Can Anything Good Come from Gaza? How Western Science is Collapsing.

The attempt to improve science by "free-access publishing" is backfiring.

Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” (John, 1:44)

In the early years of the Christian era, when Syria was feeling the pressure of Greece, Herod Antipas and Gamaliel and those zealous Theudases and Judases who, in Gamaliel’s memory, had perished by the sword, would almost certainly have concurred with a Greek poet in partibus Orientalibus, like Meleager of Gadara, or a Roman provincial governor like Gallio, in asking, in the same satirical tone: ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’ … they would almost certainly have agreed in answering that particular question with an emphatic and contemptuous ‘No.’ (Arnold Toynbee, Civilizations on Trial, 1948).

(Above, the Islamic University of Gaza, bombed in 2014.

The peak of cultural vitality of the ancient Roman Empire was probably in the decades before and after the turning of the first millennium BC, with poets, historians, and philosophers we still remember nowadays: Tacitus, Virgil, Horace, Sallust, Seneca, and many others. But even during the high times of Roman literature, the best that the authors could do was to recognize that there were problems with the Empire. None of them could propose creative solutions nor imagine that there might have been something to learn from the non-Roman world.

In this atmosphere, the apostle John wrote the line, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” It was a question meant to highlight how narrow was the view of the Romans, who couldn’t imagine anything that was at the same time good and non-Roman. Arnold Toynbee discusses this statement in his “Civilizations on Trial” (1948), noting that the Roman Empire could only change its obsolete structure by accepting ideas from a place such as Nazareth that, at the time, was little more than a forgotten village in a remote province. And yet, it was from there that change came with the arrival of Christianity. Today, we could express the same concept by saying, “Can anything good come from Gaza?”

Just as you could say that the Roman Culture of imperial times gradually became more static and ossified, we can say the same thing for our modern Western culture, and in particular for the backbone of Western thought that we call “Science.” Of course, not everyone agrees that science is collapsing, on the contrary, it looks shinier and better than ever. But you could have said the same of the Roman Empire at the time of Seneca.

There are systemic reasons for all systemic collapses, but it is remarkable how the collapse of science is a good example of the phenomenon that Jay Forrester (the founder of “System Dynamics”) called “pulling the levers in the wrong direction.” That is, operating on the system with the intention of solving and instead worsening it. One of these backfiring effects consists in concentrating the resources available in a small number of centers. In Roman times, the center of military power was the capital city, Rome itself. In our times, scientific power is concentrated in the small group of universities that rank among the first in the various classifications you can find on the Web. This approach didn’t save the Roman Empire, nor it can save modern science. Centralization can keep the military or the scientific machine running, but it cannot, in itself, produce innovation or stimulate creativity.

Let me tell you the story of another of these backfiring attempts. The latest trend in scientific publishing is the diffusion of the “free access” system. It is a good idea, in principle. Scientists noted that the public could not access the results of scientific research without paying huge fees to publishers despite having already paid for it with their taxes. So, they thought that opening up the mighty castle of research would lead to better communication with the public — and among scientists, too. That would do something good against the plague of hyperspecialization (aka knowing everything about nothing).

As usual, solutions that work in theory suffer very different fates when tried in the real world. “Free Access” publishing was ridiculed at first (all new truths are born as heresies), but during the past two decades or so, it rapidly expanded to the point that, today, no reputable scientists would dream of publishing a paper they think important in a format other than free-access. They know that the old pay-for-view format guarantees that nobody will read it.

Sounds good, right? Yes, but perverse as it was, the old system had advantages. Publishers made money mainly by selling subscriptions to university libraries, and since profits didn’t depend on the number of articles published, that was an incentive to maintain a certain level of quality in order to entice libraries to subscribe. Then, since publishing was free of charge, the system was a great equalizer: even unknown scientists could submit their ideas to the most prestigious journals. Not that there wasn’t a bias against outsiders, but at least they had a fighting chance to compete with their more famous colleagues.

With open access, publishers soon discovered that they could force scientists to pay “processing charges” for the privilege of publishing in their journals. It means that the more papers are published, the higher the profits. Not exactly an incentive to keep high-quality standards. Once this idea took hold, the gates of publishing hell opened. Today, at the very minimum, you have to pay a few thousand dollars to have your paper visible in a decent journal. If you want to publish open-access on “Nature,” one of the most prestigious scientific journals, you have to shell out more than $10k. There are cheap journals, yes, but publishing with a publisher that's just suspected of being a predator is a surefire way to destroy a scientific career. Then, of course, you may publish at zero cost in the old pay-per-view scheme, which will ensure that your work is ignored. Scientists still publish using this scheme, but only for works that they themselves judge of low quality.

