The Scientific Journal Industry is Monopolized and Broken — Here’s How Blockchain Can Fix It
The scientific community has a serious problem on their hands. At present, they’re being extorted by a oligopoly of academic journals that are slow, expensive, biased and, as shown by the evidence, ineffective at what they do.
If it sounds that bad, it’s because it is that bad. Scientific journals charge hefty price tags for their services. Between 1986 and 2003, they raised their subscription prices by a whopping 215%. Why, you ask? The simple answer: because they can.
When you have total control over a market, you can charge whatever you want. Scientists and universities know it’s happening, yet, they shrug it off because there’s nothing they can do about it. Scientists have tried boycotting certain journals without much success.
In 2010, the University of California tried fighting back against rising prices in Nature, a high-profile scientific journal. What happened? Nothing. Eight years later, Nature continues to dominate the industry.
For those who believe things will get better on their own: 1) I salute your optimism, and 2) The scientific publishing industry is worth an estimated $25 billion - they’re not going to leave the bar without throwing a few punches.
Come Down The Rabbit Hole With Me
As beautifully stated by Morpheus in the 1999 Hollywood hit, The Matrix:
“You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth.” — Morpheus
What do you say?
Are you ready to see what’s really happening in the scientific publishing industry?
Or would you rather put on the blinders and pretend everything’s going to be okay?
Am I being overdramatic? In my opinion, no. This is a very serious problem that affects all of us. It should be addressed before these monopolies accrue more power. Otherwise, the generations after us, and even our own, will suffer.
The Era of Scientific Gatekeepers
Peer review has only been around for a few hundred years, and within that timespan, has become a monopolized mess. I call it the “era of scientific gatekeepers” because A) It has nice ring to it, and B) It’s true.
In Science, another high-profile journal, your chances of getting accepted are just 7%. Numbers like this are fairly consistent across the board. With such a high rejection rate, authors resort to publishing in low-profile journals that garner minimal traffic.
You’re probably thinking, “Okay, but they’re rejecting for a reason. The other 93% of papers must be low quality”.
Nope.
Scientific journals are notorious for rejecting famous papers. George A. Akerlof, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, had his paper “The Market For Lemons” rejected several times before finally getting accepted.
In 2015, it was shown that the top medical journals rejected 14 out of 14 of the top cited articles of all time within their respective fields.
Enrico Fermi’s paper on weak interaction (a fundamental force of nature) was rejected by Nature for being “too remote from reality”. That same paper helped him win the Nobel Prize in physics in 1938.
The list goes on an on. Which begs the question: why do scientific journals charge so much? Because scientists have to publish consistently to sustain their careers.
Journals aren’t stupid. They know that researchers, especially young ones, must “publish or perish”. That’s why journals are able to charge $1,350 to $5,000 per paper and get away with it.
To make matters worse, the entire process can take years. Researchers can’t afford to wait that long, otherwise, they risk getting surpassed in status by their peers.
Scientific Journals Have Insanely High Profit Margins
I don’t think people realize just how profitable the scientific journal industry is. In 2010, Elsevier, a major journal in the space, reported profits of £724 million with a revenue of £2 billion. That’s a 36% profit margin. That same year, Google, Apple, and Amazon all reported profit margins lower than 36%.
In the publishing industry, that’s high. Take, for instance, magazine companies. Their profit margins are about 13.5%, nearly 3x lower than some journals. Despite a similar business model, the numbers are vastly different. The question is, why?
The answer: free labor.
Before a paper gets published, it must go through a process called peer review. The role of a peer reviewer is to judge a paper’s merit. It’s their job to let the journal know whether a paper is fit for publication.
It’s a time-consuming and mentally-taxing role- and that’s putting it mildly. Most scientists are very busy. They teach, mentor, and conduct their own research.
One would assume that peer reviewers get paid for their efforts. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. These roles are filled by working scientists on a volunteer basis. It’s estimated that unpaid peer review is worth £1.9 billion.
How, then, do journals reward scientists? By charging them pricey subscription fees for content they created. It’s the epitome of the classic idiom “biting the hand that feeds you”. Remember, the journals pay nothing for peer reviewers or research papers. It’s no wonder why their profit margins are so high!
