Two future developments that will open up scientific research to anyone

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed

—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

We live in an Orwellian society, but we’re not aware of it because we’ve slowly descended into this state over decades. In this instance, the Orwellian state I’m referring to is the process of disseminating scientific research to the public. Right now, it’s a closed system, but I doubt this will last forever. I believe two developments are coming that will completely change the way we conduct scientific investigations.

The first of these is universal open access to all scientific literature; the second is using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse that literature.

Development 1: Open Access to all scientific literature

I am a geological consultant to the minerals industry. Every consulting project I do for my clients is a mini unpublished research project for me because I see and learn something new almost every time. By ‘new’, I literally mean new—patterns and realisations that have never been described in the geological scientific literature by academics. On rare occasions, and if I get permission from my client, I publish my observations, the analytical methods that I’ve developed and my findings. My research is self-funded and not dependent on government research funding. I actively seek out publishers that allow me to purchase the copyright to my papers so that I can freely distribute my work—as a scientist, I believe that disseminating my research to the public is very important.

The Australian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM), my professional society, has been very supportive and generous in allowing me to purchase the copyright to my papers published in their publications at a very low cost. However, purchasing copyright to my own papers from commercial publishers and allowing those papers to be made open access is expensive, often costing many thousands of dollars. My latest research paper published in ‘high impact’ Springer Nature journal Mineralium Deposita cost 2,480€ (US$ 2,700; AU$4,200) for the ‘Gold Open Access’ fee paid to the publisher. Getting people to access and read my articles is, after all, the whole point of publishing, isn't it? Despite the majority practice of academics, I feel accessibility to my articles is something I do not want to compromise.

Private research isn’t cheap, especially if I publish my papers as open access in well-regarded journals that have competent editorial teams, but being a private researcher allows me to be independent and objective. Academic and university politics is irrelevant to me and I freely express what I want to write in my papers, so long as it is scientifically sound and passes the peer review process.

I don’t require external funding to conduct research, but I cannot do without access to online technical journals. Most private sector consultants do not have this access—even if it was available to them, the subscription costs would be prohibitive.

As an adjunct researcher with an university in Australia, I’m an academic by name only, and one of the main benefits for me is access to the university’s online library of scientific literature. However, members of the public, even those with postgraduate degrees, do not have access to this literature once they leave the university system. The primary reason is because for-profit publishers (such as Elsevier and Springer Nature) hold the copyright to most of the published literature and keep it locked away behind their paywalls. Choosing to publish open access is not something most academics can afford and, understandably, they choose to spend their precious research funds actually conducting research. In 2019 only 6 out of 64 papers published (9%) in Mineralium Deposita chose open access. Because this is typical for many commercial subscription-based publishers, most journal articles are closed to the public.

This all changed in September 2011 with the launch of the non-profit Sci-Hub—ever-changing URLs that give access to scientific literature to anyone simply by typing in the name of the article you want to obtain in their search window. Using a program written by Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazakhstani researcher, Sci-Hub cuts through the paywalls of the publishers and moments later you’re reading the article on your computer. With Sci-Hub, the requirement to be a staff or student of a university to access journal articles disappeared and now millions of academic and private researchers use Sci-Hub each year to obtain access to journal articles. As of 2017, Sci-Hub’s database contains 70% of the nearly 82 million scholarly articles registered with Crossref. Some researchers publicly acknowledge Elbakyan for indirectly helping them with their research, but many do not as Sci-Hub is considered ‘illegal’. Despite the onslaught of legal actions from publishers, Elbakyan doesn’t consider that what Sci-Hub does is illegal and claims that it is the publishers who are acting illegally and infringing on basic human rights, citing Article 27.1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948) as evidence:

'Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits'

Eleanor Roosevelt with the English language version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Elbakyan initially set up Sci-Hub as a way for her and her colleagues to obtain access to the much-needed literature they required for research. She was convinced that free access to scientific literature was the right of every human, so she went ahead and built Sci-Hub for everyone to use, without really thinking beyond this aim. But running and maintaining Sci-Hub is labour-intensive; it survives on cash donations from around the world.

The world in 2020 is rapidly converging towards decentralisation, and intermediaries are being pushed off the economic gravy train as traditional barriers come down. Decentralisation is one of the drivers of the increased popularity of cryptocurrencies and open source software. The scientific community is about to experience a reform that parallels these trends, and it appears that they will have no choice but to change with the times. The first sign of this is the seen in the legal battles of Sci-Hub, and I have no doubt that Sci-Hub and others like it will survive and will have a lasting influence on our views about science.

