Sep28

No Evilsevier DEAL!

In: science politics • Tags: , , ,

No matter how well-intended (and we all know to which place the road leads that is paved with good intentions!), transformative agreements (such as DEAL in Germany) are generally the wrong tool at the wrong time for making publicly funded science accessible to the public. If you count public statements, the picture of a rare academic consensus emerges: the DEAL-incompatible proposals and criteria from the Council of EU Science Ministers were enthusiastically welcomed by a wide range of scientific organizations. This was not surprising as these conclusions originated from within the scholarly community and build on existing solutions within scholarly institutions. More surprising is the positive feedback coming from the smaller publishers. They welcome these modern concepts from the scientific community that have found their way into the EU decisions, because they finally give them an opportunity to compete with the larger publishers. In short, the only ones still considering DEAL to be up to the task are DEAL themselves and the big publishers; all other relevant actors who have made public statements so far, all reject DEAL.

If DEAL needs to be rejected in general, the Elsevier DEAL needs to be rejected with particular fervor. In addition to the reasons mentioned above, the price negotiated by DEAL with Elsevier is many times more expensive than the market-based solutions favored by all other stakeholders. These spiraling costs will eventually eat into the budget also of non-DEAL fields, which have already taken massive hits by the serials crisis. Elsevier is also part of the surveillance corporation RELX and the clauses in the contract that are intended to protect users from data abuse are useless, because they are neither policed nor enforced. This blank check issued to Elsevier makes participating institutions accomplices in the corporation’s eventual privacy violations. Especially in times of globally growing autocratic tendencies, there should be no question that German universities ought not to denigrate themselves to data suppliers for international intelligence services and law enforcement agencies – all important RELX customers.

A continuation of DEAL in general, but especially a DEAL with Elsevier, is therefore neither in the interest of science, the scientific institutions, the scientists, nor the public that finances them. It is only in the interests of Elsevier and those DEAL employees, who will be offered lucrative positions at the publishers after the contract is signed. Rarely has there been so much agreement in academia: There must be no Elsevier DEAL. With the opt-in procedure of this DEAL contract, every institution is now faced with the choice of whether to position itself for or against this consensus in science.

Below are the fully referenced 14 reasons why no German institution should sign the brokered (botched, really) DEAL with Elsevier:

  1. In May, the EU science ministers clearly explained why “transformative agreements” (TAs) like DEAL are not in the spirit of science and what should be used in science instead: “interoperable, not-for-profit infrastructures for publishing based on open source software and open standards, in order to avoid the lock-in of services as well as proprietary systems, and to connect these infrastructures to the EOSC”. DEAL does not meet a single one of these criteria.
  2. These insights are supported by recent data showing that TAs like Plan S or DEAL unfortunately do not transform, but consolidate. TAs transform nothing but public funds into dividends. The transformation process is never completed because it affects a popular business model, which is why coalitionS came to the conclusion that only 1% of the journals they examined were actually transformed, while more than two thirds missed the Open Access criteria to such an extent that they were removed from the program.
  3. Ten major science organizations, representing most of the scientific institutions and scientific excellence in the EU, welcome the decisions of the science ministers and emphasize how groundbreaking they are (EUA, Science Europe, LIBER, ALLEA, AERG, MCAA, Eurodoc, cOAlition S , OPERAS, ANR). One of these organizations is the European University Association EUA. Their full members have already rejected DEAL in principle, via their EUA membership.
  4. Here in Germany, the DFG is also one of the official supporters of the Council of the EU’s decisions. The largest research funding organization and central self-governing institution for science in Germany has recognized how “trend-setting” the decisions of the science ministers are and also emphasizes how important it is to establish “open access infrastructures that operate without publication fees paid by authors and without profit intentions”. DEAL is diametrically opposed to these goals.
  5. The Council of the EU’s decisions follow long-formulated demands from the scientific community. Just recently, ten international experts highlighted how long overdue this modernization of scientific information infrastructures has become.
  6. The infrastructure units of the scientific community also emphasize that they are ready to implement the infrastructure recommended by the Council of the EU. The Coalition of Open Access Repositories (COAR) emphasizes in particular that a large part of the infrastructure already exists to implement the Council’s decisions.
  7. The small and medium-sized publishers damaged by DEAL also welcome the Council’s decisions, as their implementation promises an actual market that would replace the secret DEAL negotiations with the large monopolists.
  8. Elsevier is part of the surveillance corporation RELX, which has signed contracts with several intelligence services, so institutions with civil clauses need to take an even more critical stance. In principle, a university should protect the privacy and academic freedom of its members and not act as a willing provider of user data. In this respect, institutions which enter into a contract with Elsevier may face legal jeopardy and the risk of liability for libraries associated with DEAL is likely substantial.
  9. The clauses intended to protect user data and privacy in the DEAL contract with Elsevier, are neither policed nor enforced and therefore invalid. Elsevier de facto has full access to users’ private data and those affected are under the obligation to prove any damage.
  10. All “Article Processing Charges” (APCs) over ~€1,000 are not market-based and should therefore generally never be paid from public funds.
  11. The DEAL with Elsevier will be significantly more expensive than the negotiated prices suggest. For one, APCs rise supra-inflationary. Moreover, Elsevier forces its journals to publish more articles in order to increase sales.
  12. The DEAL was negotiated even though there are alternatives for publication services that can be tendered, so the contract violates procurement rules.
  13. Profit-oriented companies cannot dictate public institutions what research they are allowed to conduct. The AI ban in the DEAL with Elsevier represents a violation of (in Germany constitutionally protected) academic freedom.
  14. Overall, the DEAL project itself does not gain in trustworthiness if members of the DEAL project group sign up with one of the publishers even before the ink on the contract has dried.
Posted on September 28, 2023 at 16:42 2 Comments
Sep05

Is this Smits’ tripleC moment?