And that’s the problem. The publishing scheme that has developed in recent years cuts out from the best journals all those scientists who lack substantial financial resources: scientists from poor countries, low budget scientists, and individual scientists. But it is from this pool of non-mainstream scientists that creative ideas come. Think, for instance, of James Lovelock and his “Gaia Hypothesis,” one of the revolutionary ideas of the 20th century. He was an independent scientist, always working on a low budget. If Lovelock were active today, would he be able to publish in the best journals? Most likely not, and his work would be ignored.

And that, unfortunately, is bringing further degradation to the whole system of scientific publishing, already suffering from sclerosis, inefficiency, cronyism, elitism, and worse. New ideas from original thinkers are efficiently screened out and eliminated from the mainstream. Creativity, in science, does not pay, and free-access publishing has worsened the situation. One more perfect example of “pulling the levers in the wrong direction.”

Can science still be saved? Or will it go the way the Roman Empire did? Maybe it has to; collapse is the way the universe uses to renew itself. The Roman Empire had to collapse to give space to something new, and the same thing may need to happen to science, the way it is understood nowadays. Will a new science arise from places such as Gaza, Kabul, or Mar-a-Lago? Most of us will be tempted to answer “no,” just like Nathanael answered Philip according to John’s Gospel. But never forget that “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” (1 Corinthians 1:27)

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Scientific Papers as a Scientist’s “money”

by Ugo Bardi. From “Cassandra’s Legacy,” 2014 (with some edits)

We are seeing scientists badly failing to convince decision-makers of the urgent need to do something against the impending disaster caused by global warming. But that's just a symptom of the decline of scientific research, with scientists desperately seeking for funds, oppressed by bureaucracy, and by a general disinterest on the part of the public. To say nothing of the rampant phenomenon of pseudoscience. In this text, I argue that one of the causes of the decline of science is the emphasis on publishing (the "publish or perish" rule). I argue that scientific papers have become a currency, suffering all the problems plaguing the modern financial markets. The financial and scientific worlds have developed "emergent" properties that optimize throughput but not necessarily benefit. In short, we are publishing too much. (image above from this page)

The scientific world seems to be swamped by a true tsunami of papers of all kinds, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. A situation that looks more and more similar to that of the general cacophony of the World Wide Web swamped by poor quality information drowning the good information (if any). This starts to be a serious problem; some have explicitly asked that scientists publish a smaller number of papers but of higher quality (as argued, for instance, by Timo Hannay). 

But why do we find ourselves in this situation? What has caused science to become a paper mill? Here, I argue that it is the result of the basic properties of complex systems. These systems generate emergent properties that are often similar in fields that appear very different at first sight. In particular, scientific publishing turns out to be very similar to the world's financial system, with all the associated problems of uncontrolled growth and waste of resources. Let me explain my point.

From the beginning of one's career, scientists are pressured to publish, publish, and publish. That is known as the "Publish or Perish" rule, which is implemented through the "peer review" process in which the authors' colleagues have the authority to accept or reject the submitted paper or request modifications. It looks simple, but it is much more complex than this, with several variants on the theme of "peer review", different prestige of scientific journals, different methods of diffusion (e.g. open access or paid subscriptions) and more.

One of the problems with the system is that the peer review system can usually filter out the really bad papers but can hardly do the same for papers that are simply mediocre. The limitations of peer review have generated the arcane (and ineffectual) methods of post-publication evaluation, which sometimes go under the name of "scientometry" or "scientometrics" (not to be confused with Scientology!!).

For a non-scientist, the urge to publish and the methods of publications in science are hard to understand, but the matter will appear perfectly clear if we compare it to something we are all familiar with: ordinary, monetary currency. Let me examine the many parallels in a non-exhaustive list.

1. Currency. The way we intend monetary currency nowadays is something that has no intrinsic value: it is in the form of sheets of paper or bits in computers. But by having these bits or pieces of paper, you gain prestige and luxury items and climb the social ladder. The situation is exactly the same for scientific papers. In themselves, papers may have little or no value, but the more papers a scientist has published, the higher his/her prestige and the more he/she can climb up the scientific ladder to higher and more prestigious positions. Papers can also bring luxury items in the form of expensive research equipment (microscopes, particle accelerators, scanners, etc.).

