This week the Spinoza and Stevin Prizes were awarded to four scientists. These prices are an absolute dream. With this money, researchers buy freedom and space for their pure curiosity. They can ask exactly the questions they want, regardless of whether they are considered fashionable by juries and committees.
Don’t forget: a lot of scientists don’t get any money at all to do science. They are paid for patient care, or for the education they provide. They have to scrape together the money for their own research by applying for grants.
The idea behind this is that the best applications are awarded funding, assessed by other scientists, of course. Chance that an application is successful fluctuates between 10 and 20 percent, but thanks to the high degree of randomness and chance, it still makes sense to submit an application ten times, just as it makes sense to keep buying scratch cards if you keep getting a tenth chance of winning the jackpot.
All of science is designed to judge each other. Academic freedom is nice and nice, you can hang your own garlands and set your own accents. But anyone who wants money for their project or wants to publish something has to go through the ballot committee. This is sometimes a useful exercise that improves your research. More often it is mainly a matter of cosmetic corrections and obligatory repetitions of experiments.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world just started communicating openly with each other on social media. I always found that frustrating. Why couldn’t we just live-tweet our experiments in the lab at the university and put the articles online as blog posts? That has now partly become a reality. The articles now first appear on a kind of blog, a so-called ‘preprint server’ where you publish your science at the touch of a button.
That was a storm during the corona crisis. There was no time for balloting, when it became really urgent it was the way to communicate quickly.
But it’s not called for nothing ‘preprint‘-server. It still means that a genuine article has been approved by anonymous peers and published in an official journal, the so-called ‘print‘. Only then will it count on your publication list. Then you can use it as an academic medium of exchange with which you receive subsidies and promotions.
Surprisingly enough, a hefty bill then follows. The whole world communicates with each other for free; blogs, posts, publishes. Except science. He pays about three thousand euros to also put such a manuscript on a publisher’s website. A publication list of a widely published Spinoza Prize winner costs the university about 30,000 a year. A billion-dollar profit for the publishers at minimal cost.
This afternoon on my to do-list: reviewing an article by colleagues that has been online for a long time. And adjusting my own article here and there that has also been online for a long time, so that I also get new means of exchange, against payment of a few thousand euros. In 2020, researchers collectively spent one hundred million man-hours assessing other people’s work. It sometimes takes years before an article can finally be read. Everything is done for that never proven suspicion that this jury sport quality improves.
In 2023, that is a downright dubious claim. Papers in which errors were deliberately added were also rated as excellent. Papers with fraudulent or ramshackle results were also judged sufficient for publication. And what happened during the corona crisis? There is now quite a well-functioning self-cleansing capacity of the scientific community beyond traditional ones peer review. The bad apples on the preprint servers are removed by openly discussing the reliability and quality of such an article. Free.
Read also: Clogged by corona: the scientific publishing machine is clogged. ‘There is so much dredging’
And yet we keep reviewing and picking up the bill again and again. Scientists turn out to be just people. Arch conservative, especially when they operate in herds. I expect that we academics will keep each other busy for years to come with this cumbersome, expensive way of communicating. Because it is heurt. Because that’s how we’ve been taught.
The only way in which this collective hostage-taking by publishers can be broken is through intervention from above. When someone simply demands an end to this waste of time and tax money.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.
A version of this article also appeared in the June 10, 2023 newspaper.