In: science politics • Tags: ,

Jeffrey “predatory journals” Beall famously catapulted himself out of any serious debate with an article in the journal TripleC, entitled “The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access“. In it, Beall claimed that OA proponents don’t care about access, but that they form an “anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with”. The article is so replete with similarly unhinged fairy tales that Beall quickly lost all standing with the scholarly community.

Seasoned science policy developer Robert-Jan Smits may just have published a similarly devastating article. Granted, the comparison of Smits to Beall is hugely unfair: In contrast to Beall, Smits has an outstanding track-record: architect of the EU Horizon 2020 program, director-general of research and innovation (RTD) at the European Commission, spearheading the Plan S initiative, to only name a few. Likely, no single article can have a major impact on such a stellar career. Especially because of Smits’ expertise, experience and competence, his recent Research Professional News article “Plan S: Stay the course” (also on ScienceBusiness), is raising a number of flabbergasting concerns. Some quotes:

The case for open access became utterly clear when the Covid-19 virus spread rapidly across the globe, and the science community was mobilised to look for medication and vaccines. From day one, research results and data were shared and made available in real time by both academia and industry to win the race against the clock. And the commercial publishers took their responsibility by joining in and abolishing their paywalls. It would have even been unethical if they would not have done so, with certainly a public outcry as a result.

Actually, the publishers to a large extent only formally ‘published’ what had already been published as preprints before. If anything, in contrast to Smits’ claims, the Covid-19 pandemic is widely seen as an example how science can thrive without the involvement of commercial publishers.

new open-access publishers and platforms have entered the market and, as such, widened the landscape of services and enhanced competition.

It has been established for several decades now that academic publishing is not a market and that the kind of competition that does exist is not really the kind of competition commonly associated with a “market”. It is difficult to understand why someone with Smits’ level of competence still perpetuates this myth of a market.

Only 31 per cent of all cancer-related publications are openly accessible.

This figure seems to assume that public access to cancer research would benefit cancer patients. However, cancer research is only reproducible to just under 12%. Having much of this unreliable research accessible only to experts at funded institutions could be interpreted as a public health measure. This paragraph is one of many statements by Smits over the years where he appears to endorse an “open access at all costs” attitude. With regard to notoriously unreliable medical research, maybe the cost aspect should be considered more carefully? Talking about costs:

While the costs of subscription range between €4,000 and €9,500 per article, the costs of open-access publishing APCs is on average €2,500 per article, although there are of course exceptional cases whereby APCs of almost €9,000 are charged. Yet it has to be acknowledged that over recent years there has been an inflation of APCs.

These numbers and their juxtapositions are really strange. There is a very common number that has held surprisingly constant over the years, that the average cost of a subscription article is between US$4000-5000. It is nearly impossible to compute a range, as one would need to know the total subscription income for the single journals, which is a notoriously difficult to know number for all but the smallest publishers/journals. For small journals, per-article-costs are often very high, sometimes even absurdly high, see,. e.g., the New England Journal of Medicine, where each research article would cost about US$300,000. Given the average cost of a subscription article, subscriptions per-article range is probably best estimated at between almost zero and 300k – not a very useful range and far from what Smits wrote.

The price of about 2500€ for an OA article is fairly accurate, but he conveniently leaves out that publishing costs are less than half that price. With that in mind, a >100% markup doesn’t seem like such a fair price any more. Add to that the admission that APCs are increasing (arguably at a similarly supra-inflationary rate as subscriptions) and the number of published articles keeps increasing, the total cost of publishing research OA exponentially increases, making APC-OA an even less sustainable option than subscriptions. Smits goes on about costs further down:

The often-heard claim that diamond open access is free to all stakeholders distracts from the reality that there is always a price to be paid for quality open-access publishing

But he never mentions what that price is: we know that it is less than half of even current average APCs. Is he endorsing such price gouging only because it is less bad than subscription-based price-gouging?

perhaps most importantly, the transformative agreements mentioned above have not yet delivered and in many cases are not really transformative.

and immediately below that:

be ruthless about the 2024 deadline for the transformative agreements to have delivered

So Smits claims that TAs don’t work, so we must keep going with the TAs? Not sure what to make of that.

And if the bottleneck is the increasing price of APCs, just put a cap on them

Smits does not explain how that cap should be implemented. He doesn’t mention any laws being passed (in what countries?) to make high APCs illegal, so one can only assume he is referring to the Plan S idea to simply not reimburse authors for more than a fixed amount. Such a cap has been in place in Germany for nearly 20 years now and it has not had any effect on prices, as authors simply pay the amount exceeding the cap from other sources. Not sure why such an important piece of evidence seems to have escaped someone with Smits’ experience.

It was therefore very disappointing that in the Council of the EU’s conclusions of 23 May, Europe’s science ministers, while being unambiguous about their support of open access, hardly mentioned Plan S, but called for the support of “not-for-profit open-access publishing platforms and models”. With this, they take a ‘left turn’.

This ranks very high on the list of most problematic paragraphs of the article. The Council of the EU’s conclusions of 23 May have been widely heralded as a major policy advance and have been roundly welcomed from all corners of the scholarly landscape, even by some smaller publishers and, notably, by cOAlition S. With his statement, Smits is alone in siding with the corporate publishers who are now all but isolated from all other stakeholders. Is Smits trying to make a political statement by “left turn”? If so, his notion of a “price cap” seems hard to reconcile with a right-wing ideology, his statement that there existed a market with competition and even more so with his later statement:

It was also surprising that the science ministers gave the impression with their conclusions to wish to exclude the large commercial publishers, which provide a quality service to the science community. These key players in the world of scientific publishing just need to be forced to change their business model and embrace open access at a fair price.

And this is what Plan S is all about. 

The EU Council conclusions explicitly mention the importance of preventing the kinds of corporate lock-ins which are a main driver behind the current academic crises related to infrastructure. Smits’ previous quote lamenting these conclusions together with this statement seem to imply that lock-in by corporate monopolists is precisely what Smits is defending here. A public, non-profit infrastructure, with substitutable for-profit service providers, for instance, is one option to prevents such lock-ins. If “left turn” is a political reference, then Smits finds actual competition with substitutability in a genuine market to be more to the left, politically, than his position, where the government actors in cOAlition S would be forcing corporations to change their business models and impose artificial price caps, while maintaining the corporations’ monopolist position. Where is the reason in such an argument?

I also wonder what evidence Smits has used to base is statement on that the corporate publishers provide “provide a quality service to the science community”. The most prestigious journals are all in corporate hands and the higher the prestige, the lower the reliability of the research published there. This evidence seems to suggest that getting rid of the corporate publishers and their hierarchy of expensive journals, if anything, should increase the quality of science.

Very little makes any sense in this article of a seasoned, competent, yes, even renowned policy maker. This is concerning on a number of levels. What could possibly bring someone who for decades very prominently sided with science, to become the only one left defending the corporate monopolists?

Posted on September 5, 2023 at 14:06 3 Comments
Jun02

The beginning of the end for academic publishers?

In: science politics • Tags: , ,

On May 23, the Council of the EU adopted a set of conclusions on scholarly publishing that, if followed through, would spell the end for academic publishers and scholarly journals as we know them. On the same day, the adoption was followed by a joint statement of support by the largest and most influential research organizations in Europe. At the heart of the goals spelled out in the conclusions and the statement of support is the creation of a “publicly owned and not-for-profit” infrastructure for scholarly publications.

Specifically, the Council

ENCOURAGES Member States and the Commission to invest in and foster interoperable, not-for-profit infrastructures for publishing based on open source software and open standards, in order to avoid the lock-in of services as well as proprietary systems, and to connect these infrastructures to the EOSC

This echos almost verbatim our proposal from 2021 where we outline a replacement for academic journals. In this post, we detail the reasons behind this seemingly radical proposal:

Three major scholarly crises in a vicious cycle
A vicious cycle of three crises.
With their supra-inflationary price increases, profit-maximizing journals overcharge (via subscriptions or article processing charges) institutions by a factor of up to tenfold, extracting library budgets with little if anything left for infrastructural development. The resulting lack of infrastructure funds is a crisis of affordability: institutions cannot afford to invest in technology and its human support system that could relieve researchers of clerical tasks such as manuscript submission, data deposition, code publication, etc. This results in a functionality crisis that entails researchers lacking time, functionalities and human support both for efficient scrutiny during the review process as well as for making their own research open and reproducible. Not shown: Journals have apparently not invested their surplus into reviewer support, resulting in little improvement over the last decades, such that researchers are still lacking basic functionalities such as, e.g., comments via authoring system, direct author communication, AI-assisted error and fraud detection, efficient manuscript submission, etc., contributing to the functionality crisis. As the journals keep increasing their prices without a concomitant rise in investments, they fuel the replicability crisis.

This vicious cycle has been allowed to go on for so long, that more and more experts are now calling for precisely such a disruptive break. The time for small, evolutionary steps has passed and the parasitic publishing corporations have shown little willingness over the last decades even to just mitigate, let alone solve the problems caused by their extractive business models. For more than a decade, an ever-growing group of researchers have called to cut out these parasitic middle-men. It now finally seems as if our arguments have been convincing. Everything in the Council’s conclusions reiterates what the open science community has been fighting for in all this time: vendor lock-in needs to be broken, scholarly governance established and fragmenting silos replaced with interoperable, federated infrastructure.

