© iai
Despite relentless technological innovation, scientific progress is stalling compared to the prodigious revolutions in understanding that our ancestors provided us a century ago. We seem to have fallen into the habit of living off such scientific props, burning such a legacy and credibility quickly and unwisely. We need to transfer new funds to the science ledger, or else our scientific credentials will soon become hardly more than a pseudo-religious credo.
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Science publishing has become a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme at the expense of taxpayers and scientists themselves.
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I believe the key lies in the way we make science public. This entails a double-stranded path: the inner route of publishing scientific results and the outer route of publicizing them. Much like in M.C. Escher's Drawing Hands, thinking and communication are "a strange loop" (borrowing Douglas Hofstadter's phrase), namely, a self-referential paradoxical system. Knowledge circulates via peer-reviewed publications within the walls of academia. Then, outside the citadel, we do science outreach which, in turn, directs public attention and funding to certain topics and ways of doing science back to academia. Both routes are severely compromised:
First, science publishing has become a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme at the expense of taxpayers and scientists themselves. Top journals charge obscene fees to publish results already paid for by those taxpayers in the form of grants, while we peer-review there "for free". Moreover, such "reviews" tend not to be the critical, objective, and dispassionate appraisal of the work one might think they are, especially when results threaten the dominant worldview or simply one's tiny conceptual condominium or scientific business niche. The line between editorial curation and censorship is thin, even dashed.
Comment: There are alternative theories: