have always made it a practice in my work to avoid, as much as possible,
citing any research articles that are behind a paywall. My recent scientific
papers have all been in journals that are freely available to the public.
In my opinion, this is not just good for science. It is good scholarly practice.
There are many other reasons why we should, to paraphrase former President Reagan, tear down these paywalls. The public paid for this research with our taxes, yet they must pay as much as $60 per article to read it. Patients in developing countries die because their doctors can't afford those fees. A public understanding of science is essential to our survival as a technological culture. Publishing nowadays means publishing online, as scientists rarely read hard copies of articles anymore. And finally, scientists do much of the work for free: they don't get paid for their articles, they peer-review and proofread them at no cost to the journal, they pay up to $3000 to the journal to get published, yet they still must pay to read them.
During the Covid crisis, scientific journals made a unified effort to make all their articles on Covid public. It was a glorious time for science. It led to an explosion of public interest in clinical research. New websites sprung up to describe each clinical drug trial in excruciating detail and discuss their results. It also led to criticism, as people discovered that so much of the research consisted of poorly controlled, agenda-driven studies designed to nail their political enemies instead of finding the truth. Readers discovered that many of these studies were not only fatally flawed, but potentially harmful to patients.
Bad papers made it into print not because they were good science, but because a journal editor thought the topic was newsworthy. The criticism they received was well deserved and helped to improve the quality of research.
This criticism is desperately needed with climate studies papers, where a small cadre of alarmists tell the public that the alarmists are following the science, there's a crisis, the discussion is over, and the public must trust them when they're told that they can no longer use their gas stoves, air condition their homes, eat beef, or drive their cars.
If it's really a crisis, scientific journals should bring all articles on global warming outside their paywalls. The public is expected to pay an enormous price based on results they are prevented from seeing. Let people evaluate the evidence for themselves instead of concealing it from them. We need more actual debate on the topic and less of the experts-know-best-and-do-what-you're told attitude that pervades the field.
What if, skeptics ask, the evidence in these papers is fatally flawed, as the Covid research was? How do we know that the theory of anthropogenic warming isn't a mere fantasy, or even a scam? People cannot be expected to allow their lives and their economy to be crushed, as the alarmists insist, if the evidence is hidden from those affected by it.
The problem, of course, is two-fold. One is the well justified suspicion that publication bias is rampant in the field. Last month, one climatologist publicly admitted he had to “de-emphasize” in his paper to a Nature journal the possibility that other factors besides anthropogenic effects could be responsible. The only reason he felt safe saying so was that he had left academia for a non-profit research institute and was safe from retribution by funding agencies and by academic bureaucrats, who are notoriously vindictive.
It was a classic demonstration of how publication bias works. This researcher knew Nature would never publish his work if he followed good scholarly practice. It's not just Nature, and it's not just global warming. Hiding scientific results from the public inevitably leads to distrust and suspicion of the scientific establishment, weakening science as a whole.
Maybe it's too late: even if they stopped hiding their scientific results, by now much of the public believes the reason the results are concealed is that the scientists are lying. Instead of a healthy discussion, we now have politics: those who want bigger, more soviet-style government believe one thing and those who believe that individual liberty should have absolute priority believe the opposite.
The other problem is that the government and many researchers benefit from asserting that there is a climate crisis. This results in considerable funding bias. However, if the science converges on a finding that any crisis is at worst a minor one, the government will eventually be forced to concede to protect its credibility with the public. What will the news media hector us about if that happens? I'm sure they'll find something.
sep 25 2023, 5:08 am