The technical solutions needed for this modernization from 17th century journals to 21 century digital technology are plenty and readily available off the shelf. Scholarship has the choice of either picking pre-existing solutions such as CORE or ORC, or design a new network. In either case, the general structural design of such a network may look something like this:

Concept for a federated scholarly information network.
A federated network of institutional repositories constitutes the underlying infrastructure. Ideally, this infrastructure is designed redundantly, such that large fractions of nodes may go offline and the remaining nodes still provide 100% of the content. Users only directly interact with the output and narrative layers. The output layer contains all research objects, text, data and code. The narrative layer combines research objects in various forms, including research articles. The community layer encompasses standard social technologies such as likes, follows and other network tools (see also “Mastodon over Mammon“). Modified from LSE.

Picking an existing solution such as CORE or ORC comes with the advantage that little new development has to be done and that it is obviously very cheap: everything is already in place and only needs to be expanded. The downsides are that the existing solutions have been designed in the current ecosystem and that may have entailed some historical baggage one would need to identify and fix. Conversely, picking off-the-shelf components to build a replacement from scratch costs more, but has the advantage to be able to build a state-of.the-art system with all the bells and whistles from the ground up. It’s a bit like the choice between buying a used or new car or house.

Obviously, right after the declaration came out, the corporate misinformation machine sprang into high gear. I won’t repeat the misleading, false or sometimes just comically desperate attempts at smearing an obviously well thought-through, sound and logical solution that has been decades in the making. Suffice it to say, there are plenty of reasons why the plans outlined by the Council have drawn such widespread support from all corners of the research community, while the only resistance comes from the monopolistic corporations. This declaration tackles the root of the replicability, affordability and functionality crises. It aims to treat the disease, not the symptoms and has the potential to develop into an effective vaccine against parasitic businesses striving to leech the public purse. Little wonder these businesses fear it so much.

Posted on June 2, 2023 at 09:01 4 Comments
Mar14

Should you trust Elsevier?

In: science politics • Tags: , , ,

Data broker RELX is represented on Twitter by their Chief Communications Officer Paul Abrahams. Due to RELX subsidiary Elsevier being one of the largest publishers of academic journals, Dr. Abrahams frequently engages with academics on the social media platform. On their official pages, Elsevier tries to emphasize that they really, really can be trusted, honestly:

In fact, if one searches for “trust” with Elsevier, one may be forgiven for getting the impression that Elsevier is obsessed with trying to appear as if they were trustworthy:

For anyone following Elsevier’s endless list of transgressions, is not difficult to understand this obsession: academics routinely call the company “Evilsevier” for more reasons than there are bits on the internet (see, e.g., their Wikipedia page). With so many parasitic or outright hostile actions consistently directed at academics and academic institutions over decades, it really is prudent to at least try and provide an outwardly trustworthy face to the unsuspecting early career researcher who may not have heard of ‘Evilsevier’, yet. A wolf in sheep’s clothing:

The fact that Elsevier fits the consensus definition of a “predatory publisher” so well is thus only one of many reasons why data kraken Elsevier is so reviled in the academic community, but a reminder of it seems to have triggered the “we really can be trusted, honestly, this time” wolf-in-sheep-clothing-reflex in the RELX CCO Dr. Abrahams, such that he responded:

Apparently, he tried to make the claim that so many researchers author in and cite Elsevier journals that this must be evidence they trust Elsevier. He went on to make three very specific claims, which are worth examining:

As Paul Abrahams is tweeting in his capacity as “Chief Communications Officer at RELX”, let’s fact-check his three statements, one by one, as an example of just how trustworthy such public statements from RELX/Elsevier can be.

1. “Elsevier provides above-average quality…”

Let’s pretend, for now, RELX were not chiefly a surveillance platform and data broker enabling ICE mass deportations (some quality!), but instead an academic publisher (via subsidiary Elsevier) with above average overall impact (according to the citation numbers Dr. Abrahams posted himself, see above). In that case, given the negative relation between impact/prestige and quality, the available data suggest that Elsevier actually provides *below average* quality. So the first statement is contradicted by the available evidence. Of course, it may also be that Elsevier journals aren’t as impactful as their CCO claims, in which case his previous statement would be false. Either way, both cannot be correct at the same time.

2. “…for below average prices”

From the Q&A on occasion of the release of the latest 2022 RELX financial statement, and from Dr. Abraham’s tweet above, we learn that Elsevier published 600,000 articles the past year yielding a revenue of 2,909 £ million. Accordingly, an average article from Elsevier cost the tax payer 4,848£ or US$5,850. Which, even if one assumes the upper bound average cost of an article at US$5,000, is more than average. Also the second statement can be easily falsified, this time using RELX’s own numbers.

3. “You just don’t think the private sector should be involved in the diffusion of scholarly knowledge.”

Let’s take a recent article on the topic with me as a co-author and check the abstract: “It [the journal replacement] needs to replace the monopolies of current journals with a genuine, functioning and well-regulated market. In this new market, substitutable service providers compete and innovate”. Quite demonstrably, we argue for a market and the article text clearly states “traditional businesses” as competing as service providers in this market. So also this statement is obviously false. Interestingly, Paul “Chief Communications Officer at RELX” Abrahams seems to interpret our proposal of a “genuine market” as a threat to their monopoly and rightfully so: an actual market does threaten Elsevier’s gargantuan profit margins (37.8% in 2022, see above financial statement) with competition, something they fear deeply, as they have never had to deal with it in the history of their company. Quite apparently, Elsevier fear the mere proposal of competition so much, they attempt to smear it with misrepresentations by the Chief Communications Officer of their parent company.

