Academic capture

The 21st century has brought with it some new terms that have not been welcomed. One of these was ‘state capture’: when the government and its institutions’ policies and laws are significantly influenced by private individuals and their companies for profit. This became a hallmark of governments in Europe (Hungary, Bulgaria, western Balkans), several Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Columbia and Mexico) and South Africa. Some have also suggested that the USA under Donald Trump was undergoing ‘state capture’. 

The lament of academics that publishers are profiteering from their labours through charging ever increasing sums to access their work are familiar to most of us. We are caught in a system whereby our employers judge us by the prestige of what we output, and typically these outputs are publications published by the same profiteering publishing companies. Choosing to opt out would result in academic suicide for any Early Career Researcher who cannot show that they are capable of publishing in upper quartile journals. Similarly, publishing in the highest ranked journals can facilitate and define a career - so much so that some academics are prepared tocommit fraudin order to publish there. Moreover, pushing for increasingly high metrics perpetuates dynasties ofbad sciencethat jeopardise the centralscientific tenets of rigour, reproducibility, and transparency. 

Björn Brembs and colleagues have just revealed a much darker side to this story in apreprint on Zenodo. In it, they describe what we could describe as the incipient capture of all academia by the same four publishing giants that are dominating the publishing conundrum described above. In it, they describe the shift of profits by these companies from publishing towards data. We know that Elsevier owns Scopus and so are able to drive the listing of all of their own journals therein, and ensure that they attain maximum benefit from inflation of metrics. But did you know that the new academic database on the block, Dimensions, is owned by publishing supergroup SpringerNature? 

When an institution subscribes to one of these databases, they also subscribe to a whole set of access to metrics that inform them about their own academics, and any prospective academics that they may want to employ. Owning the company that makes the metrics, makes sure that the publisher gets a controlling stake in the future of publishing in that institution. But the most startling revelation by Brembs et al. is that discovery and publishing are just the two ends of what these four publishing houses are attempting to acquire: the complete academic workflow.

Figure 1. The academic workflow undergoing capture 

In the central figure of their manuscript, Brembs et al. provide a breakdown of each of the companies acquired by Elsevier, SpringerNature (Holtzbrinck), Wiley-Atypon and Taylor & Francis. It might not surprise you to know that Elsevier and Holtzbrinck are far ahead of the others in terms of completing their work-flow capture. Holtzbrinck, for example, also own Digital Science, a new company that owns Dimensions, Elements and Altmetrics. This captures the discovery, outreach and assessment ends of the work-flow. They also own Overleaf (the writing component) and a raft of analytical tools. It goes without saying that they have all Springer, BMC and Nature journals in the publication sector. 

And once they’ve captured the workflow?

We should be aware by now that companies that capture a lot of data are in a commanding position to find plenty of customers. Who do you think are the customers for all publicly funded science? 

Imagine the worst implications of theCambridge Analytica data scandal, and then apply this to the entire academic workflow. Not a pretty picture for sure. But it’s one that should strike fear into the hearts of all academics. This is happening now, and you and your research is feeding it. These publishers don't even need to install spyware onto our computers as their tools do it all for them. Once collected, individual data on employees can be sold to employers, or third parties interested in our research topics. At least with Cambridge Analytica you had to be duped into giving over your data. Right now, we are giving our entire academic workflow into the hands of the same people that have prompted our greatest obstacles to free and open science. 

For those of us who have lived through state capture, we felt powerless and could only watch as institutions were plundered. Right now, we are willing participants in the capture of our own academic freedom. 

Academic capture: when the institutions’ policies are significantly influenced by publishing companies for their profit. 

How can we prevent academic capture?

There is a growing community of academics that are pushing for Open Research, and in particularOpen Source Tools. Always use open source software, and avoid using any software offered for free by publishers (e.g. Mendeley, Overleaf, Peerwith, Authorea, etc.). 

