bjoern.brembs.blog » Procurement Before Prestige

"Why has science tolerated this arrangement for so long? The answer is structural dependency. Early-career researchers, often precariously employed, must publish in established journals to have any chance at a permanent position. Libraries, in turn, must subscribe to those same journals so researchers can read and cite them. The EU Council aptly calls this a “lock-in.”

The lock-in benefits those who publish in the most expensive — pardon, the most prestigious — journals. And of course these authors pass this lesson on to their students: if you want to stay in science, publish in prestigious journals first, worry about reliability second – or not at all. The perverse outcome is that the journals most rewarded by the system are often those producing the least reliable results. In cancer research, only about 12 percent of findings can be reproduced. No deep knowledge of evolutionary biology is needed to see how that can happen: selection pressure rewards visibility, not quality.

When the EU warns of “the hazards of scholarly publishing,” it is not fretting about excessive footnotes. It is pointing to wasted public funds, violations of fundamental rights through data tracking, and an incentive structure that systematically rewards unreliable science while penalizing rigor. Above all, it is pointing to a dependency that has left science unable to reform itself.

The Council’s proposed remedy is strikingly direct. Member states and the Commission are urged “to invest in and foster interoperable, not-for-profit infrastructures for publishing based on open source software and open standards, in order to avoid the lock-in of services as well as proprietary systems, and to connect these infrastructures to the EOSC” (European Open Science Cloud). Translated into plain language: replace commercial journals with public infrastructure."