So all three statements by the CCO of RELX turned out to be demonstrably false. Not surprising for the most reviled corporation in academia, where probably one of the least damning qualities is that they also fit the consensus definition of a predatory publisher. If Paul Abrahams keeps his job (as one would strongly suspect), it only serves to confirm that such false statements are part and parcel of the strategy with which RELX communicates with academics – and that one should never assume any engagement with them will be in good faith.

Posted on March 14, 2023 at 15:13 6 Comments
Feb14

How about paying extra for peer-review?

In: science politics • Tags: ,

There are those who demand journal peer-review be paid extra on top of academic salaries. Let’s have a look at the financials of that proposal.

The article linked above confirms common rates of academic consulting fees, i.e., anything between US$100 per hour for graduate students and US$350 per hour for faculty. Taking a conservative US$200 as an easy, lower-bound estimate for, say, a post-doc hour seems to cover most cases. Clearly, many academics, especially from high-income countries, will refuse to work for such a low payment. In order to mitigate against potential exploitative developments, US$200 appears more like a bare minimum.

How long does peer-review take? A recent article examined this question in great detail and concluded that one round of peer-review takes an average of about 6h and that an average published article requires about three such reviews, i.e., 18h of peer-review per published article, or an additional cost of US$3600 per published article, if this peer-review were adequately paid.

We also know that pure publication costs of an average article are about US$600 and non-publication costs accrue to about US$2200:

non-publication costs

Taking all of the above together, the total cost of an average peer-reviewed journal article would increase from about US$2,800 now to about US$6,400 with adequately paid peer-review. Add to that a conservative profit margin in this sector of around 30% and the average price for a peer-reviewed journal article would come to US$8,320.

Compared to now, paying peer-reviewers adequately would stand to more than double the price of an average article from ~4k to >8k and increase publisher profits from now 1.2k to nearly 2k per article. Those are the figures one needs to take into account in this discussion.

Posted on February 14, 2023 at 15:04 2 Comments
Dec15

What if Greta Thunberg took a Shell-sponsored professorship?

In: science politics • Tags: , , , ,

Or let’s think a a few sizes smaller and imagine a renowned pulmonologist taking the, say, “Marlboro Endowed Chair” in the Mayo Clinic’s Pulmonary Medicine Division, sponsored by Philip Morris. What would they have to endure and how much credibility would they and the institutions lose? Undoubtedly, the foul stench of corruption and hypocrisy would be difficult to counter. Which is probably why such hypotheticals appear more like April Fools jokes than realistic possibilities. Who in their right mind would do such a thing?

And yet, in times when news and parody become increasingly difficult to discern, something comparable has happened in Germany. Two weeks ago, Heinz Pampel has announced that he is leaving his post as the “Open Science Officer & Assistant Head of Helmholtz Open Science Office” to take the position of an Elsevier-funded professorship with the Einstein Center for Digital Future at the Humboldt University Berlin. In his many years working towards Open Science, Dr. Pampel had gained visibility though his numerous scholarly articles on the topic, became a member of countless committees and working groups for various Open Science initiatives, received grant funding for Open Science projects and was a sought-after expert for interviews on Open Science.

(UPDATE, 25-11-23: Little did I know at the time of this writing that such a person actually existed before Pampel: Derek Yach headed the “Foundation for a Smoke-Free World” that had a single sponsor: Philip Morris. Like Pampel, Yach claimed the foundation were entirely independent, yet nobody believed him and nobody wanted to be associated with his foundation. He was ousted in 2021.)

Dr. Pampel’s new position had been announced in 2017 as “based on the existing cooperation between the Humboldt University Berlin and the Humboldt-Elsevier Advanced Data and Text Centre” (HEADT) and he is the second person to sit in this chair, succeeding Rebecca Frank. Was this supposed to be an April Fools joke just before Christmas?

What makes this already quite bizarre story even more concerning, is one of the initiatives Dr. Pampel is active in. A few weeks ago, he was lead author on an important document arising from one of the working groups of the German Alliance of Research Organizations. The document contained guidelines for all German research organizations and consortia (notably DEAL) on how to negotiate “transformative agreements” with academic publishers such as Elsevier. One new aspect in these guidelines that was not present in previous guidelines, was eagerly awaited: The section on how negotiators ought to handle the tracking technology that the publishers have been using for the last ten years to monetize the personal data of academic users. Last year had seen a bombshell publication from the main German funder (DFG), decrying the practice for threatening academic freedom (a constitutional right in Germany) among a list of other concerns. This publication triggered a wave of interest and of course broad condemnation of the publishers. Just a few days ago, the topic “science tracking” was also featured in the German newspaper FAZ.