1. Emitting currency. Today, central banks are the entities authorized to emit monetary currency, and they have the authority to stamp a validation mark on an otherwise worthless piece of paper which becomes 'money'. In science, validation of a paper is the privilege of scientific publishers. But who gave scientific publishers this authority? It is an interesting question, just as impossible to answer as asking who gave the banks the same kind of authority with ordinary currency.

2. Spending your currency. Ordinary currency has no value in itself, but it can be exchanged with all sorts of items in the market. Scientific papers are not so easy to redeem but can be transformed into ordinary currency by using them as tokens necessary to obtain a salary, career advancements, honorariums, and more.

3. Inflation. Currency is well known to undergo inflation; it loses part of its value with time. Scientific papers are subjected to the same phenomenon. Older papers are less valuable than new ones, and in order to maintain your "wealth", as a scientist, you must fight inflation. If your papers get old and no new ones are published, they will be worth nothing.

4. Interest on currency. Ordinary currency can be deposited in banks in order to acquire an interest in the form of more currency. For scientific papers, the same role is played by funding agencies that transform scientific papers into research grants, which scientists will use to produce more papers. It is a classic example of a reinforcing feedback. 

5. Assaying. The real value of ordinary currency can be ascertained by procedures that may involve chemical assaying of precious metals. With paper currency, there are ways to determine whether they have been printed by authorized agencies. With scientific papers, their validity is verified by "referees," scientists who will decide whether the data and the interpretation reported are correct.

 6. Counterfeiting. Ordinary currency can be counterfeited in various ways, for instance in the form of worthless metals instead of precious ones, in the form of paper bills printed by unauthorized agencies, and in the form of legitimate - but worthless - currency emitted by the central bank of small and unknown countries. In scientific publishing, counterfeiting is performed by small "predatory" publishers which do not perform the same validity check as the established publishers and may simply publish anything in exchange for a (standard monetary) fee paid by the authors.

7. Bad money replaces the good. This is a well-known phenomenon in all economies, with money being debased by reducing the content of precious metals or printing too much of it. In science, we are seeing the same phenomenon with the proliferation of scientific publishers - often shady businesses trying to make a buck from scientists eager to see their papers published but not succeeding with the traditional journals. The result is an inflation of bad papers, which tend to swamp the flux of good ones.

8. Ponzi schemes and multi-level marketing.  A Ponzi scheme is a pyramidal structure in which the lower layers pay the higher ones for the privilege of being inside. A multi-level marketing scheme is similar, but you pay for the privilege of being able to sell a product. There is no reason why such schemes cannot exist also in science. Some recently started journals have taken up a pyramidal structure that looks suspiciously like a multi-layer marketing scheme. In this case, scientists are drawn into the scheme with the allure of being defined as "editors." As a result, they work for free for the publisher!


As you see, the similarities are so many and so evident that we can say that the paper publishing system in modern science is a form of currency that exists and prospers within the system that has created it. It is so entrenched and natural that most scientists show little or no interest in its origins. Yet, the peer review system was unknown a century ago (see, e.g. this note by Michael Nielsen). For instance, only one of the about 300 papers published by Albert Einstein went through peer review. The scientific publication system we know today seems to have become the rule only in the second half of the 20th century. It is impressive that this system emerged all by itself without anyone planning it. It is an "emergent phenomenon", one of the characteristics of complex systems that tend to evolve in such a way as to maximize the dissipation of potential energy (see, e.g., Kaila and Annila).

We could say that the world's financial system has evolved in order to maximize the destruction of the Earth's natural resources; favoring their consumption at speeds much larger than the Earth's capability to reform them - obviously not a benefit for humankind. We could argue that the world's scientific publication system has evolved in order to maximize the production of a large number of mediocre and useless papers. Again, this is not a benefit to science. Scientists are publishing too much!

Can these systems be changed? There is much talk on the subject of reforming the world's financial system, just as there is much talk about reforming the world's scientific publication system. In both cases, however, reform seems to be very difficult, if not impossible. In science, the well-intentioned effort to open up to the public the results of scientific research through the "Open Access" system seems to have backfired, generating a wave of "predatory publishers" favoring an even faster dissipation of scientific potentials by greatly increasing the number of mediocre or bad papers. The financial system seems to be even more impervious to all kinds of changes.

In the end, it seems that most systems of this kind can be reformed only by rebuilding them after they have crashed. That's not surprising: after all, you should know that if you fight thermodynamics, thermodynamics always wins.