This time I’m taking you on a tour of the scientific journals, where a bomb has just exploded. But before that, let me return to a small episode from my university life. I allow myself to do so all the more since it is not me who will be in question, but a late colleague.
Freitag, the institution and the organization
At the beginning of the 1990s, when I was beginning my career as a university professor, many people had the feeling that something was happening, something that would transform the university, almost everywhere, and particularly the university research. I then had the idea of bringing together professors representing all sectors of the university to think about all this. We met for a year, then we held a conference to which Michel Serres was invited. What came out of it was one of my first publications.
Among these professors was the late sociologist Michel Freitag (1935-2009).
One of his ideas had a lot of influence on our work. To put it in a few words, Freitag argued that we were perhaps moving from a moment in history where the university – with all its faults, of which he was aware, of course – was conceived as an institution at a time when it was becoming an organization. This mutation meant in particular, according to him, that the preponderant place of reference to normative ideals gave way to a desire for functional adaptation to the present, which penetrated with force, all accompanied by commercialization and clientelization.
I suspect he would add today: and salaries of its leaders on par with those of large organizations. But let’s stick to the research and the possible negative effects of all this on the university.
Research under threat
It has happened – and it still happens of course – that research is subsidized by private companies which sought to serve their interests (and often succeeded in doing so), with all the dangers that this presents.
But there is something new in this area of possible obstacles to the search for truth, this old normative ideal.
I have sometimes mentioned here what we call predatory journals, false journals which give themselves the appearance of real ones and which, for cold hard cash, publish articles. There would be hundreds of them. I also mentioned these article factories (paper mills) who, always for cold hard cash — sometimes, it is said, up to more than $1,000 — write you articles that you can then sign and which they will try to have published in a journal, ideally not predatory, or even prestigious .
However, it seems that this is now very possible. This is what the bomb that has just exploded suggests.
The Wiley bomb and the others
Wiley (more precisely John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) is a very old, gigantic and renowned American academic publishing house. Scientific journals (more than 2000) and books are published there. In an industry that is reportedly worth billions of dollars, Wiley is a very big player, with estimated 2023 revenue of $2 billion.
This week, Wiley announced the closure of 19 journals affected by a massive influx of fake articles. But this is the tip of the iceberg: this announcement followed more than 11,000 articles withdrawn by Wiley over the past two years and the closure of four other journals. All this was less publicized. Just like the fact that another publishing house, IOP Publishing, withdrew 900 fraudulent articles in 2022. Just recently, the publisher Elsevier was concerned about 60 articles in a chemistry journal, as part of an investigation into undisclosed potential conflicts of interest by editors, improprieties by some authors, and manipulation of peer reviews and citations.
Behind these distressing affairs – and which partly explains them – we find the obligation to publish, a sine qua non condition for obtaining subsidies, which allow us to continue publishing and obtaining promotions. It is not an exaggeration to think that it is the science and knowledge that the university must produce which are thereby threatened.
Fortunately, the scientific community is reacting. We will find, for example, this group of researchers who identify the multiplication of these cases and these other researchers who help to identify them. There is plenty to do, especially since, as you might guess, ChatGPT has already started to change the situation and make the situation worse. It’s not likely to stop.
I often think of Freitag in the face of this troubling commercialization of knowledge, but also in the face of so many academic fields which often seem under the influence of the ideologies of the day. Dear Freitag died too soon to see this in its full extent. But a year before his death, I called him to check on him. During our conversation, I told him: “Ultimately, you were quite right. » He replied: “I wish I had been less right. »