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Barbara Fister (submitted to Against
the Grain for the June 2004 issue on Peer Review, ed. by Steve McKinzie) A few years ago, our biology department hired a
neuroscientist. As soon as he arrived, he stopped by the library to see what we
had in the way of journals in his field. Unfortunately, we had none since he
was the first neuroscientist on campus and nobody thought to mention it to the
librarians. (We have a seat on the curriculum committee, but this new
curricular development hadn’t shown up in the paperwork of course proposals or
program changes. Nor, unsurprisingly, had it revealed itself in a mysteriously
increased library budget.) Apart from expecting the library to support
undergraduate research and study in his area, he quite reasonably planned to
keep up his own research—something not only needed for his own growth as a
scholar, but required for tenure and promotion at our liberal arts college. He
had been assured that interlibrary loan would supply materials we didn’t own
locally. When I explained the “5/5” rule, he was appalled. Five? While the rule might not
daunt a humanities scholar, used to quarterly journals that publish perhaps
twenty articles a year, many science journals publish well over a thousand
articles annually. It didn’t make sense to him. What’s the point of publishing
results if they can’t be shared? Herein is the
conundrum of scholarly communication. The Constitution gives Congress the power
“to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited
times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings
and discoveries”—a fairly straightforward balance between social and individual
interests to be orchestrated by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” We can quibble
over what is meant by “a limited time,” and we do, but the concept rests on the
uncomplicated notion that tipping the balance too far in either direction would
be bad both for individual authors and for society at large. In the case of
the academic author, however, things get complicated. Certainly, giving
scholars the exclusive right to have their name associated with research
findings is a powerful incentive that drives the production of new knowledge.
Setting aside the abstract quest for truth, authorship of publications—particularly
those appearing in well-respected scholarly journals—is essential for personal
advancement. The self-interested scholar publishes in order to get tenure and
promotion, win grants, and develop a bankable name in the marketplace of ideas.
Yet it is the use of those publications, not their sale,
that is the primary currency of exchange. Scholars aren’t rewarded
through the sale of their texts, but rather through their being read and cited.
They give away their legal ownership of those texts to publishers assuming that
gift will make their ideas available for circulation. Once published, after
all, their work will become a part of the record, a contribution to the common
knowledge base on which other scholars can build. The flaw in the
argument, of course, is the assumption that those texts will be readily
available. It’s an understandable mistake. For several decades after the birth
of “big science,” and the mass infusion into academia of public funds for basic
research, they almost always were. Academics produced knowledge, publishers
published it, and libraries ransomed it back. Simple—until the ransom demands
grew too high. It wasn’t until scholars began to have trouble getting their
hands on the literature they and their colleagues produce that their faulty
assumption became clear. It had been obscured by the fact that the reward
systems for publishers and for academic authors are significantly at odds. And,
while it’s tempting to simply fault publishers, the academic reward system itself
is a significant part of the problem. The republic of science faces a deficit Michael Polanyi described science as a republic in which everyone
plays a part in making and remaking knowledge. Though he was speaking of
science in particular, it’s an apt description of making knowledge in any
academic field. Authority is built on a network of trust and tradition, in that
no one person or body decides what is true; it is decided by those who know
enough to make those judgments. Yet flouting tradition has its place, too.
“While the whole machinery of science is engaged in suppressing apparent
evidence as unsound, on the ground that it contradicts the currently accepted
view about the nature of things, the same scientific authorities pay their
highest homage to discoveries which deeply modify the accepted view about the
nature of things” (66). Thomas Kuhn offered a somewhat more rambunctious
picture of how this works in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
the normal course of affairs is overthrown when significant anomalies are
uncovered that call into question the regulations used by science to assess
truth—a crisis that is “tradition-shattering.” In either case,
these models view the production of knowledge not as a process of piling up
bits of truth incrementally through ongoing discovery, but of a social activity
that depends upon a self-governing process of negotiation—a process in which
(like the balance described in the Constitution) the self-interest of the
scientist is largely consistent with society’s need for good science, assuming
that the goal is knowledge and that the value accruing to scholars is their
name attached to ideas that others can build on. However,
self-interest can influence the ways research is shared, often to the detriment
of the public’s interest. Some scholars have their name attached to research to
which they made little contribution. Others may rush into print with a discovery
that needs more testing merely to stake their claim since, if a competitor
beats them to it, it is instantly devalued. Authors may finely slice a piece of
research into what Whitney Owen has called the “Least Publishable Unit” to seem
more productive than they really are. Review committees too often ask “how much
have you published?” rather than the harder question, “what difference does it
make?” Across the disciplines, the marketplace of ideas is beset by inflation.
