetric — even nose-pickers need a prize.
The anti-coherence call for greater capacity to push more papers into site licenses and transactions through the APC turnstiles brought to mind a source of inspiration for Chris Hayes in his new book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. Hayes talks about a 1971 lecture by Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize -winning economist, called “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” The gist is that more information creates a scarcity of what it consumes, which is attention. The job of an information-processing system — an organization like a publisher, let’s say — is to absorb more information than it produces. As Simon said, “it listens and thinks more than it speaks.”