Este artículo fue originalmente publicado en 2015 en El Blog del Lector en La Vanguardia, y en la web Ciencia para el Pueblo.Lamentablemente, sigue en vigor.
El Árbol de la Ciencia: así tituló Pío Baroja una de sus obras más celebradas, que construyó alimentada por su propia biografía. Nos narra la historia de un estudiante de medicina en el Madrid de finales del XIX que, al terminar su carrera, es destinado a Alcolea como médico de familia. Cuando uno encuentra en la biografía de Baroja que fue médico durante un corto periodo de tiempo y luego lee la novela, no puede evitar escapar un pensamiento del tipo: “no me extraña”. Porque en el libro se puede encontrar el hastío, la incertidumbre, la desidia hacia su propio país. Tan bien expuestos, que es fácil entender que muchos de estos sentimientos nacen de lo más íntimo de la dinámica – más bien estática – cultural de la España de la época. Con lo cual, uno se pregunta de qué árbol hablaba Baroja entonces.
El mejor modo de verlo es través de un fragmento del libro. Me hubiera gustado reducirlo pero no he sido capaz de suprimir una letra. Hurtado, el protagonista, es médico (reflejo de Baroja)1:
“Unos días después, Hurtado se encontró en la calle con Fermín Ibarra. Fermín estaba desconocido; alto, fuerte, ya no necesitaba bastón para andar.
—Un día de éstos me voy —le dijo Fermín.
—¿A dónde?
—Por ahora, a Bélgica; luego, ya veré. No pienso estar aquí; probablemente no volveré.
—¿No? —No. Aquí no se puede hacer nada; tengo dos o tres patentes de cosas pensadas por mí, que creo que están bien; en Bélgica me las iban a comprar, pero yo he querido hacer primero una prueba en España, y me voy desalentado, descorazonado; aquí no se puede hacer nada.
—Eso no me choca —dijo Andrés—, aquí no hay ambiente para lo que tú haces.
—Ah, claro —repuso Ibarra—. Una invención supone la recapitulación, la síntesis de las fases de un descubrimiento; una invención es muchas veces una consecuencia tan fácil de los hechos anteriores, que casi se puede decir que se desprende ella sola sin esfuerzo. ¿Dónde se va a estudiar en España el proceso evolutivo de un descubrimiento? ¿Con qué medios? ¿En qué talleres? ¿En qué laboratorios?
—En ninguna parte.
—Pero en fin, a mí esto no me indigna —añadió Fermín—, lo que me indigna es la suspicacia, la mala intención, la petulancia de esta gente… Aquí no hay más que chulos y señoritos juerguistas. El chulo domina desde los Pirineos hasta Cádiz…; políticos, militares, profesores, curas, todos son chulos con un yo hipertrofiado.
—Sí, es verdad.”
Pongamos que cambio “suspicacia” y “mala intención” por “corrupción” y que quito a algún chulo para meter a algún futbolista: tendría una carta al director en el siglo XXI escrita a finales del XIX. Así que parece que el árbol que describía Baroja era un árbol más bien seco y que, además, seguimos pintando el mismo árbol. Les doy ejemplos para demostrárselo.
El primero llega del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), que es la primera institución de investigación en España por tamaño y producción científica. Y es pública. Resulta que tiene en su logotipo precisamente un árbol, probablemente inspirado por el texto fundacional de la ley que creó el organismo en 1939, en donde se entendía la institución como árbol en el que «promover su armonioso incremento y su evolución homogénea, evitando el monstruoso desarrollo de algunas de sus ramas, con anquilosamiento de otras» lo que, curiosamente, resulta antagónico a la política del gobierno actual. De hecho, quizá se veía venir que sería más bien un árbol como el de Baroja porque, en la exposición de motivos, también se lee que la “gloriosa tradición científica” de la institución tendría lugar a través de la “restauración de la clásica y cristiana unidad de las ciencias destruida en el siglo XVIII”.
Otro ejemplo viene del Instituto de Química Física Rocasolano, uno de los centros del CSIC. Fue creado en 1942 y se le dió este nombre por Antonio de Gregorio Rocasolano que, además de químico y académico relevante, no cuesta mucho encontrar que fue miembro de la Comisión Depuradora. Adivinen su función.
Quizá no les parezcan importantes estos ejemplos, pero reconocerán que es inquietante que el organismo estandarte del I+D español tenga esta estética, y les adelanto que el que haya científicos relevantes yéndose y pidiendo una refundación de la institución tiene que ver con esto. Pero les pongo un último ejemplo más tangible –para que no crean que quiero hablar de la memoria histórica– cuyo origen es, además, reciente. Nos lo trae la Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (FECYT) que ha lanzado la plataforma en internet Precipita. Esta plataforma está orientada a “acercar la ciencia a la ciudadanía”, atrayendo fondos para pequeños proyectos científicos a través de financiación colectiva, conocido popularmente como “crowdfunding”.
