Trust Markers Flame Out Fast
FASEB makes a sincere play, and then VeriXiv undermines the very concept
Who can you trust these days in the scientific publishing space?
It’s sad it has even become a question, but this is where we are. Brands have been hijacked, business models have been corrupted, publishers have gone feral, peer-review has been undermined, and the attention economy has corroded standards.
What’s an information consumer to do?
In an effort to rise above the fray and identify themselves as trustworthy, various publishers and platforms have undertaken efforts with “badging,” an approach that seems to revive itself every decade or so.
- A good brand used to be badge enough, but now brands have been undermined, sometimes doing it to themselves for dumb reasons.
At the end of May, FASEB and a small set of like-minded publishers in what they call BioCore launched a badging initiative called the “Trust Seal.” It is a sincere effort at differentiation around quality.
But, like everything these days, a second-rate provider came in and ruined it.
Last week, VeriXiv — an F1000 freak show run by the increasingly troubled Gates Foundation — announced its own trust marker badges, which aren’t the same, but which confuse the landscape. Unlike the FASEB approach which confers a badge on the journal, these badges are like merit badges for papers, given when a process is completed.
The timing stinks for BioCore and FASEB.
It shows how messy and weird this all is. Because we’ve eroded so many aspects of the journals system to feed the attention economy, cater to some creepy funders, and derive revenues from the producer-pays business model, brands are no longer sufficient to signal trust to a community. As a result, they feel they have to supplement themselves with soft branding susceptible to being co-opted. Knock-offs confuse the market. It’s all just an endless game of trying to create false equivalencies in a confused information space, with half the players focused on exploiting science and half focused on protecting it.
As long as it’s unclear who is doing what in that duality of motivations in the midst of business models and ideologies at odds with creating a sane and sound scientific record, we’ll remain confused and confusing — badges or no badges.