I believe that free access to scientific literature is inevitable and will become as ubiquitous as internet e-commerce. With Sci-Hub, we’re seeing the early stages of open access to scientific literature. This is like Napster was to online music access, but for now, like Napster, everything is illegal—just like the years before 1991, which was when the US National Science Foundation lifted the prohibition on internet e-commerce. In January 2019 the University of California decided to not renew their subscriptions to Elsevier journals, driven by the decision that their publicly funded research should only be published in open access journals. I applaud the University of California for taking this important first step towards making their scientific literature—which represents 10% of all scientific output of the USA—free for all.

The public, and many academics, are voting with their cursors for open access of scientific publications—the product of research that is largely funded by tax dollars, but now locked behind paywalls and inaccessible to the public who effectively already paid for them! The role of the journal publisher has long passed its use-by date because the publication process is no longer as difficult or expensive as it was. It is understandable why for-profit publishers such as Elsevier are upset over Sci-Hub. Delusional university administrators in the last half century or so decided that scientific and academic advancement is proportional to the number of papers an academic publishes in what are described as ‘high impact’ journals. These in-demand journals owned by Elsevier and other private publishers effectively use academic slave labour to pump out literature that is sold back to universities at ridiculously inflated prices. Decades and centuries of scientific work by academics are kept behind a paywall by these publishers, but if you’re not a staff member or a student of a university, you can’t access these journals. And once an academic leave the university system, they can’t access their own published articles unless they pay US$30 or more per paper. Before the internet age, printing books and journals was expensive, but now that literature is available electronically these companies’ business models should go the way of Kodak because they are not giving benefits back to the community that produces these products for them for free.

Surprisingly, the latest legal battle against Sci-Hub was initiated by the American Chemical Society (ACS), which is a society of professionals just like my professional organisation, the Society of Economic Geologists. Why would the ACS oppose opening up their journal articles? Is it because journal subscriptions from libraries are an important source of revenue? Wouldn’t it benefit the ACS as a whole if their scientific journal articles were freely made available? Yes, these established societies would have to become entrepreneurial and come up with alternative sources of revenue, but shouldn’t knowledge be accessible to everyone? What should be the priority—the cause of scientific enquiry, or revenue raising for a small group of ACS members?

I speculate below about a reason for this fight with Sci-Hub other than the official reasons given (copyright, intellectual property [IP], quality of publication etc.). 

Academia under threat?

Despite what the universities might say, the number of qualified individuals who can properly critique scientific literature and/or self-fund legitimate scientific enquiry is not limited to academia.

Charles Darwin, ~1854, when he was preparing On the Origin of Species for publication.

Probably the most famous is Charles Darwin. Darwin never worked as an academic (his wealthy father funded his research) yet in just over ten years he was able to convince the public of the theory of evolution by writing On the Origin of Species (1859), a book that anyone could purchase.

But for most of the last a century the world has been under the illusion that the current closed way, through government funded institutions, is how ‘proper’ scientific enquiry should be conducted. This is despite major advances in recent years that have come from private enterprises, such as Google, which are outside universities. Many may argue that Google Search isn’t really ‘pure science’—i.e. the type of work done by academics—but Google Search has had a vast positive impact on science that was unimaginable only 30 years’ ago. This invention has spawned a web of scientific enquiry in various fields that was simply not possible before, and it has had a multiplying effect on scientific advancement.

As a postgraduate student at the University of Toronto in the 1990s, I estimate that I spent more than 15,000 hours in the library researching journal articles. Most of those hours were spent walking up and down stairs and halls, searching, photocopying, and ordering unavailable articles from other universities. This can now be done in a fraction of the time using Google Search. Although most journals might apparently be readily available at our fingertips, the scientific societies are beating back people with enquiring minds, and are demanding money they (or their libraries) cannot afford, for the sake of copyright and IP. This simply isn’t ethical behaviour regardless of motive, especially when it comes from a professional society. It goes against the best interest of scientific advancement. Additionally, the poorest countries suffer because the privileged few deem (by their actions in demanding exorbitant fees) that science is effectively for the wealthy developed world, and what’s more, you have to be part of a ‘special group’. 

If the status quo continues, we will never discover the next Marie Curie who studies in isolation in a Guinean village, or the next Albert Einstein who theorises in a river boat on the banks of the Ganges River. Such people will never be discovered unless we provide open access to scientific literature for everyone

I would argue that for many specialised subjects the combined intellectual power readily available from the crowd can easily rival and vastly eclipse those few who have tenured positions at universities—the privileged few that currently make the rules for the rest of the world to follow. Once the floodgates of literature open, these academics will be exposed to critical reviews by the educated public and only the best and most talented will survive the constant onslaught of public scrutiny. Ironically, scientific scrutiny will also come from something that the academics helped invent—artificial intelligence.

