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My lab:
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It has been the main argument against unifying scholarly literature and data in a single database that monoplies are always bad. I won't go into any political arguments here. Markets have their place, but they also have their limitations. In a recent email exchange with a fellow scientist, we fired these arguments (among others) at each other.
He wrote:
But what I'm not sure is whether a single platform for publication is the right way to go. I believe that competition is still important to prevent corruption. So, if we have many PLoS ONE-like platforms with different bodies of peer reviewers that would be ideal.
I replied:
If competition were really so important, why does each university have one library system? Why hasn't that been outsourced to whatever provider provides the best library service? What is there to corrupt when all that is required for publication is scientific soundness? What is there to be corrupted when where you publish is irrelevant, but what you publish? And besides, with currently 1.5 million papers being published every year, you need so many people that if for some reason you get into a feud with someone, there's plenty of others to chose from. And if someone publishes nonsense, post-publication review takes care of that.

So I don't buy into the competition argument at all. Markets work. But nor everywhere and not for all purposes.
To which he replied:
Where I work I see corruption everywhere.
In my University, many things are monopolized by single committees or single regulatory bodies and this always produces favoritism, nepotism, power abuse etc.
But nobody owns the standard. The system depends critically on a standard to which all libraries subscribe. Think of it like email. Who owns smtp, or http? There is one single system, yet, no mafia, only spam (and that's what peer-review is for: not to eliminate, but at least to reduce spam).
A corrupt Editor-in-Chief can and does favor his relatives, his students, his protégés and publishes many things that make no sense or are sometimes fake. On the other hand, this same EiC blocks another person's papers from being published, and this makes his "mafia" get promoted faster so that he can control the department, etc...
Happens now and will be less later - because just publishing isn't rewarded. What is published is being rewarded, not just publishing.
I didn't mean competition in a political sense; I'm not exactly pro-free-market (nor against). However, any monopoly is scary to me. I'm thinking what if Google or Facebook decides suddenly to blackmail me, for example? I'm significantly dependent on them, and they have substantial amounts of my private communications. In addition, if there is no Microsoft or Yahoo, wouldn't Google slowdown the development of new tools etc.?
A standard in publishing is as much like a monopoly as http or smtp...
Of course existing publishers can join the standard, but why would they? There's no financial incentive for them anymore, because libraries provide the same service for less.
I don't trust post-publication tools will work very well.
Yet people love to publish papers falsifying someone else's papers. Science is a single, gigantic post-publication tool, that's how it works. What else is a paper other than a comment to all the papers listed in the references? It's just the formats that vary and that just takes acclimatization. With a common standard and a single database, all we're doing is just tapping the potential of something that has been there all along: multi-level communication. What I'm advertising is not the creation of something new - it's merely trying to stop historical baggage to prevent the potential discourse that is inherent to science from unfolding.
Posted on Wednesday 24 June 2009 - 22:10:44 comment: 0
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