Analicemos el ejemplo porque, ante la aparente bondad del mensaje –que podría considerarse un logro de la política científica del Gobierno dado que FECYT es una fundación pública–, surgen las preguntas. La principal función de FECYT es la de “potenciar el impacto en la sociedad de las diferentes iniciativas para desarrollar la cultura científica y de la innovación”. A ver si lo entiendo. FECYT como organismo que potencia “el impacto en la sociedad de las diferentes iniciativas (científicas)”, decide darlas a conocer no por el hecho de que se desarrolle “la cultura científica y de la innovación” –que sería una consecuencia–, sino para que consigan financiación –como primer objetivo–. Así conseguimos que ciudadanos que consideran importantes los proyectos (porque aportan dinero), acepten que su financiación sea por este medio y no por sus impuestos. Qué astucia.
Claro que, como la propuesta surge en una región tan difusa para los españoles como es el quehacer científico, es difícil identificar que los 25.000 euros que se solicitan en alguno de los proyectos bien podrían ser para pagar un “becario” y que, traducido, es el sueldo de un científico en formación –o, en este país, incluso el de un científico hecho y derecho–. Igual de dramático que si imagináramos financiar por crowdfunding el sueldo de un profesor en un colegio público (y probablemente sin derecho a paro).
Mientras que en una sociedad crítica hubieran saltado las alarmas, nos encontramos con que consideramos que Precipita es una de las diez mejores innovaciones sociales de 2014, y el objetivo es seguir alimentándola. Con lo cual cabría preguntarse si el que los políticos que nos gobiernan nos gobiernen, el que en las manifestaciones por la ciencia vayamos únicamente científicos –y típicamente jóvenes–, o el que tengamos este logo en el CSIC, no es más que un reflejo de lo que somos: el mismo país que el de Baroja.
Porque lo que llamaba estática no es más que el anquilosamiento cultural que vivimos desde hace mucho tiempo, también científico, y estos ejemplos son, simplemente, su estética –la caspa–. Habría que quitársela de encima, pero es llamativo que los propios científicos no hacemos lo suficiente por agitar el inmovilismo de la cultura científica española. Si bien es cierto que la valoración que se hace de nuestro trabajo a la hora de conseguir un contrato se basa casi exclusivamente en nuestra producción científica –lo cual hace complicado que nos dediquemos a otras actividades como la divulgación– no es frecuente escuchar científicos que hablen (por ejemplo) de la necesidad de que la divulgación tenga relevancia en nuestra evaluación.
Y si no invertimos más esfuerzo en esto, si la sociedad no aprecia la ciencia como el fútbol o las cañas, los científicos volaremos (como ya volamos). Pero no volamos porque sea bueno para nuestra formación como científicos, sino que volamos sin opción remota de vuelta a casa y convertidos en leyenda urbana. Personalmente, me causa perplejidad ver el nivel de pasividad ante esta situación, y sobre todo la falta de militancia de muchos jefes de línea hacia acciones que pretenden cambiarla. Parece que nos esté sucendiendo lo que Caparrós ve que sucede en la sociedad argentina en referencia a las medidas del Gobierno sobre la violencia en el fútbol: “cuando sucede algo que nos parece intolerable (la medida que toma el gobierno), lo toleramos suponiendo que no va a durar mucho, dura mucho, nos olvidamos de que nos parecía intolerable, se convierte en la norma”.
Deberíamos estar en estado de excepción tras ver que se pueden suspender los sueldos del CSIC un año cualquiera por una falta de financiación del mismo orden de magnitud que el fichaje de un futbolista. Por ver que se puede desmantelar un centro de investigación porque cuesta la mitad que el canon de fórmula uno. Por darnos cuenta de que “los Fermines” vuelan y Hurtado cambia de profesión desde hace más de un siglo. Y ese estado de excepción debería traducirse en un esfuerzo extraordinario por hacer llegar a la sociedad no tanto nuestros archiconocidos lloros por ser maltratados, sino la ciencia misma.
Porque la sociedad es quien vota. Y solo así quizá algún día hayamos movido tanto las entrañas de España que se determine que el logotipo del CSIC tenga que ser un árbol, no frondoso, sino seco: como el que nos pintaba en realidad Baroja, que adoptemos con vehemencia como recuerdo de lo que no queremos (volver a) ser.