One major goal for the Open Science movement is precisely to push back against the privatization of science as a public good. Tracking scientists in real time, their behavior and their momentary research interests seemed like a raised middle finger: “we can privatize you if we want and there is nothing you can do about it!”. So the question on everybody’s mind for the last year was how to get the corporations to stop tracking science? The expectations were high when the guidelines finally came out. However, early reactions from some experts can best be described as ‘underwhelmed’: the guidelines seemed relatively lax and non-committal, compared to the discussions and widespread condemnations the surveillance had received in the meetings leading up to this document and in the broader community. Renke Siems, who was one of the first to raise the alarm about the publishers’ surveillance practices in Germany, called the guidelines “helpless” and “inadequate“. Other comments from the community were even less generous. It raises some serious questions, when just a week later it becomes known that one of the lead authors had applied for an Elsevier-funded position while they were drafting the guidelines.

Dr. Pampel doesn’t have the global attention of a Greta Thunberg, of course. Nevertheless, it is fair to assume that he is probably at least as known and respected in the German Open Science Community as a renowned pulmonologist could be for German lung cancer research. He didn’t receive the lead author position on the Allianz guidelines for nothing. The volume of such contracts in Germany is about 200 million € per year, so this is not a document concerning peanuts, either.

In his work towards Open Science, Dr. Pampel always strove for reconciliation and was not known for openly attacking the publishers. So while Dr. Pampel’s position may have been to at least try and work with the corporations rather than against them, it never seemed in doubt that he was on Team Scholarship. The Team Scholarship that values the public good over profit, that values the needs of society and science over those of corporations. The fact that of all the corporations involved in academia, Dr. Pampel has decided to now side with the single one that like no other stands for investing billions of $/€ over decades to flagrantly and unapologetically oppose everything Team Scholarship strives for, just reeks of hypocrisy, even betrayal – no matter what he tries to say to defend his decision. One can easily imagine the glee of Elsevier about their latest acquisition. Whether and to what extent the Berlin Einstein-Center/Foundation is also funded by Elsevier, is currently subject to a freedom of information request.

//This post was originally published in German, on the blog of Jan Martin Wiarda.

Posted on December 15, 2022 at 10:58 1 Comment
Nov08

Interacting learning systems at SfN22

In: own data • Tags: , , , , , , ,

I just sent the poster for this year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting to the printer. As our graduate student is preparing his defense and our postdoc did not get a visa (no thanks, US!), we just have a single poster this year and I will present it myself on Monday, November 14, 2022, 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM, on poster board WW53.

Contrary to our plans, this poster will not just contain the work of postdoc Dr. Radostina Lyutova, but also some PhD thesis results from graduate student Andreas Ehweiner. The general topic is how animals learn from the consequences of their actions. To this end, we train Drosophila fruit flies in different situations, with or without genetically manipulated nervous system. In the first situation, the tethered animals control a punishing heat beam with their yaw torque (roughly corresponding to turning attempts around the vertical body axis). In such experiments, wild type animals form a motor memory after 8 minutes of training. We have called the type of learning giving rise to this memory self-learning, because the animals are exclusively learning about their own behavior. This is in contrast to a second, very similar experiment, where we have made one seemingly small, but highly consequential modification. In this ‘composite’ situation, the animal is controlling the heat as before, but now the environment of the fly is colored in either green or blue, depending on the attempted turning direction. In other words, now the animal can not only form a motor memory about the un/punished turning directions, it can also learn which color is associated with heat. We call this form of learning world-learning, because the animal is learning about relationships in the world around it.

More then ten years ago now, we developed tests to probe which learning mechanism is engaged under which circumstances.

For instance, both after yaw torque training (where the self-learning mechanism is engaged) and after composite training, we test for torque preference (i.e., whether a motor memory has been formed) without colors. After eight minutes of torque training, wild type flies show motor memory, while after eight minutes of composite training, no such motor memory can be detected. We are hypothesizing that the world-learning mechanism is engaged in composite training and inhibits the self-learning mechanism. Without colors, the self-learning mechanism is free to operate, so motor memory is formed during torque training.

On the poster, we now show the most recent results on the molecular components of the self-learning mechanism and how the world-learning mechanism inhibits self-learning. We found that the gene for the atypical protein kinase C (aPKC) is necessary for self-learning and that it likely acts in motor neurons that also express the FoxP gene. When we overexpress a constitutively active form of aPKC, this improves self-learning so much, that such flies not only can form a motor memory after 4 minutes of training (not sufficient for learning in wild type flies), but also can overcome the inhibition of motor learning by the world-learning mechanism, such that motor memory is detectable after eight minutes of composite training. Because we knew that this inhibition acts via neurons in the neuropil called the mushroom body, we also screened mushroom body output neurons (MBONs) to find out where the inhibition is transmitted from the mushroom bodies. We silenced these MBONs one category at a time, looking for lines which showed motor memory, similar to the flies with the improved self-learning. we found three candidate lines and the rescreen of these lines is still in progress.

The poster can be downloaded by clicking on the picture below:

Poaster
Posted on November 8, 2022 at 15:27 1 Comment
Oct24

Open Access and the incentives for embezzlement

In: science politics • Tags: , , , ,

Wikipedia defines ‘embezzlement‘ as “the act of withholding assets for the purpose of conversion of such assets”. Google defines it as “misappropriation of funds placed in one’s trust”:

If one takes the position that researchers at public institutions are entrusted with public funds to spend on research in the public interest, then researchers spending public funds on something that mainly benefits them personally rather than the public, may be considered in dangerous territory. The point here cannot be to make a legal case. This exercise is more of an attempt to analyze if current or future researcher publication practice can be ethically condoned, broadly speaking.

