In 2005 I\u00a0submitted an essay about science publishing to a political magazine. I got a polite reply back saying that the article was interesting and the issue important but that my approach\u00a0wasn’t right for them. My piece was too straightforward. Too persuasive. They preferred articles that\u00a0had a simple “hook” and, most importantly, were “counterintuitive”.<\/p>\n

Zoom forward a decade and I finally get what they were looking for. In the last few months two articles about open access have appeared in political magazines, both having “counterintuitive” points.<\/p>\n

The first, \u00a0“The Duck Penis Paradox: Is too much Internet pop science drowning out the serious stuff?<\/a>” by Alice Robb appeared in September in The New Republic.\u00a0<\/em>I spoke to Robb\u00a0extensively as she worked on\u00a0the article (although I got labeled\u00a0“voluble” for my efforts), and as I started to read it, I was reasonably pleased. Although she was a bit flippant, Robb did a credible job of describing the motivation behind\u00a0PLOS ONE <\/em>and our rise in the publishing world.<\/p>\n

But then she got to her “counterintuitive” point:<\/p>\n

So, in many ways, Eisen has won. More people have more access to more studies than ever before. Science has never been so democratic. It\u2019s just not clear whether democracy is what science needs.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robb goes on, describing how actually reading about the variety of science people are doing gave her a headache, and laments the potential loss of filters:<\/p>\n

The traditional journals may be inefficient, but they serve a purpose. By establishing a hierarchy, they help direct scientists\u2019 and journalists\u2019 limited attention to the research that deserves it<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, basically, Robb was complaining that PLOS is bad because it is anti-elitist – that we\u00a0may not like elitist journals, but we NEED them, lest we leave poor science journalists dangling in the wind, forced to actually read papers and figure out what’s interesting on their own.<\/p>\n

Nevermind, that said meritocracy is demonstrably flawed. Nevermind that the current system of peer review sucks at identifying good quality and important science. Nevermind that anyone\u00a0who pays attention to science – and\u00a0Science\u00a0<\/em>– should know “high quality” journals routinely publish crap. After researching the issue, Robb concluded that even a dysfunctional elitist hierarchy is better than no elitist hierarchy.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, this should not have surprised me. For as long as I can remember – and long before that too –\u00a0T<\/em>he New Republic<\/em>\u00a0has been a great defender of our current\u00a0“meritocracy” in all areas of life. So why should it be a surprise that they view efforts to democratize science as a bad thing.<\/p>\n

Robb’s piece of reminiscent\u00a0of an editorial<\/a> that appeared in\u00a0The Harvard Crimson<\/em> shortly after\u00a0PLOS ONE\u00a0<\/em>was launched:<\/p>\n

Getting into Harvard is hard, very hard. Yearly the gatekeepers in Byerly Hall vet thousands of applicants on their merits, rejecting many times the number of students that they accept. But getting a scientific paper published in Science or Nature, today\u2019s pre-eminent scientific journals, is oftentimes harder.<\/p>\n

Science, like much of academia, has its own admissions committee. Though over a million manuscripts are published in journals yearly, many more are submitted and rejected. The gatekeepers of science\u2014peer reviewers who are reputable scientists and well versed in a particular field\u2014advise journal editors whether to reject a manuscript outright, send it back for revisions, or publish it.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Without a peer review process to separate the revolutionary papers from the merely good from the rubbish, scientists will have no way of knowing which discoveries and experiments merit their time and interest. Instead, they will spend inordinate amounts of time wading through the quicksand of junk science to get to truly interesting work. Peer reviewers are chosen as peer reviewers for a reason\u2014unlike the hoi polloi that roam the Internet, they have the knowledge and experience to judge scientific research on its merits.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I responded<\/a> at the time:<\/p>\n

As a Harvard graduate and co-founder of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), I was appalled by your editorial, \u201cKeep Science in Print\u201d in which you condemn our new journal PLoS One. The article is too ill-informed and riddled with factual inaccuracies to be taken seriously as an attack on our efforts to rejuvenate peer review by opening up the process to all members of the scientific community. I would normally feel compelled to correct all these errors, but fortunately I don\u2019t have to. Perhaps sensing the opportunity for delicious irony, the \u201choi polloi that roam the Internet\u201d have identified and corrected your mistakes in the open commentary you provided for this article.<\/p>\n

They did not, however, respond to your repellent effort to rally the forces of elitism to derail a project whose primary aim is to rapidly bring scientific knowledge to everyone. Elite scientific journals are, you argue, like the Harvard admissions committee\u2014carefully separating revolutionary papers from the merely good, just as Byerly Hall culls the unworthy from the ranks of each year\u2019s freshman class. I couldn\u2019t agree more. The two are very similar\u2014and both are deeply flawed. It is impossible for even the smartest scientists to recognize the true merit of a paper before it is published, just as it is impossible to identify the smartest and most talented scholars on the basis of their high school grades and SAT scores.<\/p>\n

Think, if you will, of PLoS One as a large public university\u2014our doors are open to papers that might not earn admission to Science or Nature. But, over time, many of these papers will turn out to be outstanding. Once they see PLoS One, we are confident that consumers of scientific papers will discover what employers have long ago: If you\u2019re looking for the imprimatur of greatness, try Nature or Harvard\u2014but if you want the real thing, try PLoS One or Berkeley.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although I am disappointed that the conversation about PLOS ONE hasn’t really changed in a decade, both The Crimson<\/em> and TNR<\/em> were\u00a0right in\u00a0calling PLOS ONE<\/em> an attack on elitism in science. We just differ in whether we think that’s a good thing.<\/p>\n

With this critique of PLOS in mind,\u00a0it was surprising to read an article published earlier this week, “Free Access to Science Research Doesn’t Benefit Everyone<\/a>” by Rose Eveleth that comes\u00a0at open access\u00a0(and open science in general) with a different “counterintuitive” point. She too starts off with a generally favorable outlook on openness, but quickly comes to a different conclusion: that PLOS is\u00a0TOO\u00a0elitist:<\/p>\n

Making something open isn\u2019t a simple check box or button\u2014it takes work, money, and time. Often those pushing for open access aren’t the ones who will have to implement it. And for those building their careers, and particularly for underrepresented groups who already face barriers in academia, being open isn\u2019t necessarily the right choice.<\/p>\n

…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Melissa Bates, a physiology researcher at the University of Iowa, says that when it comes to making papers open access, it\u2019s not fair to ask graduate students and early career scientists to bear the brunt of the responsibility. \u201cThere\u2019s this idea that open access is this ethical and moral thing, that it\u2019s a morally and ethically grounded movement, and I can appreciate in a sense that it is,\u201d she said. \u201cBut there\u2019s also a business model to how science is done.\u201d<\/p>\n

That business model isn’t all that different in science publishing than it is in any other kind of print publishing. Putting out a journal costs money. And someone, whether it’s the university, the scientists, the government, the public, or some benevolent billionaire, has to pay for it. Much scientific research is funded by taxpayers. But the editorial process\u2014the printing, the hosting, and the rest of it\u2014is not. “In principle, Open Access is what I call doing the right thing,” said Alan Leshner, the executive publisher of Science, a journal the keeps its papers closed for the first year after they’re published, and then opens them up to the public. “It would be great if we could afford open access to everything we publish immediately. The problem is it costs $50 million a year to publish Science.” Somebody has to foot that bill, he says.<\/p>\n

When a paper is accepted to a journal that isn\u2019t automatically open access, in some cases scientists can pay a certain amount of money to release it to the world. Those publishing fees can be thousands of dollars for each paper. Open-access advocates argue that it\u2019s worth the money to put the work out there, but Bates points out that often grants will have a limit to how much someone can spend on publishing fees. Gezelter says that that economic tension is a big one in labs. \u201cWould you rather publish these 10 papers open access or would you rather hire a grad student for a year?\u201d he asks. \u201cIt leaves individual scientists in an ethical quandary,\u201d Bates said. \u201cThe answer for me is always going to be: I\u2019m going to pay a person.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s a lot to unpack here, but Eveleth’s\u00a0basic argument is that open access is a high-minded ideal being pushed on young scientists by an\u00a0elite who don’t understand, or don’t appreciate, the challenges of doing science in the modern world. I agree completely that the system as a whole pushes people away from open access, both in terms of career development (pressure comes from many directions pushing people to publish in the highest impact journals, irrespective of how they are run) and financially (universities\u00a0heavily subsidize\u00a0the costs of getting access to subscription journals, but do little to offset the costs of\u00a0open access journals). There has been a tendency in the OA community (myself included) to put our hopes in young scientists (since the publishing behavior of most\u00a0established scientists has\u00a0proven themselves to be beyond\u00a0amendment. \u00a0But that’s not fair or reasonable (something previous interactions with Bates helped me to appreciate). So there is value in this piece for shining light on a aspect of open access that hasn’t received a lot of press play.<\/p>\n

I really like Eveleth’s writing<\/a>. But\u00a0I feel that this piece did not do justice to the past or present of open access in several important ways.<\/p>\n

One of the central premises of the story is that costs associated with open access publishing (or open source software) make it a luxury that many can not afford. There is some truth to this – the move to open access publishing has shifted the way in which money is transferred from scientists to journals. Although it costs the system way less when people publish in open access journals – the average revenue for subscription journals is around $6,000 a paper, more than even the most expensive open access journals, and several times more than the cost of publishing in PLOS ONE – subscription costs are almost completely subsidized by universities, while open access charges rarely are. Thus the\u00a0money it takes to publish in an open access journal comes out of research funds, while subscription costs do not.<\/p>\n