1 Edición conmemorativa del centenario del nacimiento de Pío Baroja: 1973. Caro Raggio, Editor, Madrid
En estos días de encierro y preocupación alrededor de la pandemia, estamos viendo con preocupación cómo incluso las fuentes oficiales fallan a la hora de dar información fidedigna. Un caso particularmente inquietante es el del origen del brote, en el cual Donald Trump está teniendo un papel protagonista al señalar un posible fallo de seguridad en un laboratorio de Wuhan como posible origen de la pandemia. Tiene razones para promover esta hipótesis, pues le permite tapar sus vergüenzas en relación a su lamentable gestión de la crisis, señalando a otro culpable. Como científico, veo con preocupación este tipo de maniobras que generan miedo en la gente y crispación, en este caso hacia China.
Este tipo de teoría de la conspiración a menudo parece estar orquestado por intereses que nos superan al común de los mortales, y hemos escuchado en el pasado cómo distintas redes sociales han sesgado la información para conseguir uno u otro resultado. Hoy he tenido un ejemplo sencillo en mis propias carnes que me hace pensar que esto es más común de lo que creemos. Les cuento mi experiencia de hoy y júzguenla ustedes mismos, pasen y vean.
Todo comenzó cuando un colega me preguntó mi opinión sobre este vídeo, en el que se apoya la posición de Trump en este tema con un sesgo para mi gusto bastante descarado, y revestido de experto científico. El autor, con un canal con muchos seguidores, dice ser Doctor en Psiquiatría por la Complutense y ostentar honores de tan dudoso valor para hablar de COVID como ser “uno de los pocos profesionales de salud mental a nivel mundial que ha sido autorizado a participar en los cursos dedicados a sacerdotes católicos exorcistas realizados en el Ateneo Pontificio Regina Apostolorum de Roma.” Su actual rama de investigación es la “neuroteología, ciencia que estudia los fenómenos místicos y espirituales desde una perspectiva neurológica.” Todo un experto en COVID, sin duda.
Después de ver su vídeo mi sorpresa llega cuando veo que la mayoría de los comentarios son positivos, y prácticamente no hay criticas. Sin ser tampoco experto en COVID mi laboratorio está involucrado en varias iniciativas relacionadas con la epidemiológica del virus y yo mismo estoy trabajando en una de las task-forces, así que sigo estos temas de cerca y decidí escribir un comentario, que adjunto a continuación:
“La información que da la persona que realiza este vídeo está gravemente sesgada. No basta con dar referencias, hay que dar referencias de todas las perspectivas y ponerlas en contexto. Dentro de los cerca de 45.000 artículos científicos y pre-prints que se han publicado sobre COVID, ha claramente seleccionado aquellas (3) opiniones y artículos controvertidos apuntando en una direccción. Por ejemplo, habla de la divergencia entre el virus en el que se trabajaba en el laboratorio y luego enseña un árbol filogenético con una explicación muy somera sobre lo que significa el árbol, como si esto le diera alguna validez a sus argumentación cuando no se molesta en explicar qué dice el árbol. Si lo hiciera, a lo mejor se avergonzaría de que su hipótesis puede ser explicada de una manera mucho más económica como lo hace el Prof. Rasmun Nielsen en su cuenta de Twitter diciendo que el parecido entre la secuencia del laboratorio de Wuhan y la inicial de la pandemia es el mismo que entre un cerdo o un humano (https://twitter.com/ras_nielsen/status/1250641314967777280) . De hecho, hay secuencias naturales más parecidas a la que ha generado la pandemia que las que manejaba el laboratorio de Wuhan (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.02.974139v3), con lo cual sugerir que ha sido un accidente implicaría que sería necesaria evolución dirigida en el laboratorio, lo cual se ha demostrado que es sencillamente falso (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9). Otro ejemplo de sesgo es cómo maneja los datos del porcentaje de infectados que tenían relación con el mercado, decir que "sólo" un 50% de los infectados tuvieran relación con el mercado abre la puerta a otra explicación dada la infectividad del virus es ridículo. Conseguir trazar un 50% de los infectados en relación a un mercado en realidad es muchísimo, querer poner el vaso medio vacío es tergiversar la realidad, sobre todo cuando no hace mención alguna a cuántos infectados tienen relación con el laboratorio de Wuhan que es lo que tendría que hacer para tener algún tipo de credibilidad su hipótesis alternativa, dado que es mucho más fácil de trazar dicha conexión ya que el personal autorizado en el laboratorio es muy limitado. De hecho se podría molestar en estimar cuál es la probabilidad de un accidente en un laboratorio P4 (máxima seguridad, en China sólo existe uno) respecto de un brote natural. Dado que aproximademente un 3% de la población rural tiene anticuerpos contra coronavirus de murciélago (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12250-018-0012-7) significa que hay entre 1 y 7 millones de personas expuestas a virus al año. Así que en términos estadísticos, pensar que un accidente por tener alguna probabilidad es una explicación a tener en cuenta sobre un brote natural, es como decir que si veo una piedra encima de una mesa tengo que considerar la hipótesis de que haya absorbido calor del medio y levitado (ya que la probabilidad no es cero, pero es más o menos la misma que la de que un chimpancé escriba el Quijote golpeando las teclas de un ordenador al azar) en vez de el que alguien la haya puesto encima. En resumen, un lobo disfrazado de cordero manipulando la información para construir un caso a lo cuarto milenio enseñando los datos a su antojo y omitiendo otros. Resultado: confundir a la opinión pública y generar animadversión, altamente peligroso.”