Update: I just realized that Elsevier’s profits have increased from £724 million/year to over £900 million/year. For all you optimists out there, do you still believe things will get better on their own?
Journals Only Care About New and Spectacular Results
For journals, it’s all about publishing exciting discoveries. After all, they’re in the business of selling subscriptions. They can’t do this by publishing “boring” research. Papers must have a certain “wow factor”, otherwise, they get rejected.
According to a 2013 study, 50% of all clinical trials in the U.S. never get published. This means that thousands of clinical trials go unreported.
Why is this bad?
Because it leads to redundant research. When clinical trials don’t get reported, scientists don’t know what’s been tried and what hasn’t. As a result, they waste time and money performing unnecessary experiments.
You might think, “Well, it’s the researchers’ fault for not reporting their findings”.
I disagree.
While it’s easy to blame the researchers, we must remember: scientific journals favor papers that show positive results. It’s rare for them to publish negative findings. This leaves little incentive to report anything but positive findings.
Compare the following approaches:
In Figure 1, which is the most common approach taken by journals, only experiments with positive results are published. In Figure 2, all results- negative and positive- are published.
A common rebuttal against Figure 2 is, “Negative data can’t be trusted”. As pointed out in a 2013 article, negative data is statistically more trustworthy than positive data.
“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” — Mark Twain.
The Current Peer Review Model is Biased
Most scientific journals use single blind peer review. This means the author’s identity is revealed while the reviewer’s is hidden. Unfortunately, it can lead to favoritism- particularly towards senior scientists.
In this report (http://publishingresearchconsortium.com/index.php/prc-documents/prc-research-projects/36-peer-review-full-prc-report-final/file), the acceptance rate of a prestigious researcher’s paper was 87% with their identity revealed, but only 68% with their identity hidden. In other words, the author’s prestige skewed the reviewer’s opinion of the paper.
How Can Blockchain Fix This Mess?
Scientists around the world deserve financial empowerment and better connectivity. However, they can’t acquire this while centralized scientific journals still exist. The middleman has to go, and blockchain is the perfect way to make that happen.
Our Solution — Incentivized Post Publication Peer Review
The model we are proposing is Incentivized Post Publication Peer Review. It’s simply an incentivized version of the standard post publication peer review model.
Remember, peer reviewers aren’t paid. They also don’t receive any notoriety. Without pay or prestige, there’s little incentive, aside from integrity and/or impact, to do a good job.
Ask yourself: if you had to devote yourself to a project without pay or prestige, would you do it? For most people, the answer is “No”. Remember: peer reviewers, like all people, want recognition and/or monetary compensation for their work.
Lab Ledger solves this problem by giving peer reviewers what they deserve: pay and notoriety.
You can read the full whitepaper here: https://LabLedger.net
Lab Ledger Official Links
Official Website: https://LabLedger.net
Telegram: https://t.me/LabLedger
Twitter: https://Twitter.com/LabLedger
Medium: https://Medium.com/@LabLedger
SteemIt: https://SteemIt.com/@LabLedger
Reddit: https://Reddit.com/r/LabLedger
Some questions I had... that might help the community to follow:
Q1: Any news about this project?
Q2: Is the airdrop something that will happen, or was it aborted?
(found the answer on Pined message on Telegram)
Wow, one more project claiming to fund science. So we're at 3 of those by now.
http://deip.world
http://scienceroot.com
I wonder what you guys think where the money will come from. But I guess the economy of the token is a minor issue after the ICO.
It does not need a token to solve the issues with publishing. The reward for a scientist is his reputation. Which is a joke if you base it on a transferable token.
I got to admit, having worked on PEvO for nearly 2 years now I'm kinda biased, and seriously frustrated that it's not possible to get people collaborating on blockchain projects that don't include an ICO.
