Close followers of recent geopolitics will be forgiven for wondering if the good guys and bad guys of the traditional world order have been swapping sides. When a dictator who has invaded a country gets praised while some of the oldest democracies are attacked for their positions, it’s tempting to slap yourself about the face to see if you wake up.
The same can be said for scholarly communications at the moment, as technological progress and policy changes seem to be occurring at such a dizzying pace, one feels the need to grope for something solid to hold on to. But who do we trust when everything seems so unstable?
Twin tales
There have been two recent stories that, in particular, have highlighted questions about just who the good guys and bad guys are in academic publishing. Firstly, this week saw a new Indian government directive come into force, restricting researchers’ access to Sci-Hub and its affiliate sites. As many of you will know, Sci-Hub is a service offering toll-free access to tens of millions of articles that would otherwise require a subscription to access. According to the site’s creator, Alexandra Elbaykan, the service is vital for researchers to access important information; for her and Sci-Hub’s critics, the service is an illegal, unsupervised abomination suspected of harboring malware and funded by Russia.
While some of the coverage of this story has argued that commercial publishers are to blame for withholding access to copyrighted content and the Indian government for supporting them, there has been less coverage of the shady nature of Sci-Hub itself. While the lack of access to research for Global South researchers is very real – as is the difficulty they often have in paying APCs – the answer to this problem is surely not a web service that breaks numerous laws, not just in India, but all over the world.
Criminal background
And there is also a link here with organized crime and the dodgy operators of predatory journals. There is money to be made from publishing by either subverting or diverting the traditional process, and bad actors are in prime position to take advantage. We are reminded of this by the second recent story on nefarious behavior relating to paper mills. In a piece in The Conversation, a UK academic argued that scientific fraud was now becoming big business.
Rather than focus on identifying individuals who were using paper mills and other bad practices in order to get their paper published, the author argued that there was a need to scale up investigations; otherwise, the situation would get out of control. It may be obvious, but it is worth spelling out that the problems being caused by industrial-level cheating will manifest themselves in poor science, poorer health, and social outcomes, and a potentially catastrophic drop in trust in the good science can do.
Solid platform
During such times, the people and services that have traditionally been trusted and shown full transparency in what they do will become increasingly important. In geopolitics, it is organizations such as the BBC that will only become stronger through their independence and history of straight reporting. In scholarly communications, it will be those long-established actors who have retained their focus on supporting researchers to do their work that will come to the fore.
In other words, the good guys.