Mi sorpresa llega cuando contesto a mi colega diciéndole que he escrito un comentario y me dice que no lo ve. Pregunto a otro colega y tampoco lo ve. Sin embargo, desde mi ordenador yo lo podía ver. Borro cookies y otras maniobras para suprimir mi identidad y lo sigo viendo. En la imagen al final del artículo, muestro entre qué comentarios (del día 19 de abril) mi comentario debería aparecer (he ocultado mi usuario), tomado desde mi ordenador. Efectivamente, conectándome desde otra red por VPN mi comentario no aparece en su web. ¿Ha habido moderación de algún tipo? Podría ser, pueden juzgar si decir “un lobo disfrazado de cordero” después de toda la información que proporciono es digno de censura (por parte de YouTube). Otra opción sería que este señor tenga la capacidad de moderar mi intervención a su gusto. Lo desconozco, pero si lo hiciera en vez de responderme diría bastante poco de su profesionalidad como «doctor», me gustaría ver la opinión en ese caso de sus seguidores sobre esta práctica. En cualquier caso es un poco extraño que a mí no se me informe de que mi intervención viola algún tipo de normativa y que aún se mantenga a mis ojos mi comentario. Así que puestos a abrir a abrir teorías conspirativas para cuarto milenio, abro aquí la mía.
Juzguen ustedes mismos.
Sobre el autor: Alberto Pascual-García es investigador en el Instituto de Biología Integrativa de la Universidad Federal Suiza (ETH-Zürich)
Pantallazo del día 19 de abril a las 20h de los comentarios al vídeo de YouTube discutido en el artículo. En negro el comentario eliminado
Public institutions should lead the way towards a new model
A decaffeinated version of this article was published in EMBO Reports:
Ignacio Amigo & Alberto Pascual‐García, EMBO Rep. 2017 Dec; 18(12): 2081–2083. Published online 2017 Nov 20. doi: 10.15252/embr.201745008
Abstract
Despite great technological advances, scientific publishing has experienced little change in the last decades. While the strong push for Open Access has contributed to increase the expand the accessibility of science, most of the publication process is still largely opaque and subjected to economic and private interests imposed by journals. The momentum of pre-prints, together with the creation of online platforms to bypass journals, such as those from the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates, are signs that we could be approaching a watershed. Here we discuss the problems associated with the current publishing model and present some of the alternatives that have bDespite great technological advances, scientific publishing has experienced little change in the last decades. While the strong push for Open Access (OA) has contributed to expand the accessibility of science, the way in which has been implemented has created a situation of conflict of interests which impacts the quality of the science produced. In particular, the Gold OA model, in which authors pay for making their work freely available, explicitly links the scientists’ possibilities of obtaining economic stability to journals’ revenues, through the ability that the formers have to allocate funder’s resources into journals. Thus, both journals and scientists have an interest in producing as many papers as possible, overlooking quality or integrity issues. The current momentum of pre-prints, together with the creation of new platforms such as those from the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are signs that the publishing system could be approaching a watershed. However, these new models fail to address the heart of the matter and are likely to lead to new conflicts of interests. Here we discuss the problems associated with past and present publishing models, and analyse alternatives that have been emerging in the last years. We propose a model which we believe could create a scenario free of conflicts of interest and benefit the scientific community as a whole. Public institutions hold the key to the quality and speed at which such scenario could be reached.
Scholarly journals have been the bedrock of scientific communication for the last centuries. The first academic journals, Philosophical Transactions and the Journal des sçavans, date from 1665. Peer review, another pillar of scientific communication, was established in the 19th century, although the term and its current form – commissioned by journals and performed anonymously – did not become routine until late 20th century.
This model worked throughout most of the 20th century, when funding was abundant and scientists few: governments funded scientists, who published their results in scientific journals, and University libraries then purchased those journals, granting communication between scientists (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 Well before the advent of internet the relationship between journals (news icon), funders (briefcase icon) and scientists (woman icon) was a positive one. Scientists produced research outcomes (allocated in the puzzle icon) that were then submitted to journals. There was a positive feedback between scientists and journals (black loop with a positive hand), where the formers provided not only the content but peer review, which was organized by the latter. Journals’ revenues came from organizations funding scientists (unlocked contents) and from other readers (locked content without payment), such as industry and technological companies. As earnings for journals were dependent on the quality of their contents, and competition for research positions was low, scientific production was subjected to deep scrutiny.
