The subject does not provoke debate in the National Assembly. He does not inflame friends’ dinners or social networks.
Yet the wonderful world of scientific publishing is sick. And we shop for serious problems by letting the situation degenerate.
Recently, our colleague Philippe Robitaille-Grou shone the spotlight on “article factories” that produce fake scientific publications. Articles sold to researchers desperate to publish anything to boost their careers.
Added to this are the “predatory journals” that charge scientists to publish in their pages, turning a blind eye to the quality of the work to pocket the money.
Not to mention the private publishers, certainly credible, but who make shameless profits with the dissemination of a science largely financed by public money.
These twisted models will end up blowing up in our face.
Allowing fraudulent scientific results to infiltrate good ones runs the risk of discrediting the entire scientific process.
However, the pandemic has demonstrated more than ever how essential science is to our societies. And revealed all the importance for citizens to understand and trust it.
It only takes a slightly too large proportion of citizens who believe that vaccines are dangerous to derail entire public health strategies.
At a time when conspiracy theories spread faster than a respiratory virus in a daycare center, every scientific fraud is therefore a ticking time bomb.
The good news is that there are ways to defuse these bombs. But for that, we have to go back to the source of the problem: the commodification of scientific results.
Around the world, a handful of big publishers like Elsevier, Springer or Sage control thousands of scientific journals (think journals like Nature Where The Lancet).
In 2017, an article by Guardian showed that these publishers are an incredibly profitable industry, generating higher margins than Apple or Google.
Why ? It’s simple. While a conventional magazine must pay its journalists, scientific publications receive manuscripts from researchers free of charge. They then have these manuscripts evaluated by other scientists without paying for them (the famous peer review). Then resell the items through expensive subscriptions to often publicly funded institutions, such as university libraries.
We are not the first to conclude that we are being had.
“The state pays for the bulk of the research, pays the salaries of most of those who verify the quality of this research, and then buys the bulk of the published products,” Deutsche Bank has already summarized in a report in which it qualified the “weird” model.
To remedy this, so-called “open access” newspapers, meaning that one can read for free, have appeared. But since there is nothing free in life, many of them ask scientists to pay to be published there.
These exchanges of money, on one side or the other, have created markets for science. Markets that never lack customers, with researchers under unhealthy pressure to publish, especially in countries like China.
Unsurprisingly, this has led to abuse and parallel markets. This is how researchers buy fake articles produced in “factories” in an attempt to have them published in real journals. And that fake magazines publish anything to make money.
For now, the savvy ones usually manage to tell the real science from the fake. But not always, and the appearance of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT could make boundaries even harder to pin down.
The solution ?
Like many, Jean-Claude Guédon, honorary professor at the University of Montreal, concludes that scientific results must be published on public platforms.
It is already happening. In Quebec, the Érudit platform publishes, moreover in French, more than 300 scientific journals, especially in the human sciences. It is notably funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The principle is that of “diamond open access”, that is to say that the publication is free for both authors and readers.
In South America, in particular, such platforms (Redalyc, SciELO) are very successful.
Free diamond access does not solve everything. But it takes a big problem out of the equation: the financial incentive for journals to publish bad science.
Obviously, the prestige of major journals like Nature remains large compared to public platforms. But we will have to learn to judge scientific work according to other criteria. The current model is broken, and the whole credibility of science is at stake.