However Eveleth raises this issue as if it’s something new – an unexpected, and unappreciated, side effect of open access publishing. But this is not a new problem. Supporters of open access have long been aware that until the ~$10b\u00a0currently spent every year on subscriptions is diverted and used to support publishing in other ways, mechanisms must be developed to help authors whose grant funds are insufficient to cover up front charges to publish in open access journals. And\u00a0Eveleth fails to mention the\u00a0many initiatives designed to address this issue. PLOS (and many other OA publishers) offer fee waivers\u00a0to authors who are unable to pay the publication fee, and to my knowledge PLOS has never turned away a paper on financial grounds. Furthermore, many\u00a0funding agencies will cover the costs of OA for their grantees. And an \u00a0increasing number of universities have open access funds<\/a> that will cover or help defray these costs for scientists at their institutions. Bates’ own University of Iowa has such a fund<\/a>, although it is limited to researchers without grants.<\/p>\n

And the situation with publishing costs is far more complicated than the story lets on. Many subscription journals also charge authors who publish there – in some cases\u00a0more than it costs to publish in open access journals. Bates, for example, published an article<\/a> in the Journal of Applied Physiology last year. \u00a0This journal charges authors a $50 submission fee, and $75 per page in the final PDF. At 9 pages, this article would have cost them $725. That’s a bit less than publishing in PLOS ONE, but not more than it would have cost to publish in Peer J. And this\u00a0is low compared to the cost of publishing in other subscription journals. PNAS charges $1700 per article, for example. While it’s “free” to publish in\u00a0Science<\/em>,\u00a0Nature<\/em> or\u00a0Cell,<\/em> they charge ~$1000 if you have a color figure (which most articles do). Thus, at an institution that has funds to support open access publishing, it might actually be cheaper to publish in open access journals than in many subscription journals.<\/p>\n

I am not denying that that people are under severe financial pressure these days, and\u00a0there are certainly many authors who do not have access to institutional funds to cover these costs. It’s a systemic failure when\u00a0funding agencies (e.g. the NIH) and institutions that claim they support open access publishing but leave\u00a0authors in a position where they have to choose between publishing in open access journals and having some extra research funds. But it was incorrect of Eveleth to suggest that these financial challenges are\u00a0unique to open access.<\/p>\n

This has been a disturbing trend in journalism about open access lately. It’s become fairly common for people to take a problem with publishing, note that this problem applies to open access journals, and make this a problem for open access. The most egregious example was the “open access sting<\/a>” carried out by John Bohannon in which he submitted a bogus paper exclusively to open access journals, found that many accepted it, and concluded that open access journals had a problem with peer review. If we are worried about ensuring all scientists\u00a0have unfettered ability to publish their work – as we should be – we should worry about obstacles to publishing in all journals, not just open access ones.<\/p>\n

Leaving\u00a0the author charges issue, Eveleth \u00a0chose to wade briefly\u00a0into the broader economics of scholarly publishing, quoting Alan Leshner, the outgoing publisher of\u00a0Science<\/em>, citing the fact that it costs $50,000,000 to publish\u00a0Science<\/em>, and complaining, “Somebody has to foot that bill.” But this point is left hanging – with no discussion or response. By doing this\u00a0Eveleth says\u00a0to her readers – many of whom, because the story was published outside of the science press, are learning about open access for the first time – that these is a valid and open criticism of open access, for which there is no response. When, in reality, Leshner has been saying the same thing for over a decade, and I and other open access advocates have a detailed response. I don’t necessarily expect Eveleth to rehash the whole open access debate, but to leave it seeming that\u00a0this is some kind of new, unanswered critique of open access\u00a0does not do justice to the history of this subject.<\/p>\n

There are several problems with Leshner’s statement. Yes, it costs $50,000,000 to publish\u00a0Science<\/em>. And there is no way these costs could be covered by the thousand or so authors of research articles it publishes each year ($50,000 a paper would tax even the most well-heeled labs). But the fact that\u00a0Science<\/em> can not come up with a business model that would allow it to make the papers it publishes freely available is not a problem with open access, it’s a problem with\u00a0Science<\/em>.<\/p>\n