However, over the last decades there has been a concentration of journals in the hands of only a few publishers. A recent report shows that half of all the papers published in 2013 in the natural and medical sciences belonged to only three publishers. The proportion was even higher in the social sciences [1]. As a consequence of this oligopoly, publishers have engaged in the past in abusive practices, including excessive price hikes and the creation of controversial journal bundles [2]. For the interested reader, a detailed historical account of the events that led to this situation has been recently published [3].
At the same time, the increase in the number of scientists outpaced the creation of secured positions within academia. Competition between scientists on one hand, and limited funding from university librarians on the other, created a fertile ground for the development of metrics to evaluate the impact of research, including the now infamous impact factor. Thus, publishing in the best journals became the only way for scientists to access fixed positions and secure research funding. One of the consequences of this model was the emergence of a conflict of interests between journals in look for highly citable papers, and scientists, that were forced to adapt their researches to fit the most prestigious journals’ interests (Figure 2).
Fig. 2. An increase in the access of people to higher education increased the number of scientists, who started experiencing difficulties to find permanent positions, due to increased competition. Funders relied on new evaluation companies to select the best scientists for these positions (metric icon). Scientific production also increased, prompting the appearance of more journals competing for scientific dissemination. These journals, being concentrated in hands of few publishers, imposed high paywalls (exclamation mark) to be covered by funders. In addition, there was also growing demand for companies to access this contents which, despite often being publicly-funded, was not always accessible (question mark). Higher education cultural context boosted technological and industrial development, and the high fees of journals made impossible for them to access to the scientific production (question marks). This context made public funders to move towards Open Access policies.
In this scenario, the increasing difficulties created by journals to access scientific information, both to scientists and to a growing industry, bolstered the emergence of the Open Access (OA) movement and, in the early 2000s, things began to change. With the advent of the internet, the costs of producing papers plunged and publication speed increased. The new scenario prompted the surge of new journals that embraced a model which is now known as ‘Gold OA’. Under this model, instead of charging readers to access the content, journals charge the authors a fee to cover for the publication costs, after which their work becomes freely accessible.
But despite having increased the overall accessibility to scientific literature, Gold OA has some important drawbacks. One of them is that it has failed to address the problem of the increasing costs of scientific publishing, which was one of the main reasons why it was implemented in the first place. Publication fees in many Gold OA journals are substantially high, considering that the cost of making papers is continuously dropping while fees keep steadily increasing. Another consequence of Gold OA has been the spread of low quality ‘predatory’ journals, that charge authors for publishing their work after flawed or non-existent peer review, discrediting both the OA movement and science as a whole [4]. Finally, Gold OA has only superficially tackled the existing problems with the editorial and peer review processes of journals, which still remain largely opaque. This perpetuates the scenario in which reviewers carry out the most important task of peer review without receiving any credit for it. This opacity, together with the increasing number of papers published, opens the door to situations of misconduct, conflict of interests or fraud.
In the last years, as governments legislated to make the research they fund accessible free-of-charge, Gold OA has become increasingly popular. Publicly funding this model is justified by governments appealing to an increase in the benefits-to-costs ratio: as research becomes more easily available, economic activities arise. However, a study has estimated that if authors made their research available simply by posting their articles online – what is known as ‘Green OA’ –, there would be a 40-fold increase in the same ratio [5]. Also, the reported profit margins of 37-40% of some publishing companies such as Elsevier, suggest that public institutions invest in publishing services far more than it would be needed [6].
In perspective, Gold OA is a model in which journals are financed by scientists using money from funders. For journals, adopting this model made their business more robust, no longer relying on subscriptions. However, the conflict of interests between scientists and journals has gotten worse with Gold OA (Figure 3). While high quality science requires time to be pursued, in the current scenario both journals and scientists benefit from publishing as many articles as possible. This is a natural environment for cheaters to arise on both sides, as we are seeing now with the emergence of predatory journals and the increasing number of cases of scientific misconduct.
Fig. 3. The lack of free access to publicly-funded scientific content prompted the promotion of Open Access (OA) publishing. Under Gold OA, the amount of capital and services in the system remain the same, but the fluxes change. As private readers and scientists will have free access to journals, the total amount of capital needed to sustain publishing strictly comes from funders. Critically, while in the previous model funders negotiated directly with publishers the prizes for their services, these are now in hands of scientists that are free to decide where to publish and thus where public funding is allocated. Not surprisingly, given the harsh competition, new predatory publishers arise aiming to convince scientists to publish in their journals (journal with vulture icon). Under this scenario, both journals and scientists increase their economical status generating a large amount of science independently of its quality, thus hindering scientific knowledge which suffers the consequences of a negative feedback (black loops) fed by strong conflicts of interests from all parties.
