Only the Open Access Movement can address the adverse impact of Western domination of the world of knowlege.
THAT the United States and its European allies dominate
the world of knowledge is unquestionable. This is reflected in indicators of
academic “output”. According to the National Science Foundation of the United
States, the U.S. accounted for 26 per cent of the world’s total science &
engineering (S&E) articles published in 2009 and the European Union for 32
per cent. In 2010, the U.S. share in total citations of S&E articles stood
at 36 per cent and the E.U.’s share was 33 per cent, whereas Japan’s and
China’s remained at 6 per cent each.
This domination comes from two, among other, sources.
First, leadership in spending. Despite the growing importance of Asia
(especially China), the U.S. remained the largest single R&D-performing
country in 2009, accounting for about 31 per cent of the global total. The E.U.
accounted for 23 per cent. Second, the ability to attract the world’s best
talent. The foreign-born share of U.S. S&E doctorate holders in U.S.
academia increased from 12 per cent in 1973 to nearly 25 per cent in 2008, and
nearly half (46 per cent) of postdoctoral positions in 2008 were held by
foreign-born U.S. S&E doctorate holders. A dominant share of these came
from China and India. A similar trend holds in the social sciences, though
exact data are not available.
There are a number of collateral consequences of these
trends. One is what Jean-Claude Guedon calls the “structuring of power” in
science, with the most powerful institutions and journals being based in the
U.S. and Europe and having international reach. These institutions set the
agenda and the standards for science. As a corollary, publishing in those
journals with their high impact factor is becoming a marker of academic
standing even in less developed countries of the periphery. For younger scholars,
obtaining a PhD from abroad and publishing in international journals has become
a prerequisite for obtaining jobs in the best universities even in developing
countries.
There are a number of adverse consequences that this can
have. In the sciences, for example, one consequence is that the research
pursued in leading institutions in developing countries tails that in the
developed world. As a result, there emerges a disjunction between science and
production in these countries because, while science seeks to keep pace with
the developed countries, production does not, since much of the economy remains
“informal”. Or, as happens in the pharmaceuticals industry, there is a lack of
correspondence between the drugs being researched and developed (under international
influence over priorities) and the disease pattern that prevails in these
countries.
In the social sciences, the problem can be more severe.
North Atlantic domination often destroys plurality. In economics, for example,
the resulting domination of neoliberal theory with its rhetoric of market
fundamentalism, in which the market or ostensibly “free economic exchange” is
presented as the most efficient mechanism to work the economic system, paves
the way for policy that permits the increasingly unfettered functioning of
private capital, both domestic and foreign. Markets are not benign, and the
extent, nature and consequences of growth tend to be adverse. Such policies are
pursued even when in the developed countries the state intervenes to restrain
markets and supplement them. In practice, this amounts to recommending that
developing countries should do as developed country governments say, and not as
those governments actually do.
It is in this background that the relevance of the Open
Access (O.A.) movement for the developing countries needs to be addressed. That
movement tries to undermine the control exerted by the corporate sector over
the distribution and sharing of knowledge, especially peer-reviewed scholarly
research published in journals, generated largely with financial support from
the state. A leading example of the movement is the Public Library of Science
(PLOS), launched in 2000 with a letter that urged scientific and medical
publishers to make research literature available for distribution through free
online public archives, such as the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed
Central. Nearly 34,000 scientists from 180 nations signed the letter, and the
movement gained momentum when in 2003 PLOS launched itself as a publisher. Recently,
the O.A. movement grew more targeted. In early 2012, 3,000 leading academics
signed what is known as the “cost of knowledge” petition, which declared their
intention to boycott publishing in, refereeing for or serving on the editorial
board of journals published by Elsevier because it charges “exorbitantly high”
prices for its journals and adopts indefensible trade practices like selling
only “bundles” to libraries.
Such corporate behaviour is geared to maximising profit.
Some journals cost thousands of dollars. To defend such pricing, the academic
publishing industry imposes barriers such as copyright restrictions and
distribution limitations on authors, and constructs pay walls in the form of
subscriptions, licensing fees or pay-per-view rules. This restricts the sharing
of knowledge and discriminates against those endowed with less resources than
their peers in developed societies and richer institutions. It also results in
the inefficiencies associated with journal publishing in the closed access world
with long waiting times, publishing queues and delayed access, even at a cost.
Open Access uses the digital, online, free-of-charge
model to disseminate peer-reviewed research and is in that sense hugely
efficient and cost effective. It is also democratising. Those remotely located
and without the resources to buy access to journal bundles, online sources or
journal archives, can now have access to it. Without printing, the publishing
time even with peer review is considerably shortened. Since costs of production
are minimal for online journals the number of journals are far more than
earlier, so that publishing queues and waiting times for publication shrink.
