bjoern.brembs.blog » Minimizing the collective action problem

"Thus, researchers need to modernize the way they do their scholarship, institutions need to modernize their infrastructure such that researchers are enabled to modernize their scholarship. These have now had more than 30 years for this modernization and neither of them have acted. At this point it is fair to assume, barring some major catastrophe forcing their hands, that such modernization is not going to magically appear within the next three decades, either. Funders, therefore, are in a position to incentivize this long overdue modernization which institutions and hence researchers have been too complacent or too reticent to tackle.

If, as I would tend to agree, we are faced with a collective action problem and the size of the collective is the major determinant for effective problem solving, then it is a short step to realize that funders are in a uniquely suited position to start solving this collective action problem. Conversely, then, it is only legitimate to question the motives of those who seek to make the collective action problem unnecessary difficult by advocating to target individual researchers or institutions. What could possibly be the benefit of making the collective action problem numerically more difficult to solve?"