As mentioned above, one of the alternatives would be to adopt a Green OA model. However, while cutting the middle man would alleviate the existing conflict of interests, journals – including those that adhere to Gold OA practices – offer a variety of services that would be left undone. These include: editorially reviewing papers, organising peer review, copy-editing articles and providing long-term archiving for papers. This apparent dead end has stimulated the development of new publishing alternatives.
Pre-prints are the most basic form of Green OA. In the last years, many researchers in the Life Sciences have began to upload their work to online repositories before submitting it to journals, thus making their manuscripts available to the public prior to peer-review. This approach has been popular in Physics for the last 20 years, and in Life Sciences the number of deposited papers in emergent repositories like bioRxiv or arXiv q-bio has been rapidly increasing. Repositories are also being used to store and make available large datasets, a move that could have great impact in future research. In theory, the use of repositories could be a way out to the current conflict of interests between scientists and journals. However, the fact that they lack peer-review discourages scientists from using them as the main vehicle to convey their results, thus limiting their current impact (Figure 4).
Fig. 4 The pressure to publish and the need for specialized repositories to allocate more complex scientific contents boosted the appearance of repositories (hard-drive icon). Among these we find pre-print repositories, that allow access to results before being peer-reviewed and published in regular journals. As peer-review is not performed (peer to peer icon) pre-print repositories are not considered in the evaluation of scientists (question marks), and publishing in these venues is not a general practice. This sometimes hinders the free distribution of scientific outcomes such as scripts developed by scientists for data analysis.
Born in the same year, F1000 Research aimed to specifically tackle the problems associated with anonymous peer review. Accordingly, what in some journal such as PeerJ is still optional in F1000 Research becomes default. In F1000 Research, manuscripts are promptly published after submission and peer review is performed openly by researchers identified by their name and institution. Once the paper has been approved by at least two referees, or one has approved it and two have “approved it with reservations”, the paper is indexed in PubMed, Scopus and other databases. The cost of publishing in F1000 Research is US$150 for articles up to 1000 words, US$1,000 for those over 2,500 words, and US$500 for those in between, substantially lower than in most Gold OA journals. Although it is still in the best interest of both the scientists and the platform to publish as many papers as possible, open peer-review partially alleviates this conflict of interest, because the reputation of the reviewers comes into question if a low quality paper gets published.
Recently, some large funders have embraced the model of F1000 Research to create their own publishing platforms. One is the Wellcome Trust, that last year launched an online platform where researchers funded by the charity can publish their research to be subject to free and open peer-review. The other is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, whose platform is set to launch at the end of the year. A third platform, from the European Commission, could follow suit.
Although at first sight these initiatives might seem positive because they embrace open peer-review, it should be noted that, not only fail to address the issue of the conflict of interests, but they generate a new one (Figure 5). As the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation platforms are only open to scientists funded by these institutions, if these platforms prove successful, the prestige associated with publishing in these venues will likely increase over the next years, competing with high impact journals. This would push scientists to align their research with the interests of these funders, that provide both funding and prestige through its publishing platform. Moreover, only the minority elite which is already funded by generous grants from these organizations will benefit from it, promoting a dangerous rich-gets-richer model that creates first and second class scientists.
Fig. 5 Funders are becoming publishers of the scientists they fund (journal with briefcase icon). Publication by this means is free and peer-review is open, thus potentially reducing the likelihood of misconduct. However, as these funders provide generous grants and the results published by their scientists will likely be high impact, scientists will get more funding aligning their research to the interests of the funders-as-publishers institutions. In this way, they might get funding from this funders and from others that require high impact publications, generating a negative rich-gets-richer feedback (black loop).
Other initiatives are based in collaborative platforms. That’s the case of “Peer Community in”, a non-profit scientific organization that promotes the review and recommendation of articles in different fields. Its most successful branch, the Peer Community in Evolutionary Biology, allows peer-review of pre-prints free-of-charge. Once a manuscript is uploaded to a pre-print repository, authors can request a recommendation to the community. A ‘recommender’ then selects at least two reviewers and, according to their comments, decides whether to recommend it or not. If so, the paper is publicized and can be cited as peer-reviewed. A similar procedure can be applied to papers that have already been published, as a way of adding them value. Nevertheless, the platform does not publish negative reviews, which would be an interesting way to deal with low quality published results.