More academics and their output are able to obtain a platform to disseminate
their research. Realising the popularity of this mode of dissemination, the
academic publishing industry is responding by changing its model. Instead of
covering costs and earning hefty profits with individual submission fees and
subscription charges, they are persuading universities and research
institutions to pay for the cost of having the work of their staff peer
reviewed, edited and distributed either in print or online. The goal remains
the same: not better science, but a large profit.
Seen in this background Open Access is indeed
democratising. But only partially. Open Access only helps democratise the
distribution of peer-reviewed research. It does not democratise research
activity itself, nor does it transform the peer review system, which for
different reasons appears weighted in favour of a self-selecting elite. The
issue to be addressed is whether O.A. would rid the system of journal branding
and journal hierarchies. A journal’s “brand value” is created in the first
instance by the fact that a group of academics leading a particular discipline
establish or endorse the journal, and sometimes referee its contents. Given the
credibility the journal carries, it is read by those who want to publish in it.
They adopt the themes privileged by the journal and the articles published in
it are cited as points of departure.
This process is given a “scientific” flavour with the use
of metrics such as the citation index for articles and authors and the impact
factor for journals. The impact factor measures the influence of a journal by
the number of times work appearing in it was cited by others. A high impact
factor leads to higher readership and makes the journal a must for all
libraries. There are a number of obvious problems with this sequence.
Popularity is not necessarily an index of quality. Self-referential research
may deliver high citations but suppress originality, novelty and plurality.
Citation does not guarantee readership, with one study finding that those
citing works had not actually read as much as 80 per cent of them. The need to
please potential reviewers may lead to indiscriminate citation. A “reputation”
and high impact increase the reach of journals, feeding citation further.
It is this branding of journals, which allows a few to be
identified as the best that need to be acquired by all librarians, that allows
a private publisher controlling that journal to charge exorbitant prices and
earn huge profits. But brands are not created by publishers but by academics
who need journal rankings to separate out “better” publications and authors
from the rest. Journal rankings are used by those who award grants and appoint
staff but do not have the time or ability to themselves rate the work of
applicants in increasingly specialised disciplines. So, given the structure of branding,
it is unlikely that good work published in a relatively new open access journal
would stand comparison with work published in a well-established journal.
Further, if the journal hierarchy is created by
academics, then open access may aggravate rather than reduce the problem. With
more readers able to easily access recognised journals, their readership and
citation could go up, leading to a further privileging of those who obtain
publishing access to those journals, rather than just readership access. The
former may be influenced by a host of factors such as the location of the
author in terms of country and university, the kind of questions raised and
works cited, as opposed to some abstract indicator of quality. There is also
strong evidence of confirmatory bias, or a tendency to rate better research
that supports the views of the referee. As a result, there is little
inter-referee agreement either on which articles deserve publishing or on how
good an article is.
Such problems notwithstanding, peer review and journal
publication gain importance because of a feature that is central to higher
education under capitalism: the underfunding of education in the aggregate and
the differential distribution of that funding across universities and departments.
In time these inadequacies are justified in terms of having to create and
promote a meritocracy in order to generate and award good science and
knowledge. The worst form this takes is the metric-based evaluation system of
universities and their research to decide on funding. That credentialist system
that helps allocate “scarce resources” is based on journal ranking and
publication.
Peer review is, in fact, given a credentialist role
despite much evidence that the system can fail. This is partly illustrated by
the growing evidence of retraction, or the reversal of the stamp of approval
provided by leading journals that publish refereed articles. University of
Regensburg Professor Björn Brembs extrapolates on the basis of articles
published in a large database of thousands of medical journals, that given the
rising rate of retraction, it is likely that by 2045 as many journal articles
will be retracted as are being freshly published. He attributes this to the
rewards system that makes choices on which journals to subscribe to and on
which to privilege when making hiring and research-granting decisions based on
the citations index. This puts pressure on those publishing to undertake their
research keeping the citation prospect in mind. In the race to find a space in
these journals, marketing of research rather than good science is the winner.
One result is the high rate of retraction.
This is not a problem only in the science domain. The
problem gets worse in the social sciences as the system is in many areas captured
and used to privilege system-legitimising knowledge rather than pluralism.
Hence the question as to why there was little “acclaimed” research in economics
that foresaw or predicted the crisis of 2008. Unfortunately, rankings have
their impact not only on what is read but on where scholars from developing
nations need to publish to win academic standing. The result would be the
skewing of academic research in these countries with grave consequences. That
is a problem open access perhaps cannot address. It is not clear what will.
Source | http://www.frontline.in/
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