Development 2: Artificial Intelligence to analyse all scientific literature

Google has been scanning books (many millions of them) at a rapid pace for many years, and all that content is being processed with AI. If you think the luxury of being able to read publications online is a great achievement, gaze into my crystal ball of the future, which paints a world light years ahead of simple electronic publication access.

Although we’re not there yet, in the future AI bots will be able to comprehend the scientific argument delivered by scientists and cross-check the accuracy of every statement, claim and counter claim made. This isn’t entirely a tool of the future but something like this is being developed now. AI bots will examine and analyse all the logical connections through all past relevant publications, whether the author references these or not. Human reviewers won’t be able to compete with the bot’s ability to trawl through the vast multidimensional web of intellectual knowledge at lightning speed without being slowed by any language barrier. Scientific papers containing significant findings that were ignored, referred to as ‘sleeping beauties’, will be discovered by a routine AI bot scan. Past scientific articles that were only published because of the author’s ability to write and churn out papers, but not for their intellectual content (perhaps because of undetected subtle misrepresentations of competing research findings, or deliberately leaving out key references), will be instantly recognised through this process of AI data mining. Academics have been suffering under the oppressive scheme of being forced to write one journal article after another, yet scientific advancements have not proportionally increased with these increased volumes of scientific literature. I would not be surprised if many of these papers are completely worthless as scientific contributions. In the near future, we will all find out. 

Sigmund Samuel Library, University of Toronto, where I spent many countless hours researching. Source: Dav Foto Corp.

Through unemotional processing by AI bots, articles that really didn’t deserve publication but instead actively helped stifle, or even retrogressed, scientific progress for the sake of raising the academic prestige of a few, will be exposed and laid bare. There will be no place to hide. The bots will know the difference between fact and fiction, and be aware of the difference between well-argued theory and just a good yarn.

The public will then realise how utterly inadequate the so-called ‘scientific method’ really is under human stewardship, as the bots reveal the egotistical driving force behind long periods of scientific stagnation that exists between sharp paradigm shifts described by philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1962).

Academics who survive this scrutiny from both AI and the public who now have open access to all literature will be like the Warren Buffets of the scientific world and totally deserve to reside in their ivory towers. They will be joined by the cleverest aspiring scientists from around the world who would not have been discovered without open access to publications. No longer will academics be reliant on, or bow down to, the politics of their closed scientific community to further their career.

I personally think that such a picture of the future is an excellent development for society and for the progress of science. Opening up publications will immediately bankrupt the opportunistic publishers of this world and also nullify the nexus concocted by university administrators whereby the number of journal articles and citations published is somehow considered a reliable indicator of scientific quality. I can only speak from my experience in my field, but I believe this abhorrent practice of counting publications is a major hindrance to scientific progress and it should be abandoned as soon as possible.

What will likely happen in academia in the future is comparable to what happened to the Siskel and Eberts of the world. With the rise of unpaid but passionate internet reviewers, most well-known paid movie reviewers lost their jobs. Journalism is going through a similar employment crisis now because of the dominance of social media. Similarly, Wikipedia won the encyclopaedia battle with Microsoft (Encarta) because of the deluge of unpaid but keen community contribution. My prediction is that academics will go through a similar crisis. This is not to say that we transition to ‘Wikiscience’ with little quality control, but what is needed is a yet-to-be-worked-out new system of scientific practice that puts science—not the scientists—first. In fighting Sci-Hub, the legal battle for keeping journals locked up is simply delaying this inevitable result for science and for humanity.

What do you think?

These are just my personal views, which some may view as extreme. I’d like to hear arguments in the comments section below that oppose open and free access to scientific publications so that I can learn from the counterpoint view.

But regardless of anyone’s view, I think the genie is out of the bottle thanks to Sci-Hub, and I don’t believe it will be long before many scientific publications will be free to everyone, not matter where they live or their socioeconomic status. I can see this bright future glowing radiantly just over the horizon. 

Jun Cowan grew up in the remote mountainous region of Nagano in central Japan as a son of a Christian missionary who married a local girl. He considers himself to be a very lucky village boy who eventually obtained a PhD degree from the University of Toronto and he continues his life-long learning experience of things scientific in Australia. Out of his home in Fremantle, he consults to mineral industry clients around the world and enjoys sharing his crazy ideas with his kids, clients, and with online colleagues. This and other articles, mainly focused on geological subjects, are available from LinkedIn.

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