Hi, if you understand SteemIt, then you understand where the money comes from: inflation. Like SteemIt, we pay researchers to A) Publish scientific papers and B) Collaborate (comment) on them. Approximately 75% of LAB tokens minted will be seeded into the rewards pool. We are actually nearly identical, from an economic standpoint, as SteemIt, so we have a well-tested, sound economic system backing us up. Also, I think you're misunderstanding how it works: the reputation isn't a transferable token. Can you transfer Steem Power? No, you can't. Likewise, you can't transfer Scholar Points. We are utilizing the best economic system by far for incentivizing honest scientific peer review and progress.
I didn't ask where the coins come from, I asked about the money for the scientists. Someone has to pay in the end. What's the final use case of the currency that makes someone invest fiat into it?
With STEEM it's STEEM POWER - which may not be transferable, but exchangeable for STEEM. My STEEM POWER reflects a monetary investment, and has nothing to do with any kind of reputation.
Reputation here on STEEM is a non-consensus value, made out of thin air to give some means to protect from spam. It's not reliable as a proof of valuable contributions.
There are more issues to it. How are you planning to solve the distribution issues STEEM clearly faces? Circlejerks? Vote selling?
I do understand STEEM very well, and that's the reason why I can tell you that this concept is built on sand, from both a social and an economic point of view. As you didn't want to hear the scientist's reasoning in @lemouth's comments.
What's the final use case of the currency that makes someone invest fiat into it? <<<< Not sure what you mean by this. Can you please elaborate?
Steem Power represents more voting power. The more you have, the more influence you have over the distribution of awards.
At Lab Ledger, Scholar Points (the equivalent of Steem Power) represents influence over the distribution of rewards. Users will also have a unique "Influence Score" that will be compartmentalized towards their specific field (meaning influence can't cross "subject borders").
It will work very similarly to Google Pagerank. So you could think of it as a hybrid between Google Pagerank and Steemit.
How are we going to prevent circle jerking? The same way Google does- paid links, particularly among centralized monopolies who hold a lot of Page Rank, hold no little to no weight. Just one example of many.
Trust me: every problem running through your head we've thought of thousands of times. We've played Devil's advocate over our idea more than you possibly ever could- and that has provided us with many promising solutions.
Also, if you think of anything novel that could go wrong, we'd love to hear it, because then we'll fix it and make our platform better. So please, any feedback is appreciated.
As of now, we haven't heard anything new or novel, although we do appreciate the feedback.
No idea how to elaborate that. I don't see sustainable investments into a limited-use, inflationary token with permanent selling pressure and no clear benefit for the investors happening, that's all. Steem works because it targets everyone, your target audience is way too small to build that kind of traction.
Besides, your plan to solve problems that arise in open decentralized environments with solutions "like" a proprietary system gives me the impression that your Devil's advocate may have been a bit biased towards yourself.
Time will tell I assume. Good luck with your endeavor!
Thank you, and good luck to you as well.
I agree @pharesim
I didn't read your whitepaper in details (will do next week, just browsed it for now), but my two cents.
I don't care of not being paid for peer-reviewing (and many don't care too). This is a part of the job. However, I don't peer review anything for non-open-access journals.
I believe that you put too much emphasis on the money, and this may open the door to abuses. A free from money open-access platform will win, IMO. And this already exists, at least in my field (we have a precedent then!) By the way, you mention that it costs something to read a paper. This is wrong. Open access journals exist all over the place (and in all fields).
Some food for thoughts: to continue: you may be missing one possibility: public reviews with anonymous reviewer.
Finally, using your platform for jobs, research funding, etc.. How realistic will this be? Funding a PhD student in Europe is give or take 120.000 EUR. This is a lot of money. Postdoc positions are even more expensive. And not even talking about building experimental apparatus. In some fields, one needs millions...
By the way, it is not impossible to publish papers with negative results. It depends on the field of course. In fact, I have the impression you generalized the situation slightly too much and ignores other attempts trying to address the problem, and that work successfully for now.
In any case, good luck! ;)
Hi, thanks for the reply. As far as not getting paid, that's fine. However, I would imagine that you care about your reputation, right? Similar to SteemIt, users can choose to keep their Lab Dollars vested as Scholar Points to keep their influence/reputation high. So, even if they're not getting paid with money, they're getting paid with prestige (there should be at least one present- pay or prestige). Also, we should consider: what incentivizes good peer review?
