How can we achieve a fully open future?

Openness Movements
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21

I fully agree with your assessment of what is not the solution :slight_smile: I also agree that it currently looks like everybody is arguing precisely to do just that.

However, I think research without ‘academia’ cannot happen, because research has become too expensive: there would be no biomedical research (my field) where a vial of less than a milliliter of enzyme easily costs hundreds to thousands of $/€ and biosafety labs easily cost more than the building they are situated in (or would you like to see someone experimenting with Ebola or Sars viruses in their garage?), no space research, no high-energy physics, no Neuro-Psychology (think fMRI machines). Essentially, in nearly all experimental sciences today, research would come to a halt - with the exception, perhaps, of some short-lived vanity projects of US American billionaires (we’ve all seen plenty of those already).

There are many ways to support oneself financially in ‘new academia’: freelance teaching, research consultancy, clinical work, non-research/education related work.

OK, let’s calculate this roughly: I currently teach, on average, about 5 hours per week (regular 9h/semesterweek in Germany). Let’s assume I get a building and biosafety labs, water, electricity, etc. completely for free (unlikely). Our small group consists of a technician, a postdoc and two graduate students, so only 4 employees. Let’s say their salaries are only about 40k a year, makes 160k a year. This means that just to pay them, my 250h of teaching a year would need to bring in that money, plus my salary (about 90k), which makes roughly 250k. So about 1000€ per teaching hour only for salaries, not a a single experiment is made and no equipment bought. So let’s roughly double that for these expenses and probably another doubling for lab rent and utilities and such. So I’d need to make about 4k every single teaching hour. At 100 Students in a class (only lectures, no experiments!), for a 28h semester lecture, that would be 11200€ per student for a single lecture. Sorry, doesn’t sound realistic to me and my experiments are cheap and my lab small, compared to what nearly everybody else in my field is doing. For most of biomedical research, you can probably add a zero to all my numbers.

Not sure how any of this could be done without public money.

22

@brembs, sorry about my delayed reply, many changes in daily life due to corona made me even slower than usual last week.

You seem to assume that public money only can be hosted by traditional academia. You’re in Germany (right?), is that how it is there? Swedish public funding agencies do in theory allow grant hosting outside of traditional academia, but in practice they don’t. However, EU (e.g. giant programs such as Horizon 2020) do encourage other research organisations, such as IGDORE, to host funds. My understanding is that public funding agencies in US also allow non-universities to host funds (see e.g. Ronin Institute’s page on grant hosting). I’ve heard from Ronin that e.g. Canada is a bit more tricky though. So it seems to be quite different in different countries.

23

There is nothing new about publicly funded research institutions outside of universities. In Germany, we have several such institutes (each with anything from 20 to 50 or more campuses throughout Germany and for Max Planck even international ones). While people there are much better paid than us poor professors and they have many times our research budgets with no teaching obligations, there is no freelancing there and nobody earns 4-40k per hour either.

Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions. I can’t see how paying reviewers can have any other effect than making an already bad system worse. Freelancing, on a broad scale, also appears to make already precarious working conditions in academia even more precarious, so I can’t see how it could ever be beneficial beyond the small scale, essentially single individuals. I haven’t seen any numbers on how prevalent it is, or how it could be funded on a large scale without creating even more perverse incentives than we already have.

Barring such data, I bid everyone here farewell and hope to see you again soon - this really is much better than Twtter for discussions!

24

That’s just private organisations; they’re still traditional academia. We have them in Sweden too and of course can they host public funds. I’m talking about the freelancing researchers who can be affiliated with independent research organisations such as Ronin Institute and IGDORE.

25

i would like to answer to every replies later, when we, especially indonesians, have this pandemic situation under control.

i think this thread would always continue to be relevant, especially in post-colonial countries such as indonesia. :slight_smile:

26

dear @brembs and everyone,

this is such a bittersweet moment to see that my thought being uttered by so many others, yet jon is not here to continue his struggle for open (in all sense) peer review.

i spent perhaps close to an hour collating these tweets. i hope you can find some time to skim through them.

https://controlc.com/76d4b4b7

:slight_smile: surya