Foreign-funded online journals are expected to disseminate disinformation regarding 2020 elections by distributing articles with incorrect or unverified material in an effort to “exacerbate disunity and dysfunction” in the United States during the run-up to last year’s presidential election.
When ithaka S+R director of libraries, academic communication, and museums Roger Schonfeld saw the FBI alert, he knew it was something to pay attention to. For Schonfeld, who is responsible for promoting evidence-based innovation and leadership among libraries, publishers, and museums, unrestricted access to knowledge has long been a source of concern.
Even if open access has democratized science, to the benefit of sick patients and scientists in the developing world, it has also produced “secondary effects” that are more troubling, he stated.
According to Schonfeld, “scientific literature is now more easily cited and used in all kinds of political discourse.” Scholarly publishing as we know it today was first developed without the expectation that it would become politicized and seek out chances to misinform the public and purposely divide the public.”
It was Schonfeld’s experience working at the intersection of libraries and scholarly publication that prompted him to write his paper. He feels that scholars and librarians have a responsibility to better police fraud and prevent disinformation, which Schonfeld believes they should take on.
Many scientists are concerned about unexpected consequences of open science, and Schonfeld is not the only one. Professor of psychology at the University of Virginia Brian Nosek is the co-founder and executive director of the Center for Open Science, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting openness in the scientific community. The goal of the center is to improve the open-access system’s integrity.
As he points out, the open science movement has focused heavily on the research’s conclusion — its findings. However, he argued that if scholars are to operate in a results-oriented environment, they need to fix a key motivation problem.
According to Nosek, “publishing is the currency of advancement.” When it comes to my career progress and the promotion of science, I have a conflict of interest.” The reward system emphasizes aesthetics and novelty, which is a far cry from the messy, many-failed endeavors of actual research. Re-aligning the reward structure so that what’s excellent for science and what’s beneficial to a scientist are mutually exclusive is our goal.”
By establishing their study objectives and technique before beginning a project, researchers can reduce the risk of conflict of interest. “Registered reports” is another option COS has set up for academics who want to embrace openness with the right incentives. According to him, around 300 periodicals now provide the choice.
Scholars are asked to do discovery work and submit their idea as a proposal for journals to evaluate and precommit to publishing if they believe the question is important and the methodology is good, rather than the usual research process where authors write up results and submit them for peer review. In order to avoid conflicts of interest, he explained, the approach “frees me as author from the burden of figuring out how to massage results to be publishable.”
Currently, the Open Science Framework has more than 400,000 individuals working with it, according to Nosek. The repository was created for the purpose of sharing, searching, and consolidating registrations of research. There are around 80,000 preregistered research at the facility. Those journals that use preregistration are given badges by his center.
The badge system, according to Nosek, “signals the norms of that journal community and the values of the publication.”
BioRxiv’s co-founder Richard Sever, who says preprints are a beneficial supplement to scholarly publishing, criticized certain scholars and publishers for not doing more to prevent their potential “vectors of misinformation,” to paraphrase Schonfeld. Since he is also the assistant director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Sever has to walk a tightrope between the two worlds. Because preprints can distribute research worldwide with a single click, he discounted much of the criticism of them as naive, given their potency.
“Technology facilitates open-access preprints,” he stated. Previously, scientists would create a photocopy of their findings and mail them to one other. When you put something online, anyone with an internet connection can access it.
Sever pointed out that one of the most significant trials on COVID treatment, which was ultimately published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was originally published as a preprint. Sever: Clinical scientists realized that preprints were “essential, because they had to make science happen faster than ever” in the wake of the pandemic.
According to Schonfeld, the rise in the usage of preprints by scholars who want to share their findings early online has allowed a lot of “bunkum” to spread internationally extremely quickly.
‘It’s a demonstration of how the open movement has created a vector in which material that never would have been available publicly, never would have been available to tweet about, is now available for everyone to look at,’ Schonfeld said. Trustworthiness can be measured in a variety of ways, but no section of the sector has taken this into consideration.
Unlike publishers, which commonly host preprint services, colleges have an important role to perform, but this duty is often “treated as just a compliance function,” according to Schonfeld.There are around 80,000 preregistered research at the facility. The rise of preprints has allowed a lot of “bunkum” to spread internationally extremely quickly. Preprints can distribute research worldwide with a single click. Unlike publishers, colleges have an important role to perform, but this is often treated as just a compliance function.