At the point, it's purely impact/integrity. If someone peer reviews poorly, there's little to no negative backlash. In Lab Ledger, if someone peer reviews poorly, they are lowering the value of the network, and simultaneously, all of the value of the Scholar Points they have vested. Thus, they are economically incentivized to peer review honestly and objectively. Even if a scientist has all the money in the world, they will still value the influence they've acquired on the platform.
And then they can PASS that influence on to OTHER members that bring VALUE to the network. It's very similar to how, if I'm an author, getting a book review from Stephen King is worth more than getting a book review from Johnny Depp.
Once Stephen King passes that influence on to me, I know have slightly more influence that I could pass on to others.
Thanks for reading.
Always happy to get feedback from members of the scientific community :)
Reputation is very important. But if reputation can be bought, this won't work. Anyone from the outside world could come and buy his/her reputation (from how I understood how your platform is supposed to work, reputation can indeed be bought).
Here, you start from zero. No well-known editors will be on board and no well-known scientists. So my question is how to attract legit scientists and how having them on board? Prestige/money is not enough. Please tell me why I should come, for instance?
I agree 100%. If reputation can be bought, it could possibly have a negative affect on the quality of the research being published. This is why we've been working on an economic model that mimics the real world- scientists will have to earn their reputation through commenting/collaboration or publishing. Curating won't provide you with any significant amount of influence (if any at all). They also won't be able to "buy" their reputation past a certain threshold.
Also, the amount of influence that you're able to pass on will decrease proportionally as you move further and further away from your core field of expertise. So, for instance, if you're a chemist, your influence will hold less weight when commenting on a paper about developmental psychology. However, your influence will still probably hold decent weight in organic chemistry.
To address your last point: how do we plan on bringing scientists to the platform? One idea that we had is publish hundreds of thousands of research papers from a database onto Lab Ledger in order to populate it with content. Once the research papers are uploaded, users can begin curating and commenting on them.
The papers themselves will accumulate money that the real-world author can claim once they sign up for the site. That's just one idea we've had of many. We're also going to include bounties for solving problems in specific fields, and possibly our own version of a "Nobel Prize".
We're quite motivated and we are making big connections in the scientific industry. This time next year we'll have a lot of traction and I predict we'll have many scientists on the platform.
Hopefully you'll be one of them :)
I am afraid this does not answer my questions...
Things are really not clear to me. I cannot foresee how the scientists will come to labledger and grows your database. Just like that?
This reinforces my initial thoughts. You may be slightly far off the real concerns of the scientific world (at least the part of it I know).
I am sorry but not for now. I have way better alternatives. Please have a look to the arxiv or scipost to start with. Your platform can't compete with these.
It wouldn't be a valuable use of my time to convince someone who already has their mind made up, wouldn't you agree? Assuming there isn't anything I could say to change your mind, I'll leave it at this: good luck in your endeavors, and in a year please check back on our progress and you'll be pleasantly surprised. Cheers.
I am saying I have currently alternatives that seem preferable. For the moment and from what I read from your project, I won't change. I am however looking forward to be surprized, as I am a generally open-minded person ;)
So, if I understand correctly: you would rather have scientists earn zero money and zero prestige for their work? Also, remember: in order to truly understand something, you must be able to explain it better than the opposing view. At this point, you know nothing about our economic model, yet, make bold claims about it's value. You mentioned you were a scientist, so I would expect a more unbiased, objective approach. If you don't believe our model can work, then you simultaneously believe that SteemIt can't work either. In which case, I'd say that your opinion is in the far minority.
Im in strong agreement with LabLedger on getting pricing signals in review. The numbers for Peer Review suck and its because of socialism in the Peer review process.
Check out RAIDreviews.org and KratomDNA.org.
These projects prove that there is a market demand for this.
People are also doing this on DASH since they have a DASH Drive under development.
https://www.medicinalgenomics.com/crypto-funded-public-genomics/
Hi, Websites down, reddit empty, just wondering if this project is still alive?
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