Where possible, we should be avoiding publishing work with the big four academic publishers, and when necessary ensuring that they do not hold any rights to our data or our work. Support smaller publishers where possible, and promote their use in your scholarly societies. If possible, advocate for diamond open access using platforms likeOverlay Journalswith any journals that you conduct work for. Discourage your library from subscribing to databases run by big publishers. 

An economic solution, offered by Brembs et al., is to ensure that publishers can be replaced through competition. In this vision, currently adopted by funders such as the EU’s Horizon 2020, publishers win contracts to publish research and bid to win consecutive contracts with no right to being locked-in. Although it is possible that market forces may move profit from unreasonable numbers towards actual costs, it seems unlikely that our big academic publishing companies will ever release their grip on profits. Instead, we can expect them to fill in the missing gaps in our academic workflow, and increase the rate at which they capture our data.

Reference:

Björn Brembs, Philippe Huneman, Felix Schönbrodt, Gustav Nilsonne, Toma Susi, Renke Siems, Pandelis Perakakis, Varvara Trachana, Lai Ma, & Sara Rodriguez-Cuadrado. (2021). Replacing academic journals.https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5526635 

Who is your co-author? I've never heard of them

Yesterday we had a lab meeting about SciSci and ever increasing publishing trends. Somehow we got side-tracked along the way by fake authors, and so I decided to write this blog post about some of the things we learned. Today, while I’m having breakfast, I find that fake authors of scientific articles are very popular topics for blog posts, and there’s a number out there that you can read if you are interested (here,  hereand here). 

What motivates people to invent co-authors? 

When I was doing my PhD at Bristol University, there was a competition among post-grads about getting dodgy words or phrases published in their papers. I don’t remember any examples from back then, but my contribution was to add a condom into the first paper published during my PhD (Measey & Tinsley 1997) - all quite legitimate in that I really did use a Durex Gossamer to waterproof the microphone.

Obviously, people have their own reasons for wanting to add their pets or fictional authors to their by-line. Here are a few that caught my eye:

One of the most touching stories (for me) is that of Polly Matzinger who wrote her paper on T cells in the active tense, but apparently was uncomfortable using “I”. When she was asked to re-write her paper in the passive tense, she chose instead to keep using “we” and added her dog (seehere). Apparently, the editor was so upset that he banned her from authoring more publications in the journal until he died. In these days of Emotional Support Animals, shouldn't we all have the right to add our pets as supporting companions on our papers? It's not just me that believes this, my dog feels the same way... 

The mathematician Jack Hetherinton had also used “we” instead of “I” when writing a paper on atom exchange, and rather than typing out the manuscript entirely from scratch, added his cat, Chester (see the cat’sWikipedia page).

Others have genuinely felt that their study animals should receive credit in the papers that inspired them. This includes Madge the parrot who was first author on a paper on her use of a tool to scratch the back of her head. Strangely, Madge wrote about herself in the third person. Maybe she hadn’t learned how to use the typewriter at that point?

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh  added her three bonobo subjects (and the inspiration for a lot of her work) as co-authors on her paper about the welfare of apes in captivity. 

Last, but not least, in the animals as authors line-up is a hamster named Tisha. Tisha was levitated by giant magnets by Nobel and Ig-Nobel prize winner, Andre Geim.  

There are also totally fictional entities that have been elevated to author status. In the Max Planck institute in Munich, for example, a sign next to a door reading “Alois Kabelschacht” (or ‘cable duct’ in English) prompted physicists there to use Prof. Alois Kabelschacht as a fictional member of the institute, and a straw man in their arguments. Consequently, Alois Kabelschacht was added to a number of their publications for several years. 

Others have opted for authors to stand as cryptic messages to their readers. In their paper on the stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii equation, Gardiner and Anglin added a constant that they couldn't account for, and so their co-author "This Is A Fudge" was born.