So let’s look at the current publication practice of researchers. Due to the traditional reward structure, researchers aim to publish in the most prestigious journals, in order to benefit from that prestige in tenure, hiring and promotion decisions. In subscription times, in which we still partially live, this practice does not come with immediate changes in the cost/pricing structure. However, this picture changes dramatically when Open Access publications are considered, where the journals demand payment of an article processing charge (APC). It has been documented exhaustively over several studies that these APCs scale with journal prestige. This situations provides incentives for authors to choose the most expensive publication option and there are two studies that have found such effects already:

authors choose to publish in more expensive journals

Published this year and from 2019:

higher APCs were actually associated with increased article volumes

One argument used in favor of publications in prestigious journals is article ‘quality’: research in prestigious journals is often considered of higher quality. However, that notion is not supported by the evidence which suggests that prestigious journals struggle to reach even average reliability. This leaves current author practice mainly benefiting the personal careers of researchers at the expense of the public purse.

Taken together, in a future world where every published article is financed by APCs, all else remaining equal, there will be strong incentives for authors to spend more public funds in order to benefit their own careers. Inasmuch as the excess public funds spent on prestigious journals support the spread and attention to unreliable science, this additional damage caused by this practice likely exceeds the pecuniary damage.

Legal scholars will have to weigh in on whether spending public funds exclusively for career purposes in the way described would actually constitute embezzlement in the legal sense. However, even if that bar is not met, incentives to maximize the expenditure of public funds are never advisable. There are already too many such incentives in research (e.g., overhead, grant funds in hiring, tenure, promotion, etc.). It does not seem wise to add yet another. Eventually, the scholarly community is accountable to the public. Accumulating incentives for wasting the public funds the scholarly community has been entrusted with, does not seem like an advisable strategy.

Posted on October 24, 2022 at 18:00 1 Comment
Sep12

Scholarly societies partly to blame for post-truth age?

In: science politics • Tags: , , , ,

Reading the reactionary defense of the digital stone age in AAAS’ flagship magazine Science, I felt reminded of the now infamous “Make American Science Great Again” letter to Trump and all the other public statements by scholarly societies over the last 30 years on how this internet thing is a threat to their revenue and hence must be opposed.

The development of the internet by scholarly institutions should have been the opening bell for a broader thought process within scholarly societies of how this new technology may revolutionize scholarly discourse. After all, the purpose and mission of scholarly societies is the building and maintenance of communities and fields of study. Nobody was more aware of that than Henry Oldenburg when he founded the first scientific journal for his society in 1665, the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society”. Granted, with the journal lagging the invention of movable type and the Gutenberg-type printing technology by about 200 years, Oldenburg wasn’t really taking advantage of what one would call modern technology, but his Royal Society was only founded in 1660, so he clearly reacted quickly to the needs of his members.

The same cannot be said of his successors in today’s many scholarly societies. Prioritizing revenue, it was not lost to them that technologies such as email and browsers would allow them to copy their mail and journal distributions onto a digital format, at huge savings. Judging from their public messaging since then, for the exact same financial reasons, they have refused to invest even the smallest amount of innovation or progressive thought into what broader opportunities internet technology might provide for their mission going forward. Instead, it looks as if all of that intellectual energy flowed into conserving outdated concepts and demonizing digital progress into a threat for every scholarly society’s revenue. For nearly three decades now, scholarly societies, collectively, appear to have been preoccupied with looking back, at the expense of looking forward. Not even after 2006, when the term “social media” should have provided an etymological prompt even for the dimmest of professional “society” administrators, was there a change of direction. Apparently, the best some of our societies can do these days is installing forum technology from the late 1990s and call it “community“.

Much has been written about the consequences this reactionary attitude has had on the public accessibility of the scholarship these societies have been publishing. Here, I would like to speculate on perhaps much more pernicious consequences.

Ever since the infamous “Flame Wars” in the Usenet/Newsgroups of the 1990s (and probably already before that), one aspect of online discourse had become obvious for nearly any user: online discourse can (and sometimes inevitably will) escalate rapidly into one that nobody would call ‘civil’ any more. Passionate debate is something scholars have been actively participating in and contributing to for centuries. From early rivalries of ‘gentleman’ scientists, via back-and-forth publications of journal articles, editorials or commentaries to later antagonism between authors, editors and reviewers, there have been numerous and varied occasions for learning how to pursue reasoned discourse in a productive, scholarly way. It is impossible to predict which direction online discourse would have taken, or which functionalities current social media would have implemented, had scholarly societies perceived online discourse as an opportunity for their mission rather than a threat to their revenue. With scholarly communication far from being perfect, it is also not clear whether academics ever were in any position to claim superior knowledge. However, it also seems unlikely that early, systematic and competent engagement by scholarly communities with the goal to facilitate scholarly discourse in a way that minimizes the chances of escalation and radicalization could never have changed the course of history in any conceivable way.

