Journals give bad incentives to academics—they require new knowledge to be written in hard to understand language, without pre-registration at great cost and sometimes focused on unimportant topics. Taking over a top journal and ensuring it incentivised high quality work on the most important topics would begin to turn the scientific system around.
We could, of course, simply get the future fund to pay for this. There is, however, an alternative that might be worth thinking about.
This seems like the kind of thing that dominant assurance contracts are designed to solve. We could run a Kickstarter, and use the future fund to pay the early backers if we fail to reach the target amount. This should incentivise all those who want the journals bought to chip in.
Here is one way we could do this:
Use a system like pol.is to identify points of consensus between universities. This should be about the rules going forward if we buy the journal. For example, do they all want pre-registration? What should the copyright situation be? How should peer-review work? How should the journal be ran? etc
Whatever the consensus is, commit to implementing it if the buyout is successful
Start crowdsourcing the funds needed. To maximise the chance of success, this should be done using a DAC (dominant assurance contract). This works like any other crowdfunding mechanism (GoFundMe, Kickstarter, etc), except we have a pool of money that is used to pay the early backers if we fail to meet the goal. If the standard donation size we’re asking the unis for is £X, and having the publisher bought is worth at least £X to the uni, then the the dominant strategy for the uni is to chip in.
If we raise the money, great! We can do what we committed to doing. We’re happy, the unis are happy, the shareholders of the publisher are happy. If we fail to raise the money, we pay all the early backers, and move on to other things.
Update: I emailed Alex Tabarrok to get his thoughts on this. He originally proposed using dominant assurance contracts to solve public good problems, and he has experience testing it empirically.
He makes the following points about my suggestion:
The first step is the most important. Without clarity of what the public good will be and who is expected to pay for it, the DAC won’t work
You should probably focus on libraries as the potential source of funding. They are the ones who pay subscription fees, they are the ones who would benefit from this
DACs are a novel forum of social technology. It might be best to try to deliver smaller public goods first, allowing people to get more familiar, before trying to buy a journal
He also suggested other ways to solve the same problem:
Have you considered starting a new journal? This should be cheaper. There would also be a coordination questions to solve to make it prestigious, but this one might be easier
Have you considered ‘flipping’ a journal? Could you take the editors, reviewers and community that supports an existing journal, and persuade them to start a similar but open access journal? (The Fair Open Access Alliance seem to have had success facilitating this. Perhaps we should support them?)
My current (and weakly held) position is that flipping editorial boards to create new open access journals is the best way to improve publishing standards. Small steps towards a much better world. Would it be possible to for the Future Fund to entice 80% of the big journals to do this? The top journal in every field? Maybe.
This is a reputational loss risk of an actor in the broader EA community seeking to influence the scientific discourse by economic/peer unreviewed means? There are repositories, such as of the Legal Priorities Project, of papers, that are cool and the EA community pays attention to aggregate narratives to keep some of its terms rather exclusive and convincing. If you mean coordinating research, to learn from the scientific community, then it can make sense to read papers and corresponding with academics. Maybe on the EA Forum or so. No need to buy a journal.
Purchase a top journal
Metascience
Journals give bad incentives to academics—they require new knowledge to be written in hard to understand language, without pre-registration at great cost and sometimes focused on unimportant topics. Taking over a top journal and ensuring it incentivised high quality work on the most important topics would begin to turn the scientific system around.
We could, of course, simply get the future fund to pay for this. There is, however, an alternative that might be worth thinking about.
This seems like the kind of thing that dominant assurance contracts are designed to solve. We could run a Kickstarter, and use the future fund to pay the early backers if we fail to reach the target amount. This should incentivise all those who want the journals bought to chip in.
Here is one way we could do this:
Use a system like pol.is to identify points of consensus between universities. This should be about the rules going forward if we buy the journal. For example, do they all want pre-registration? What should the copyright situation be? How should peer-review work? How should the journal be ran? etc
Whatever the consensus is, commit to implementing it if the buyout is successful
Start crowdsourcing the funds needed. To maximise the chance of success, this should be done using a DAC (dominant assurance contract). This works like any other crowdfunding mechanism (GoFundMe, Kickstarter, etc), except we have a pool of money that is used to pay the early backers if we fail to meet the goal. If the standard donation size we’re asking the unis for is £X, and having the publisher bought is worth at least £X to the uni, then the the dominant strategy for the uni is to chip in.
If we raise the money, great! We can do what we committed to doing. We’re happy, the unis are happy, the shareholders of the publisher are happy. If we fail to raise the money, we pay all the early backers, and move on to other things.
Update: I emailed Alex Tabarrok to get his thoughts on this. He originally proposed using dominant assurance contracts to solve public good problems, and he has experience testing it empirically.
He makes the following points about my suggestion:
The first step is the most important. Without clarity of what the public good will be and who is expected to pay for it, the DAC won’t work
You should probably focus on libraries as the potential source of funding. They are the ones who pay subscription fees, they are the ones who would benefit from this
DACs are a novel forum of social technology. It might be best to try to deliver smaller public goods first, allowing people to get more familiar, before trying to buy a journal
He also suggested other ways to solve the same problem:
Have you considered starting a new journal? This should be cheaper. There would also be a coordination questions to solve to make it prestigious, but this one might be easier
Have you considered ‘flipping’ a journal? Could you take the editors, reviewers and community that supports an existing journal, and persuade them to start a similar but open access journal? (The Fair Open Access Alliance seem to have had success facilitating this. Perhaps we should support them?)
My current (and weakly held) position is that flipping editorial boards to create new open access journals is the best way to improve publishing standards. Small steps towards a much better world. Would it be possible to for the Future Fund to entice 80% of the big journals to do this? The top journal in every field? Maybe.
This is a reputational loss risk of an actor in the broader EA community seeking to influence the scientific discourse by economic/peer unreviewed means? There are repositories, such as of the Legal Priorities Project, of papers, that are cool and the EA community pays attention to aggregate narratives to keep some of its terms rather exclusive and convincing. If you mean coordinating research, to learn from the scientific community, then it can make sense to read papers and corresponding with academics. Maybe on the EA Forum or so. No need to buy a journal.
Agree, was thinking of submitting a proposal like this. A few ways to easily improve most journals:
-Require data and code to be shared
-Open access, but without the huge author fees most open access journals charge
-If you do charge any fees, use them to pay reviewers for fast reviews
Shouldn’t reviewers be paid, regardless of fees? It is a tough job, and there should strong incentives to do it properly.