SS#5 - Are Academic Publishers Acting Quasi-Criminally?
Channel: Saving Democracy dot ca
Date: 06/11/2020

I observe even DARKER stuff involving for-profit publishers of scientific journals & universities (e.g., toleration of fraud).

0:02:22 Stranger pushback against basic transparency/replicability principles was sad, but it revealed to us even deeper problems with the academic system.
0:04:33 David Funder blog post: Negative professional consequences of publicly disseminating failed replication results. Prominent researcher threatens to ruin a researcher's reputation if they don't withdraw paper reporting negative replication results. Dark dark stuff. https://bit.ly/3egbSJv
0:08:34 Stranger pushback in the relationship field: Pushback gets greasy: Replicability is only 1 of many important features of science. Really? No we need to *PRIORITIZE* replicability! It's impossible to productively investigate generalizability & validity if there isn't even any repeatedly observable effect! (Do they actually believe this, arguing this in good faith? Unlikely given conflicts of interests of best selling books, TED talks, TV morning show interviews, etc.)
0:18:14 Other stranger pushback: Field should prioritize (methodologically different) generalizability studies over (methodologically similar) replications. No this is precisely how we got into this mess!
0:19:01 Corporatization of universities: Prioritization of expensive (over cheaper) research for maximal grant revenue generation & growing # of business MBAs w/out academic backgrounds.
0:24:39 (Soft) fraud tolerance by (publicly-funded) universities. Case at Western University: They not only failed to initiate a fraud investigation in the face of unambiguously compelling evidence, they actively delayed & obstructed the Canadian funder's (CIHR) investigation.
0:31:57 Quasi-criminal publishers: They (more-or-less) steal publicly-funded research (billions of dollars globally), which is public property (i.e., they don't own it), block public access to it, & then charge exorbitant fees to access. So a quasi-double crime, which causes millions of preventable deaths globally, so perhaps "negligence causing death"? A public scandal of epic proportions, likely to go down as one of the most epic criminal acts in the history of modern society. Relevant documentary: Paywall: The Business of Scholarship https://tinyurl.com/yd5lom35
0:44:46 New law in Netherlands (2015 https://tinyurl.com/ya52t9cq), France, (2016 https://tinyurl.com/y8377w3y) & Belgium (2018 https://tinyurl.com/y73af5qr) forces publicly-funded researchers to violate copyright & publicly post all article postprints within 6 mths of publication. Huge victories for science!
0:45:21 APA & APS signed open letter **AGAINST** US legislation that would mandate public open access to all publicly-funded research articles (following Netherlands, Belgium, & France).
0:48:59 Flawed, opaque, nepotist, & unaccountable academic peer review-system.
0:54:34 Peer review gaming: Establish friendships with never-before-co-authors in one's research area, so you can recommend them as peer reviewers (& still comply with unwritten "arms-length" norm).
0:59:48 Current flaws of public funding agencies grant system: Opaque, unaccountable, politically biased, highly bureaucratic, slow to modernize, & doesn't fund replications, nor preferentially funds researchers with transparent track records.
1:03:44 Flawed nature of the "journal impact factor".
1:06:31 Citations are an uncertain estimate of impact, but still a lower bound (noisy) estimate of impact, so let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
1:15:36 To ALL FUNDERS: Please fund replication research (like the NWO in the Netherlands) & make it a grant condition to spend a certain % (eg 10%) of grant money on replicating key findings in one's research area. Make these small changes, make it happen! The taxpayer is waking up to these facts, & so raise research standards or else scientific funding will be pulled, which would be lose-lose for everyone.
1:18:10 Publicly-funded universities also need higher transparency standards, so they can be accountable to the tax-paying public.
1:20:16 Professional societies also suffer from insufficient transparency, rewarding the wrong things (i.e., quantity over quality), & political/ideological biases. (Indeed SPSP even had an embarrassing financial embezzlement fraud case!)
1:25:21 Academia's multi-layered, multi-stakeholder multi-faceted broken system, suggesting it desperately needs to be saved.
1:27:18 State of transparency across social sciences: Small improvements, but still way too low Hardwicke etal 2018 https://tinyurl.com/ybt23m2o

In this vid series, I answer the question "Does academic science need to be saved? " by telling stories of my strange adventures in academia. I then relate those observations to objective evidence, incl. (peer-reviewed) evidence (vid 5 of 7; other vids, see https://bit.ly/2V32LnX).

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