Four months ago I wanted to read a science paper on Ada Lovelace. As a non-academic, all the download sites were behind paywalls where I had to pay $60 or more. And this is not the first time either – I often want to read journals in medicine or physics but can’t. I am shut off from this knowledge.

What is special here is that the people operating within this system have realised that these large organisations operating on government money are middlemen charging for what should be a free or low cost service instead charging hundreds of millions.

In January, a distinguished mathematician called Tim Gowers, made a frustrated blogpost about a particularly odious science publishing company called Elsevier. He declared his intent to never have anything to do with them henceforth and laid out their disagreeable behaviour.

• High prices far above the average.
• Forcing academic libraries to buy journals they don’t wish to through the monopolistic practice of bundling in order that they can purchase journals they need.
• Ruthless behaviour to punish rebels. They are the Microsoft of the science publishing world.
• Elsevier supports the Research Works Act to prevent open access to science. They lobbied strongly in favour of SOPA and PIPA.

In response to his blogpost, a website called The Cost of Knowledge was created in order for academics to register their protest against Elsevier. Tim Gower talks in his post about the social pressure he feels from rejecting to review a colleague’s work based on his ethical position. His blogpost was a public statement he could point to. The Cost of Knowledge aims to give academics a formalised boycott they can point to and not feel like a colleague believes they are shirking their responsibility as a friend or academic in not reviewing their paper.

The site is now above 9000 signatures. Elsevier has been publishing open letters like mad and has dropped support for the Research Works Act. The parasitic organisation is under a lot of pressure and bad press.

“The current publishing model for science is broken, argue an ever-increasing number of supporters of open access publishing, a model whereby all scientific research funded by taxpayers would be made available on the web for free.”
~ Guardian

I often see public debate on issues that are of terminal and critical interest to society. But all that is available to me are third party sources such as news reports – and we know how inaccurate they are from our experience with bitcoin. The actual sources to the science shut off behind paywalls. Academics often don’t experience this huge cost first hand as it is universities that absorb it. Therefore there are 2 classes of people – those with access to the scientific source, and those without. I feel like a dirty plebian.

As you read the next paragraphs, think of bitcoin, Wikipedia, BitTorrent or other systems disintermediating (cutting middlemen) from formerly cathedral-like like institutions or large organisations.

I did eventually get access to that Ada paper through a contact at a university, but it wasted a lot of time and effort I would’ve spent doing other more productive and economically useful things than fighting knowledge gatekeepers.

“We face important policy choices on a whole raft of issues – climate change, energy generation, cloning, stem cell technology, GM foods – that we cannot hope to address properly unless we have access to the scientific research in each of these areas.”
~ Stephan Curry, structural biologist from Imperial College London

Academics write the papers, academics referee the papers, academics select the papers that are going to be published – the publisher does nothing except lending their prestigious name. And then academics buy the work back again.

The UK government distributes $2.2 billion annually to UK universities of which a tenth ($200 million) goes to publishers. And despite the recession, publishers are up 35% or more, while getting their main work funded via tax-payers. When an industry operates at this level, it is plainly operating inefficiently and is ripe for change. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley are the three big publishing houses and account for 42% of all journal articles published and own the majority of the world’s 20,000 academic journals. With monopolistic practices they push around science institutions often charging $30,000 for subscription to a single journal often costing a university more than $1 million.

As you read the next paragraphs, think of bitcoin, Wikipedia, BitTorrent or other systems disintermediating (cutting middlemen) from formerly cathedral-like like institutions or large organisations.

What is special here is that the people operating within this system have realised that these large organisations operating on government money are middlemen charging for what should be a free or low cost service instead charging hundreds of millions.

In the past academic publishers did help with the dissemination of research. However with the advent of the internet, they have become a hindrance erecting barriers to prevent the unauthorised transfer of wealth throughout the world.

“To be made effective, scholarly information has to be made as widely available as possible. We’ve seen an increasing amount of evidence that shows that, if we move to an open-access world, there are benefits not just to the scientific process itself but also wider economic benefits.”
~ David Prosser, executive director of Research Libraries UK

Perelman declined the prize money and rejected honors and medals from prestigious organisations

Data mining is a computational technique where computer robots comb through huge databases and search results looking for associations and connections. Such techniques can be used for trying to find common links between drugs and side effects, or genes and disease. It has a huge level of applicability to all the sciences. A single person would never be able to perform such a task on the level of a computer and would be unlikely to notice the correlations.

In March 2012, JISCM, a government organisation that promotes the use of computer technology in academia released a report. The report said that if data mining text in scientific journals enabled just a 2% increase in productivity for scientists, it would be worth £123m-£157m in working time per year.

But this requires open access to the journals which would currently be illegal under the current copyright laws.

And because of the lack of openness in scientific research, there is a ton of parallel research being done and a huge level of economic waste. Similar to the banking industry and its regulatory capture, academic publishing is trapped in a dreary chain of causality. Governments hand out grants to researchers factored largely by notability, of which prestigious journals are a massive factor. Academics keep publishing in prestigious journals, supporting their parasitic business practices. In response, government-funded research institutions keep purchasing these journals.

There are signs of change. ArXiv.org is a site where anyone can post research manuscipts for free. It is a fantastic read and there is some thoroughly enjoyable and notable papers on there.

In November 2002, Grigori Perelman solved the Poincare conjecture, a long standing mathematical problem that was one of seven Millenium Prize Problems with a reward of $1 million. It was first posed in 1904 and had been unsolved for more than a century. Perelman simply uploaded this momentous proof to ArXiv. Some mathematicians whined about how they felt slighted that he had not gone through conventional established channels. Pathetic. Perelman declined the prize money and rejected honors and medals from prestigious organisations thereafter. The Satoshi of mathematics, he rejected public recognition stating “I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.” and has since withdrawn from mathematics.

“I can’t say I’m outraged. Other people do worse. Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest.”
~ Grigori Perelman

I found this topic worth mentioning because of the similarities happening in other areas today. We truly are at the beginnings of something quite new. A special era. I want people to realise that bitcoin is not disconnected on its own island of innovation, but is part of a bigger whole. There are parallel happenings all around the internet in software, culture, science, urban development and agriculture that are somehow connected. Many of these things have been inspired by open-source culture, but others are uniquely parallel developments inspired by modern technology or thought.

In 2008, 15% of Americans were members of some kind of organisation. In 1980, this number was less than 2%. Research points to trends towards stronger secular-rational values and stronger self-expression values.

Forgive me for including this social media spam but it helps our dinky small site get exposure D:

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