The last story is that of Prof. Stronzo Bestiale. If you know Italian, you will already know that ‘stronzo bestiale’ is common slang meaning a massive turd (or similar). According to William Hoover, the man responsible for adding this Italian insult to the scientific literature, he heard two Italian woman on a flight to Paris repeatedly using the phrases ‘stronzo bestiale’  and ‘che stronzo’ (what a shit) in their conversation. Later, he asked a colleague what this meant, but decided that Stronzo Bestiale sounded like a great name and should work as a co-author. Hoover has a specific role in mind. He had had a series of rejections from journals regarding a new piece of work that he was proposing. He thought that if he added an international colleague to his author line up, then the ideas might be better received. Whether it was luck, or the addition of the Italian Prof. Stronzo Bestiale to the author line, we shall never know, but Hoover’s paper did get accepted and another paper published with Prof. Bestiale as a co-author. 

You can read the true story of Stronzohere. 

Happily for all Italian speaking physicists, the author now has a SCOPUS profile that they can laugh at:

I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading about the lighter side of scientific co-authorship. It’s not all astronzo bestiale !

References

Breitenlohner, P. and Kabelschacht, A., 1979. The auxiliary fields of N= 2 extended supergravity in 5 and 6 space-time dimensions. Nuclear Physics B, 148(1-2), pp.96-106.

Dittmaier, S., Kabelschacht, A. and Kasprzik, T., 2008. Polarized QED splittings of massive fermions and dipole subtraction for non-collinear-safe observables. Nuclear physics B, 800(1-2), pp.146-189.

Gardiner, C.W., Anglin, J.R. and Fudge, T.I.A., 2002. The stochastic gross-pitaevskii equation. Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, 35(6), p.1555.

Geim, A.K. and Ter Tisha, H.A.M.S., 2001. Detection of earth rotation with a diamagnetically levitating gyroscope. Physica B: Condensed Matter, 294, pp.736-739.

Hetherington, J.H. and Willard, F.D.C., 1975. Two-, three-, and four-atom exchange effects in bcc he 3. Physical Review Letters, 35(21), p.1442.

Hoover, W.G., Posch, H.A. and Bestiale, S., 1987. Dense‐fluid Lyapunov spectra via constrained molecular dynamics. The Journal of chemical physics, 87(11), pp.6665-6670.

Janzen, M.J., Janzen, D.H. and M Pond, C., 1976. Too-Using by the African Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus). Biotropica 

Matzinger, P. and Mirkwood, G., 1978. In a fully H-2 incompatible chimera, T cells of donor origin can respond to minor histocompatibility antigens in association with either donor or host H-2 type. The Journal of experimental medicine, 148(1), pp.84-92.

Measey, G.J. and Tinsley, R.C., 1997. Mating behavior of Xenopus wittei (Anura: Pipidae). Copeia, 1997(3), pp.601-609.

Moran, B., Hoover, W.G. and Bestiale, S., 1987. Diffusion in a periodic Lorentz gas. Journal of Statistical Physics, 48(3), pp.709-726.

Savage-Rumbaugh, S., Wamba, K., Wamba, P. and Wamba, N., 2007. Welfare of apes in captive environments: comments on, and by, a specific group of apes. Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, 10(1), pp.7-19.

Read more:

Erren, T.C., Groß, J.V., Wild, U., Lewis, P. and Shaw, D.M., 2017. Crediting animals in scientific literature: Recognition in addition to Replacement, Reduction, & Refinement [4R]. EMBO reports, 18(1), pp.18-20.

Penders, B. and Shaw, D.M., 2020. Civil disobedience in scientific authorship: Resistance and insubordination in science. Accountability in research, 27(6), pp.347-371.

Urban toads show themselves to be bolder - before and after invasion

Many of us are now familiar with urban commensal species - those that have adapted to life in towns and cities and can be seen to exploit their new surroundings. The Guttural Toad,Sclerophrys gutturalis, is one such species that can be more easily found in urban areas of east and southern Africa than in rural situations. This toad readily adapts to feeding under street lights at night, and breeding in garden ponds. 

In this study, MeaseyLab postdoc James Baxter-Gilbert, collected toads from urban and rural areas in their native (Durban) and invasive (Reunion & Mauritius) ranges (see blog posts about the field work here and here). He then examined differences in boldness and exploration in toads from each site. Because the invasion route of these toads is already known (see blog post here), James was able to reconstruct whether trends in boldness along the invasion route. Have invasive toads become bolder than their native counterparts?

What he found was that urban toads were consistently more bold than those in rural situations. This means that along the invasion route, there has been a reversal from bold to not so bold when toads moved from urban situations into rural ones. This tells us that urban settings significantly benefit these bold traits, and that toads (at least) are able to switch between these different phenotypes no matter where they are introduced. 

This finding shows us more of the flexibility of these toads as invaders. If they are moved from native or invasive ranges, they will adapt for both urban and rural lives. 

Read the article in full here:

Baxter-Gilbert, J., Riley, J.L. & Measey, J. Fortune favors the bold toad: urban-derived behavioral traits may provide advantages for invasive amphibian populations. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 75, 130 (2021).https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-021-03061-w pdf

Also see the blog entry at the CIB here: https://blogs.sun.ac.za/cib/urban-toads-show-themselves-to-be-bolder-before-and-after-invasion/ 

Selecting appropriate key-words

Key-words are very useful in your studies, because if you have a good selection, they can help nail down a good proportion of the literature that you will need to read during your studies. Moreover, if you have the best selection of key-words, then you can set up some automated notifications for when new items are published. The only problem then is pulling together the correct key-words. 

When you submit a conference abstract, or a paper for publication, you will also be faced by a demand for key-words. This is when I often draw a blank. What will be the appropriate key-words for my study? I can often think of one or two, but regularly journals want at least five. 

A method for finding key-words

Here is my method for finding appropriate key-words. It’s quick, but it does require a piece of free-ware:VOSviewer, which for me has become an invaluable research tool.

1. Go to yourliterature databaseof choice (i.e. Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Dimensions.)
2. Search for documents using the key-words that you are sure are appropriate
3. Constrain the results to ~500 documents. 
4. 1. You can either do this with the search date (e.g. the most recent 5 years)
   2. Or you can simply take the first 500 documents that are found
5. Download these ~500 documents in a tab delimited text file.
6. In VOSviewer
7. 1. Press the ‘create’ button
   2. Create a map based on bibliographic data
   3. Read data from bibliographic database files
   4. Select the file that you downloaded in the appropriate tab
   5. Type of analysis
   6. 1. Co-occurrence
      2. All keywords (you can choose here)
      3. Full counting
   7. You should see the total number of key-words in your downloaded file now
   8. 1. Change the minimum number of occurrences of a key-word so that you have ~100 results (again you can choose what suits you)
   9. Press finish

You should end up with a network like the one below. Here I have used the key-words “invasive” and “fish” (following previous exampleshereandhere). 

In VOSviewer, you can highlight any one of these key-words and see exactly what combination they have been used in. I have selected examples that occur 10 or more times in my downloaded file. This means that I can be fairly sure that these are relatively common key-words to use in combination with the ones I know are good.

The larger the panel in this network, the more frequently the word is used. This should help you when you select your own key-words. For example, even though I had used the keywords “invasive” and “fish” to generate this network, one of the first things I noticed is that the term “invasive species” is far more common than “invasive”. Hence, the first thing I should do is to change the first of my key-words.

Some of the key-words relate to specific taxonomic groups. Others include the habitat in which the fish were sampled. Now I have a shortlist from which to pick the remaining 5 key-words that I need in order to submit my abstract or manuscript. Once you’ve made your selection, you can go back to your literature database, add this combination of key-words into a search and see what comes out. If you’ve done it right, you should see some familiar papers on similar topics to your own. 

If you found this article useful, then read more helpful tips about writing and publishing in these free OA online books written for biologists:

How to write a PhD in Biological Sciences

How to publish in Biological Sciences

Talking to science denialists & the post-truth clan

I think we’ve all been in the situation where you are stuck in a room at some social event where you have to be on best-behaviour. But the person that most wants to talk to you is someone who just wants to tell you that everything you do is wrong and meaningless, and actually they hold the truth. They then proceed to tell you about some YouTube video that they’ve seen that convinced them that xxx (insert as applicable with moon landings, round earth, global warming, UFOs, all science or - especially these days - vaccines) are all bogus and/or are part of some conspiracy theory. You may get the feeling that the reason they’ve picked on you is that they know you are a scientist, and they basically want to sparr because they are sure that they can beat you. If you haven’t been in this position yet, it’ll happen to you someday soon, and in my experience is coming round more and more frequently.

Of course, the reason why this person thinks that they can beat you, is that they are planning to use the techniques that they’ve now trained themselves for using their ‘research’: i.e. watching whatever YouTube suggests now that its algorithm knows they are interested in this kind of thing. Their tactic will be to rattle off any number of tropes that if you have any inkling of an argument about why any one can be shown to be incorrect - they are ready to rattle off another. One of the major problems is that if you have an audience, especially an audience that is already sympathetic towards the denier, then your attempts to rebuff this person might actually backfire and reinforce the trope in them. 

This blog article is based on the ideas that Philipp Schmid and Cornelia Betsch put forward in their 2019 paper (get ithere). They concentrate on the types of message content that are safe to pursue as a science advocate when in public discussion with a denier. Note that they do not cover two other important points: characteristics of the sender (you) and receiver (them). You should probably not expect the receiver of your argument to publicly change their minds, or admit they are wrong. What you can hope to do is to bolster the audience’s belief in science as a way of pursuing truth.

Topic rebuttal

Topic rebuttal is to have a set of facts on a subject to hand that refute or respond to the claims of the denier. This is tough for a lot of us, as we are often not conducting research in the particular area of interest of the science denier. Yet, many of us are aware of some basics that can at least slow down some of the more outrageous claims. In order to use topic rebuttal on your denier, you should be well prepared on the topic of the debate. But the way deniers take on scientists is by constantly switching to new topics until they find one that you aren’t aware of how to rebut. This might make it look to an audience as if they know more than you do. Once they find the topic that you can’t rebut - what then?

The other string to their bow is for every topic that you can rebut, just to claim that this is your opinion - making it look to the audience like that topic was an even draw - while they move onto the next topic. By pitching your response as equal to their claim, they can keep slipping through the topics until you get stuck, and then they will end up scoring one more than you. Or this is how it will seem to the audience.

This is when you can turn to technique rebuttal. 

Technique rebuttal

Technique rebuttal will stand you in much better stead with an audience, because it will allow you to explain why the argument of the denier is wrong - not simply that they are wrong. Doing this, the audience will learn more about the nature of science, the need for evidence and that each topic is not an even score, but that you are the one who is scoring. Moreover, when the denier reaches a topic that you are not familiar with, you can explain that you don’t know the facts, but still go on to challenge the technique of their basis. 

What we can be sure of is that your science denier will not be challenging you on the basis of a scientific study. This means that their argument needs another technique from which they can make their argument. Let’s look at each of these techniques in turn, and discuss how to spot and rebut them:

Selectivity

Observational selection, or cherry picking studies, has come up a lot during the pandemic as the media (and science deniers) have turned their attention to articles being posted on preprint servers. These are studies that have not even met the silver standard of peer review (see why I call Peer Review a silver standard and not a gold standardhere), and yet are touted by deniers as good evidence when ten other studies that do not show any effect are simply explained away as bad studies (also conspiracy theory - see below). 

There are any number of reasons why we might expect good science to come up with a spurious results (i.e. Type I or Type II error, seehere). You can explain how science counters this with a consensus of studies. Importantly, is the concession that scientists will change their minds on topics if they find that their findings, or the consensus of findings of others, shows them to be wrong. 

