Connecting The Dots: Lessons in Rebellion From the Math Network

“Mathematicians play a version of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" using the great Paul Erdős (1913-1996) as the center of their universe. Erdős (pronounced ‘air-dish’), besides being an unusual fellow, was the most prolific mathematician in history, and worked in such a broad range of subfields that nearly all professional mathematicians have an ‘Erdős number’—the degree of separation based on a chain of co-authors—less than 9. Some of Erdős' greatest contributions were in graph theory, an ancestor of the network theory that's been applied to everything from protest movements to the collaborations in the mathematics network his name has come to represent. So when a group of mathematicians came together earlier this year in one of the highest profile academic boycotts since Aristotle left Plato's academy, Erdős was in the air. It's not just his technical contributions that peg him as a sort of godfather figure for the protests; his anti-authoritarian views anticipated those of the boycott by decades. ‘Nothing bothered Erdős more than political strictures which did not allow for complete freedom of expression and the ability to travel freely,’ Middlebury College mathematics professor Dr. Peter Schumer (Erdős number=3) wrote in his essay, "The Magician of Budapest". The ‘political strictures’ that reformists believe stand in the way of open borders and free markets within today's mathematics are upheld not by nations, but publishers. The boycott of the academic publisher Elsevier, created and supported most widely by mathematicians, represents a potent application of the math network. Dr. Timothy Gowers—Cambridge professor (Erdős number=2), Fields Medalist and instigator of the boycott—appealed to the network's collective bargaining powers in his call to protest, noting that ‘the more of us there are, the more socially acceptable it becomes.’ The stakes of the Elsevier action, known also as the "Cost of Knowlege" protest, have been explained at length elsewhere. But the heart of the unrest isn't journal pricing or authors' rights, it's who gets to control the intellectual 'stamp of approval' on published papers. Certainly, the scientific enterprise needs an easy way to verify the legitimacy of new research. But, as Dr. Hal Abelson, MIT professor of computer science (Erdős number=3), wrote on his Cost of Knowledge pledge, ‘With the moves of these megapublishers, we [are] seeing the beginning of monopoly control of the scholarly record.’ Publishing giants like Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell and Springer carry some of the most reputable journals across various fields, and reformists accuse them [of] operating a sort of credibility cartel in which researchers must participate for the sake of their careers... This breaks down for research subjects with smaller and more closely-knit communities. One well-known effort was the 2006 mutiny at Elsevier's Topology journal, when the mathematicians on its editorial board simultaneously resigned and formed the open-access Journal of Topology. Any loss in prestige was only temporary; Dr. Zoran Skoda, professor of mathematics at the Ruder Boskovic Institute in Croatia (Erdős number=5), noted on the MathForge forum that the move from Elsevier ‘passed with understanding of the community that the editors are essentially the same and the new journals... are gaining momentum to the top class accepted journals. Others have suggested similar tactics to overthrow particularly egregious journals outside of mathematics. But the mathematicians' network may be best suited to the job. As Tyler Neylon (Erdős number=4), the math PhD candidate who created the Cost of Knowledge website, told the the Chronicle of Higher Education, ‘I'm concerned that other fields, such as biology/medicine, may be more entrenched in a profit-supportive culture, so that it may take much longer to realize widespread support of open access there.’ Mathematics isn't even close to the most tightly-knit academic field, but this independence from industry interests—combined with the relatively small size of the community—makes collective action possible. Organized mutinies wouldn't be able to take down larger, more general journals (see "Effects of the Resignation"), but Topology wasn't exactly a niche publication, and there are plenty of even more specialized journals that may be able to follow in its footsteps. Gowers himself had doubts about repeating the Topology editors' strategy with other journals. But, after all, he wrote his manifesto in January, before the outpour of support for the boycott. If the ‘Cost of Knowledge’ signals, as Neylon put it, ‘an inflection point in academic publishing,’ then reformists have cause for optimism. Mutinies like the one at Topology rely on the fact that mathematicians don't get jobs, mentorships or lower Erdős numbers from journals— they get those things from other mathematicians. One system being developed to leverage the power of such professional relationships is Dr. Christopher Lee's Selected-Papers Network ("SP net"), a sort of Pinterest for peer-review in which researchers with common