A more ambitious example of collaborative platform is the Self-Journals of Science (SJS). Articles submitted to SJS are posted online and open to peer-review by any registered scholar, identified with its real name. Reviews are displayed along with the text and subjected themselves to debate by other peers. Users can vote if they believe that a paper “has reached scientific standards” or if “still needs revisions”. Authors can then improve the paper, and the contribution of reviewers is acknowledged and visible to everyone in the next versions. SJS also allows publishing comments -both positive and negative- on previously published papers. Finally, any scientist can curate a group of papers converting them into a “Self-Journal”, thus making an editorial work. More importantly, all these roles are tracked and evaluated by peers, generating a self-organized process that pave the way for transparent publishing and fair evaluation.
While collaborative initiatives such as these seem to go in the correct direction to solve conflicts of interests issues (Figure 6), the lack of strong funding generates uncertainty in questions such as long-term archive, or if the articles published in these platforms will be indexed and considered by evaluators. It is difficult to think that these models can succeed side-lining journals, specially considering that publishers constitute an influential lobby for policymakers.
Fig. 6. New initiatives prompted by scientists have emerged, performing open peer review of papers allocated in journals, pre-print repositories or independent platforms (journal with p2p icon). These initiatives often lack support from strong funders, which generates doubts about their long term-archiving and organizational capacities, and have difficulties to be indexed for evaluation purposes (question marks).
The times are changing. Public institutions and science funders have the power to set the pace of the change and encourage the adoption of new practices that safeguard free access to knowledge in the most effective way. They have already made clear that they support open access, as well as pre-print and databases repositories. In the US, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act and the Public Access to Public Science Act support that research produced with public funds becomes freely accessible. The EU has also issued a similar mandate to make all publications funded by Horizon 2020 available to “read online, downloaded and printed”. It has also created free-to-access online repositories, such as OpenAIRE and Zenodo, to host data and published OA papers.
So why is there still resistance to promote a publicly-funded and free of conflict-of-interests scientific publishing model? Journalist Richard Poynder, an expert in OA, believes that publishers have taken advantage of the lack of a centralised voice in the OA movement. In the past, when governments and funding agencies have looked for ways of increasing the accessibility to the works they fund, they have turned for advice not to OA activists, but to publishers. Accordingly, the laws that are being passed are being, in many cases, tailor-made to the needs of the publishing industry, and the same will apply to any attempt of free peer-review implementation. One of the consequences is that, as recently happened in the UK, Gold OA is being promoted over less expensive alternatives [7].
In July 2017 F1000 launched Open Research Central whose “longer-term plan is to transition Open Research Central to being owned and governed by the international research community with broad representation across research funding agencies, research institutions, and researchers”. Still, how this stage will be achieved remains unclear, but the statement of intentions is quite clear. We should wonder why while publishers are already taking positions to compete for a new publishing scenario as the one demanded by scientists, public institutions remain idle.
We believe that the current situation is sufficiently worrying to request public institutions to take the lead towards a more ambitious publishing system, one that is not only free and public, but also transparent and without conflict of interests. A coordinated international movement considering all the actors involved would prevent conflicts as the one we are witnessing between Elsevier and German universities [8], or the emergence of publishing alternatives as the ones we described, which not only are unable to fully tackle the different problems but, in some cases, deteriorate further the situation.
Following this line of thought, we delineate a scenario which we believe is compatible with everyone’s interests. It considers a redistribution of funding and the role of the different actors (scientists, metric companies, librarians, …) to maximise the impact of their respective skills in the benefit of science, while still keeping the different economical activities likely profitable. We articulate it as follows (See Figure 7):
Fig. 7 In the model proposed, the knowledge generated is stored in specialized repositories whose standards and protocols are coordinated. We envisage the creation of a single centralised discussion platform in which open peer review of the contents allocated in the repositories is performed, and where scientific debate takes place. Both the papers and the scientific discussions would be freely accessible, and scientists would be evaluated by their peers according to their activity. Evaluation would include not only the impact of their publications, but the perceived quality of other activities such as peer-review or the generation of scientific discussion through questions and answers, among others. Journals will select the contents they consider of interest for further edition and post-processing, to target scientists themselves, specialised industries or the general public. These contents and other potential services that journals would provide would not be free. Note that, being results of publicly funded science already accessible, and eliminating peer-review organization costs, journals will be able to follow the business model that better suits them without aligning their interests to funders policies.
1. Research papers and scientific data should be published in several specialized open, internationally-supported and publicly-funded storage repositories (SR), guaranteeing long-term monitoring and storage of all scientific activity. These repositories won’t need to be centralised, taking advantage of the particular specialised services that each of them might offer. Librarian services would be critical in these platforms, and there should be specific funding to support research in their important activity. Although not necessary centralised, it is important to reach uniform standards and protocols. This is, for instance, the path that the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) is already following.
