Tragedy of the Commons in Science

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Discussion

Richard Price:

"Scientists need to build their reputations, and the primary reputation metric in science is being published in prestigious journals, such as Nature, Science, and The Lancet. When scientists apply for a grant or a job, they know that there are 200 other people applying for the same grant, and that the grant committee scans resumes looking for such journal titles.

Journal publishers use their ownership of the reputation system to their advantage. When a scientist is looking to be published, they require a scientist to transfer the copyright of their paper. In this transaction, the scientists who wrote the paper are not paid and receive no royalties from the revenues from the paywalls. The peer reviewers who review the paper for the journal are not paid, nor are the taxpayers who have provided between $20K and $160K for the funding of the research behind the paper.

Because of its ownership of the reputation system in science, the journal industry is able to acquire the copyright to the world’s peer-reviewed scientific output for free. It then charges the public who funded the research — and the scientific community who authored and peer-reviewed it — $8 billion a year to access it. Effectively, the scientific community provides the product to the journal industry (the papers and the peer reviews), and then has to pay, along with the public, to get it back.

The tragedy of the commons is that individually rational decisions, namely scientists handing over the copyright of their papers to collect reputation metrics, lead to an outcome that is bad for the public at large: Because of paywalls, the majority of the world ends up being unable to access the scientific literature that it has funded.

To break out of the tragedy of the commons, new reputation metrics, developed by a number of startups, have been developed that incentivize scientists to share their research openly, rather than incentivizing them to put their research behind a paywall." (http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/03/the-future-of-the-scientific-journal-industry/)

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