Looking back 30 years, it is difficult the escape the impression that civic discourse has become less civil. The road from alternative facts to online mobs to death threats and real world political violence and bloodshed has shortened significantly. Radicalization of large sections of voters and a more general drifting apart of political positions over time is not specific to the internet age, but it appears to be facilitated by social media giving marginal groups or ideas an audience they lacked before. The capability of bringing marginal ideas to a broader audience cuts both ways: ideas that modern society benefits from can be amplified just as much as those it thought it had better left in the dustbin of history. Scholarly debate is all about deciding which hypotheses and theories should be kept and pursued and which should be abandoned. Sifting facts from alternative facts and how to bring the former to prominence and the latter into obscurity is a problem that could have tackled 30 years ago, if the new internet had been a focus of thought for the societies who claim to exist to foster scholarly communication, rather than use scholars to generate revenue to pay their staff. In order to be productive, all scholarly discussions need to be as passionate as necessary to be engaging and thought-provoking, but also as civil as possible to not provoke anger and aggression. Individual personalities vary and this topic comes up in various online discussions time and again, but collectively it appears there is a fairly broad Goldilocks zone of scholarly discourse where most scholars feel welcome, comfortable and discussions are productive.

So while nobody can know how civic discourse would look today had scholarly societies leaned less to the green, I’d argue that at least now, 30 years later, would be a good time to stop, take pause and think hard if the luddite path really is the one scholarly societies want to keep marching on. Personally, I’d go even further: I blame the majority of our scholarly societies that in these past three decades they have put their revenue before their mission. This perverse prioritization has not only hampered scholarly communication in general and the accessibility of scholarly articles specifically, it has also caused the scholarly community to miss a window of opportunity where it could have had an outsize influence on civic society at large by influencing the means and rules of communication. Some may argue that this paints an exaggerated picture of an actually very limited influence of the scholarly community beyond academia, but given the role these institutions played in developing the internet, I fear such arguments may be motivated by the desire to deflect responsibility. It is my impression that the collective digital torpor of academia, especially after it had implemented the internet, leaving the reins to corporations and political activists, is partly to blame for the way things are online today. In other words, is it possible that, if scholarly societies had not been so preoccupied with defending their revenue at all costs, they could have been able to assume a central role in the development of social technologies and help shape the way they operate?

This last aspect deserves a final paragraph. The large, influential societies have traditionally replied that their revenue is important either for their mission in general, or for their ECR services, their lobbyism or any of their other activities. Looking at the political situation in the leading scientific nations of the world today and beyond, it appears that very early investment of intellectual energy into the means and rules of public discourse and how to facilitate productive reasoning and rationality, at a time when they were still in their digital infancy, would possibly have accomplished more than all the dollars, euros and pounds poured into campaigns, political lobbyism or awareness weeks combined. As such, scholarly societies have not only failed their members and scholarship writ large, they have also missed a golden opportunity to maybe help make also the world outside of academia a little bit more evidence-based.

Posted on September 12, 2022 at 16:29 1 Comment
Jul08

Off to Paris for #FENS2022 with two posters

In: own data • Tags: , , , , ,

The first conference after the Sars CoV2 pandemic! We’re headed for Paris, France tomorrow and our lab will present two posters, the work of graduate student Andreas Ehweiner and postdoc Radostina Lyutova.

Andreas has been working on the cellular and genetic mechanisms underlying operant self-learning (a form of motor learning). On his poster, he presents evidence that one crucial site of plasticity for this type of motor learning is motor neurons of the fly ventral nerve cord co-expressing both FoxP and aPKC. Interestingly, FoxP expression in the brain seems to be dispensable for self-learning and knocking-out FoxP in all neurons in the adult only seems to show an effect on learning 14 days after the knock-out. Overexpressing a constitutively active form of aPKC improves motor learning, such that these flies still learn when training has been reduced to a level where wild-type flies no longer show a significant learning score. I’m particularly happy that we now seem to have found which of the five Drosophila PKC genes is involved in operant self-learning. We had been trying to identify the right PKC for a few years now. Surprisingly, it is not the same PKC as the one that is required for self-learning in Aplysia, for instance. Andreas is writing up his thesis at the moment, so he sure would appreciate job offers. Andreas is smart, resourceful and persistent. Here is his poster (link opens A0 PDF):

Radostina studies the regulation of self-learning by other forms of learning. Operant self-learning only requires eight minutes of training (see Andreas’ poster) when no other stimuli can be learned. If such stimuli are present, self-learning requires overtraining of 16 minutes. This procedure is reminiscent of habit formation in vertebrates. Radostina found that habit formation in flies is regulated by a single cell receiving input from a prominent insect neuropil, the mushroom body. If she inhibits this cell, flies show a habit already after eight minutes, suggesting that the inhibition of self-learning is mediated via this mushroom body output neuron (MBON 02). Connectome analysis revealed that MBON 02 input is provided mainly by Kenyon cells from the little-studied lateral and dorsal accessory calyx, which, in turn, receive thermosensory and visual input, respectively. This has been a massive effort over several years, clouded by a case of sabotage, that Radostina has picked up and breathed new life into. Here is her poster:

Posted on July 8, 2022 at 09:37 Comments Off on Off to Paris for #FENS2022 with two posters