2. Peer-review should be self-organized by scientists in a centralised, international and publicly-funded platform (PRP). Similar to Wikipedia, no editorial work, type-setting, marketing, communication or rights management should be performed by external agents. Data and articles uploaded by scientists to SRs, or even published manuscripts, would be linked to each scientific profile in PRP, and openly subjected to scientific discussion. Thus, the PRP will be a space for scientific discussion where all the activity performed by each scientist – discussion in forums, publication of papers or peer-review for example – , will be tracked and publicly evaluated by other scientists, following a peer-to-peer spirit. A large number of successful self-organized projects such as Wikipedia, GNU-Linux or StackOverflow support the viability of this model. Metrics developed to evaluate scientists for their published scientific activity should take into account mainly results obtained from the activity in this platform which, keeping intact its independence, would constitute a safeguard against conflicts of interests. In addition, tracking the activity this way would allow to monitor misconduct more easily.
3.- Companies developing metrics to evaluate scientific impact would convert the self-evaluation of scientists in the PRP into simple metrics that can be evaluated by funders. They would also have the important role of estimating the impact of articles already published through these new standards, which would be one of the most important challenges that the model proposed envisages.
4. Free of peer-review and its associated costs, journals could focus on processing research to make it more accessible. This would allow them to expand their audiences to include industries and the big public, making a large contribution to society. Note that, although publishing in journals would not constitute the main evaluation for scientists, scientists would still be interested in collaborating with journals to generate reviews, perspectives and other journalistic products, that would give them more visibility among their peers and facilitate outreach. In summary, journals would be free to develop their business activity under the model that better suits them, without the current constraints imposed today by public funders, for instance in relation to OA policies.
5. Public institutions should take the lead towards this change. They should establish a clear roadmap for setting new evaluation procedures and deadlines, after which only publications in a PRP would be considered. In economic terms, the cost of implementing this model would be minuscule compared with current public investments.
In summary, we believe that freeing science from the existing scenario of conflict of interests is an urgent task, given the dangerous deteriorating tendency that the current model is generating. We propose a model in which, journals, evaluators, scientists, librarians and funders, among other actors, will find a space in which they can best develop the activity in which each of them is specialist, while separating their services and economical interests from the scientific activity per se. Science can only experience a healthy growth in such a scenario, in which scientists activity is free of conflicts of interest and their evaluation is transparent. We believe we should seize this opportunity to put science back as the best example of a cooperative human activity envisaged to bring to the next generations a better world.
References
1. Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10: e0127502
2. Bergstrom TC, Courant PN, McAfee RP, Williams MA (2014) Evaluating big deal journal bundles. PNAS 111: 9425-9430
Conflict of interests: APG is working member of OpenScholar, a not-for-profit independent organization of scientists governing Self-Journals of Science. OpenScholar had no role in the preparation of the manuscript, and APG do not receive any economical reward for his activity in the organization.
Acknowledgements: The authors acknowledge useful comments in a preliminary version of the manuscript to Michäel Bonn, Pandelis Perakakis, Michael Taylor and Gary McDowell. We also thank Holger Breithaupt, editor of EMBO reports, for his insightful comments and suggestions.
This post is a letter to The Economist, on behalf of the organization OpenScholar, in response to a special number on scientific publishing (March 25th, 2017).
Your articles on scientific publishing entitled “The findings of medical research are disseminated too slowly” (March 25th) describes realistically a main problem we face in science, but a second article in the same issue (“The shackles of scientific journals”) leaves aside the main stakeholders of the solution: scientists. Your description of the platforms launched by The Gates and Wellcome Trust foundations left out an important detail – that only scientists funded by these foundations can publish in these platforms. The European Commission also announced its intention to follow suit, but only for the scientists it funds. Access to transparent peer review just for members of a club is ominous, and sounds like a serious attempt to re-establish the status-quo.
Open science initiatives driven instead by scientists now advocate the productive use of pre-prints and open peer review. Indeed, in the life sciences ASAPbio was launched in response to a funding call designed to create a centralized pre-print repository that the Wellcome Trust has also supported (together with NIH and other important funders). All well and good? Not surprisingly, in the call documentation we read that, “The Central Service will NOT provide peer review,(…), which clearly demarcates its role from the important services of journals” – a statement at odds with the idealized view of these organizations.
There is clearly no real interest from institutions nor from funders to tackle this problem and this is why initiatives like OpenScholar are advocating change. One of our initiatives is a free, community-managed and independent peer-review platform called Self-Journals of Science1, where editors, authors and referees interact transparently to evolve, validate and evaluate open access articles2. As you said, we are convinced that only in this way can scientists be science’s ringmasters, and not journals’ servants3.
Citrical 