In Orwell’s 1984 the Ministry of Truth rewrote history and rewrote the present. Orwell showed that if you control the provision of information you can alter people’s thoughts and values. I think we are in great danger of scholarly publishing moving in that direction, where commercial organisations, answerable to no-one except their money-oriented shareholders, reengineer truth in scholarship to generate profits, rather than reflect three thousand years of hard won values.
At least three events have deeply troubled me.
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The distortion of Content. The most recent is the implication from – I think – ISIS in the Ecologist blog that the accepted values of scholarly publication are becoming distorted by the publisher. See http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2187010/scientists_pledge_to_boycott_elsevier.html which I reproduce in full at the bottom of the post. It contains the phrases:
This arbitrary, groundless retraction of a published, thoroughly peer-reviewed paper is without precedent in the history of scientific publishing, and raises grave concerns over the integrity and impartiality of science.
…
The retraction is erasing from the public record results that are potentially of very great importance for public health. It is censorship of scientific research, knowledge, and understanding, an abuse of science striking at the very heart of science and democracy, and science for the public good.
And :
- the appointment of ex-Monsanto employee Richard Goodman to the newly created post of associate editor for biotechnology at FCT [the journal in question]
- the retraction of another study finding potentially harmful effects from GMOs (which almost immediately appeared in another journal)
- the failure to retract a paper published by Monsanto scientists in the same journal in 2004, for which a gross error has been identified.
Readers may recall that Merck paid Elsevier to publish a fake journal promoting their products (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australasian_Journal_of_Bone_&_Joint_Medicine )
Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of [Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine], a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles—most of which presented data favorable to Merck products—that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.[4][5]
I cannot comment authoritatively about the present case but readers should follow it.
- The distortion of merit. In 2012 Thomson-Reuters discontinued the indexing of Acta Crystallographica E (http://journals.iucr.org/services/impactfactors.html ). I have lauded this Journal as the best data-journal in the whole of science – it is meticulously peer-reviewed by humans and has a world-beating data-review system with over 500 checks. I [2] have read every single article(over 10,000). TR arbitrarily removed it from their index without telling the IUCr, who then reported a drop in submissions to the journal. TR have the arbitrary power to decide what is an acceptable 1984-journal and what is not.
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The distortion of discovery. If an article cannot be discovered it does not 1984-exist. The academic world has sat back and waited for commercial organizations to index its material. When Google Scholar was created it was a Friday-afternoon project, but it gained traction and is now the main public arbiter of where a journal is to be found. Last month a major linkup between Google Scholar and TR was announced: http://www.against-the-grain.com/2013/11/newsflash-thomson-reuters-google-scholar-linkage-offers-big-win-for-stm-users-and-publishers/ .Effectively this means that if an article is not exposed in the first page by Google Scholar it does not exist. Neither Google nor TR are answerable to anyone except shareholders.
The bibliographic management system Mendeley was acquired by Elsevier. Mendeley are answerable only to Elsevier shareholders. No one knows what content Elsevier has acquired. No one knows what content is exposed, with what priority.
This means that the control of the content of scholarship, the dissemination of scholarship, and the valuation of scholarship is in the hands of mega-corporations. Do you trust that this is not becoming the Ministry of Scholarship?
What can we do?
A lot. We can’t look to Universities as they have completely failed to address C21 scholarship. But Wikipedia and Mozilla (and others) have shown that concerned citizens can create massive value, which, being Open is at a high level of Truth. The technology is now in our hands. What we must do is:
- Build our own index of scholarship. It’s technically possible, and in my own Content Mine project I am making a start. The only things holding us back are lawyers and apathy.
- Make it blindingly better and more useful than the present system. That’s a challenge, but Wikipedia is already the best scholarly publishing system in C21 and much of the hard work has been done. We can build a better content, discovery and valuation system for Scholarship.
Join us before it is too late.
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[1] Full text of the Ecologist blog
Following the retraction of the Seralini et al scientific paper which found health damage to rats fed on GM corn, by the Journal ‘Food and Chemical Toxicology’, over 100 scientists have pledged in this Open Letter to boycott Elsevier, publisher of the Journal.
To: Wallace Hayes, Editor in Chief, Food and Chemical Toxicology; Elsevier
Re: “Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize”, by G E Séralini et al, published in Food and Chemical Toxicology 2012, 50(11), 4221-31.
Your decision to retract the paper is in clear violation of the international ethical norms as laid down by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which FCT is a member. According to COPE, the only grounds for retraction are
- clear evidence that the findings are unreliable due to misconduct or honest error,
- plagiarism or redundant publication, or
- unethical research.
You have already acknowledged that the paper of Séralini et al (2012) contains none of those faults.
This arbitrary, groundless retraction of a published, thoroughly peer-reviewed paper is without precedent in the history of scientific publishing, and raises grave concerns over the integrity and impartiality of science. These concerns are heightened by a sequence of events surrounding the retraction:
- the appointment of ex-Monsanto employee Richard Goodman to the newly created post of associate editor for biotechnology at FCT
- the retraction of another study finding potentially harmful effects from GMOs (which almost immediately appeared in another journal)
- the failure to retract a paper published by Monsanto scientists in the same journal in 2004, for which a gross error has been identified.
The retraction is erasing from the public record results that are potentially of very great importance for public health. It is censorship of scientific research, knowledge, and understanding, an abuse of science striking at the very heart of science and democracy, and science for the public good.
We urge you to reverse this appalling decision, and further, to issue a fulsome public apology to Séralini and his colleagues. Until you accede to our request, we will boycott Elsevier, i.e., decline to purchase Elsevier products, to publish, review, or do editorial work for Elsevier.
[2] in conjunction with my colleagues and machines.