It seems to take a wheelbarrow of publications to buy a loaf of credibility. Peter Lawrence
attributes these shenanigans to an obsession with mindless accountability,
lamenting the fact that “rather than assessing the research itself, those who
distribute the money and positions now evaluate scientists by performance
indicators.” Scholars are judged on how much they publish and where—and quickly
realize that “building capital in the hard currency of the audit society can be
safer and easier than founding a reputation on discoveries” (259). This
inflation makes it harder for scholars to keep up. Though the number of
publications has grown, the time for any one scholar to scan the literature has
not, forcing an inevitable narrowing of focus. The reward system has skewed the
way scholars communicate, and that has altered how we create new knowledge. Beyond the
academy, the public has grown less trusting of scholarly expertise. Suspicion
of conflicts of interest and a drive for accountability has led the federal
government—which invests some $45 billion annually on basic research—to propose
new rules requiring highly regulated peer review practices that some scientists
fear run the risk of excluding all qualified reviewers from process, rather
like a jury selection process that, to avoid bias, ends up with twelve citizens
who haven’t read a newspaper in years. A few years ago, a Supreme Court
decision (Daubert v. Merrell Dow
Pharmaceuticals) threw out the old “Frye test” of general acceptance by the
scientific community; the Federal Rules of Evidence, rather than the consensus
of scientists in the field, now determines what scientific evidence can be used
in the courtroom. An amendment attached to a spending bill in 1999 opened
federally-funded research to Freedom of Information Act requests, so that
critics could get data and do their own analysis if they didn’t like the
researchers’ interpretation. The workings of the republic that Michael Polanyi described depended on trust extended to those who are
“in the know.” That trust has eroded significantly. Not too long ago,
John Ziman asked the readers of Nature to consider the question
“is science losing its objectivity?” He was concerned that scientists were
abandoning their traditions of disinterestedness, along with the mechanisms of apprenticeship
and peer review that sustained it. “We all have personal interests and
institutional values that we are bound to promote in our scientific work,
however hard we try to suppress them. The virtue of academic science was that
it took a strong line in support of ‘disinterestedness’ and often managed in
practice almost to live up to its ideals.” This is threatened, in Ziman’s view, as “public knowledge” is transformed into
“intellectual property.” Striking a balance At my liberal
arts college, we make every effort to support faculty and student research. When
necessary, we will pay copyright fees for interlibrary loan articles. But the
copyright fee for one science article
for one researcher is often more than
the price of a book that could be put on our shelves and shared among many
readers. The unfortunate outcome is that we buy the one-time rights to the
article and hope that when a patron needs the book we didn’t buy, some other
library will loan it to us. The implications of this practice are alarming. As I write this,
another university press announces it’s closing its doors. Academic libraries
are their prime market, and the contraction of book budgets means scholars are losing
a valuable outlet for sharing research findings and analysis with the community
at large. The books that people looked for on If knowledge is a
republic, we need to redefine what good citizenship means. Academic authors
should examine their personal motives for publication and take seriously John Ziman’s call for disinterestedness. We need to look beyond
whatever field we’re tending and think about the health of the entire ecology
of knowledge. Because ultimately, when we treat the work that academics are
expected to do to fulfill their contract with society as mere intellectual
property, rather than as a contribution to a public resource, we run the risk
that contract will not be renewed. A bill recently
introduced in Congress by Martin Sabo, the “Public
Access to Science Act,” takes a breathtakingly simple approach to this—it
would remove copyright protection from works arising out of federally funded
research. Why should the public pay for it twice? This solution, while bold and
apparently sensible, is problematic because even those frustrated by the
current system don’t want their work to be subject to alteration or reuse
without attribution—actions that could harm the research record and won’t serve
the public interest in the long run. We can negotiate better ways to retain sufficient
incentives for authors and publishers while honoring the benefits of public
knowledge. All it will take is a little imagination and a better understanding
of the intersecting but crucially different perspectives of academic authors,
publishers, and the public. We have a
republic—if we can keep it. Can we strike the right balance? That’s not just an
academic question. Works cited Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions. Lawrence, Peter
A. “The Politics of Publication: Authors, Reviewers, and Editors Must Act to
Protect the Quality of Research.” Nature
422 (2003): 259-261. Owen, Whitney J.
“In Defense of the Least Publishable Unit.” Chronicle
of Higher Education, Polanyi, Michael. “The Ziman, John. “Is
Science Losing its Objectivity?” Nature
382 (1996): 751-754. |