Impossible Expectation

Any argument that has an expectation that is unrealistic. As scientists we know that absolutisms are not real. Whenever someone tells you that something is 100% safe or 100% effective, they are (1) wrong and (2) their logic is questionable because there are no such extremes in safety or effectiveness. For example, vaccines are neither 100% effective, indeed many vaccines have quite low efficaciousness. Nor are vaccines 100% safe, there are usually a small proportion of people who will have adverse reactions. What is important though is exactly how small that group of people is. For vaccines in public circulation, adverse reactions are likely to be less than 1 in 10 000 or less than 1 in 100 000. This will be similar for other common medications (like the contraceptive pill that turns out to have quite a high level of adverse reactions that many people are prepared to accept). This is one of the easiest arguments to spot among denialists, and you can explain to most audiences in simple terms what an unrealistic or impossible expectation is.

Conspiracy Theories

Spotting a conspiracy theory is quite easy. When deniers claim that there are scientists who are being paid to publish their findings, and that the overwhelming majority of scientists are simply being paid off (typically by big pharma, governments, tech industry, etc.) - then you know that they are resorting to a conspiracy theory. Sadly, there are conspiracies out there. They are regularly perpetrated by big pharma, oil and tobacco companies - and these commercial interests are prepared to pay tame scientists to publish, often in inhouse journals. Governments too are known to ensure that their scientists publish studies that reinforce their views. 

Hence, once you’ve spotted a conspiracy theory, you need to be careful how you respond. But you can go back to scientific consensus and work on how widespread results are unlikely to be the result of a conspiracy, and that these are more likely to be akin to cherry observational selection (see above).

Misrepresentation / False Logic

Denialists often fall into traps around faulty logic. You can find a list of thesehere. The most common errors are that one statement does not logically follow from the first. 

Another common mistake is that ‘something happened after, so it was caused by’ argument. This is a surprisingly common explanation, but fails to take an objective look at total evidence. This is especially common in people’s personal insight. For example, they took a vaccine, and then got sick. Therefore, the vaccine made them sick. Of course, there are lots of levels of this debate, including that there is a small chance that they really did have a reaction to the vaccine, but this doesn’t make the vaccine unsafe, because it is expected and experienced by a great many people.

Deniers will often eschew statistics, as being a way that lies are told. Again, there is some small amount of truth here, but large effects cannot be explained by faulty statistics, and once again the scientific consensus here is a valid response.

Fake Experts

The last technique that deniers often use are fake experts. Fake experts are real - and by this I mean that there really are people who are employed by universities that pedal bullshit (seehere for how to spot a bullshiter). When I worked as a post-doc for University of the Western Cape back in the late 1990s, there was a Professor employed in their Department of Zoology who had a career giving talks on alternative medicine. His experiments would never get published, because he failed to conduct controls or had very few replicates. But this did not stop him peddling his untruths around the planet. He would be invited to give talks to more people in more places than any scientist I’ve ever known. There is another retired Senior Lecturer from Stellenbosch University that sells fake kits to repel invasive polyphagous shot hole boring beetles. No doubt he has made a packet from claiming to be from the university. 

An argument built on a fake expert is rather like a naive version of observational selectionism (see above). They are relatively easy to spot, and then simply invite a discussion with the fake expert. Ask about specific studies that the fake expert has conducted, their results and where they are published. Expect to hear more connections to observational selection and conspiracy theories.

How to know when what you smell is bullshit

Carl Sagan wrote a great list that he called his ‘baloney detection kit’ (and I have renamed above). This is well worth reading because it is something that you can help teach a public audience into how not to get duped by a science denier again. 

Do take a look at the paper by Schmid & Betsch (2019) and read about experiments that they conducted on technique rebuttal and how effective the approach is with science denialism.

Schmid, P. and C. Betsch (2019) Effective Strategies for Rebutting Science Denialism in Public Discussions.Nature Human Behaviour3: 931–39.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0632-4.