One of the main reasons that Science<\/i> is so expensive (its cost of ~$50,000 per paper is roughly 10x the industry average, which is already absurdly high) is that it employs highly paid editors to screen papers, and rejects the vast majority of them. I don’t know the exact numbers, but probably only one in fifty submissions is ultimately published. Thus, even with a fairly gilded staff, their cost per submitted paper is a much more reasonable $1,000. The problem with\u00a0Science<\/em> (and\u00a0Nature<\/em>,\u00a0Cell<\/em> and other high profile journals) is that this “review but reject most papers” is that it’s a relic of the print age, when space in a printed journal was limited by the cost of paper and shipping. But those costs are gone. And instead\u00a0Science<\/em> maintains a false scarcity to drive up the value of its brand. The alternative is a system in which we decouple the act of publishing and review – to have a system in which all papers are rigorously\u00a0assessed, but where the assessment – whether good or bad – is simply published alongside the paper, rather than used as the basis for an absurd partitioning of papers into the 20,000 silos we call journals. (I’ve written about this more extensively here<\/a>\u00a0and here<\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0People\u00a0might not agree this is a better solution – but\u00a0given that\u00a0Eveleth raised this issue, it is a disservice to the topic and her readers that she didn’t contextualize Leshner’s quote properly.<\/p>\n

After raising the cost issue, Eveleth moves on to argue that open access is a also luxury of a non-financial sort – that only to people who are well\u00a0established, and that publishing in open access journals is intrinsically bad for one’s career. I know that everybody believes that a paper in\u00a0Science<\/em>, Nature<\/em>, Cell<\/em>, NEJM<\/em> or JAMA<\/em>\u00a0 is a ticket to career success, and that to some extent this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I think that – despite this near universal perception – that the effect isn’t nearly as strong as people think. There is certainly a correlation between career success and publishing in these journals. But as we all know, correlation does not necessarily imply causation, and I think it’s very possible that that people get jobs\/grants\/tenure as well as big 5\u00a0publications because the same criteria are applied in hiring, promotion and funding as are applied in selecting papers for publication.<\/p>\n

I understand why Bates and most other scientists say that they\u00a0will always choose to publish in these journals if offered the chance, because it is something under their control that they believe might\u00a0lead to greater career success. But it’s disappointing that an excellent journalist like Eveleth just takes this assumption at face value instead of questioning it or at least pushing back on people who assert it as if it is a fact.<\/p>\n

Finally,\u00a0Eveleth makes the point\u00a0that open access is elitist because it is particularly dangerous to pursue for scientists early in their careers. It is, of course, obviously true that scientists at different stages of their careers face different challenges. I am, personally, more able to take\u00a0risks than, say a postdoc looking for a job, or an untenured, unfunded\u00a0new PI. But nearly every paper I have ever published, and nearly every paper anyone ever publishes, has primary authors who are not well established. It’s the way science works. A graduate student, postdoc or other young scientists is the first author on the vast majority of papers published. And so nearly every paper involves someone in a vulnerable position in their career who would stand to benefit from whatever boost one gets from publishing a high impact paper. Thus the oft-repeated idea that there is some special subset of open access papers where the authors can safely publish in open access journals, while the authors of other papers can not, is, to a large extent, not true.<\/p>\n

In saying that I am not trying to argue that Bates or any other scientist should be asked to gratuitously endanger their careers for the greater good. Or that everyone faces anything remotely like equal challenges in building a successful career in science. Rather I think it is important to note\u00a0that the concerns Bates\u00a0expresses apply far more broadly than the article implies. Indeed, as successful as open access publishing has been, it is one of the movement’s great failings that we have not succeeded in upending the system to the extent that people like Bates, who appears to genuinely support the ideals of open access, feel like publishing in open access journals is the best way to build their careers. Until we change this, the movement for greater openness in science will not succeed.<\/p>\n

So, despite its failings in accurately representing open access, Eveleth’s piece serves a useful purpose. I believe the\u00a0open access movement is driven primarily by anti-elitist sentiments – a desire to free information, to remove its control from the forces of commerce, and to break down the elitist hegemony of high-profile journals. But the elitist\u00a0risks in open access are real. I don’t think they’re the fault of the open access movement – we have tried from the beginning to have the powers that control the funds used on subscriptions use them instead to fully subsidize open access fees; we have tried to undermine and ultimately destroy the impact factor driven culture of high-profile journals and their perceived role in hiring, funding and promotion. But the forces of inertia have, so far, been too strong. But our fault or not, it is crucial that we listen to the concerns of young scientists like Bates and try to make sure that open access really is accessible to everyone.<\/p>\n

[NOTE: In the\u00a0original version of this piece I suggested the Iowa open access fund would have covered Bates’ open access fees. It wouldn’t have as it was restricted to researchers without grants. I apologize for suggesting otherwise and for being an asshole about it.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2005 I\u00a0submitted an essay about science publishing to a political magazine. I got a polite reply back saying that the article was interesting and the issue important but that my approach\u00a0wasn’t right for them. My piece was too straightforward. Too persuasive. They preferred articles that\u00a0had a simple “hook” and, most importantly, were “counterintuitive”. Zoom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaeleisen.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaeleisen.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaeleisen.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaeleisen.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaeleisen.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1673"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaeleisen.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1686,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaeleisen.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673\/revisions\/1686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaeleisen.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaeleisen.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaeleisen.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}