Thread by @mrgunn

So @Conaw gave me the below prompt for @threadapalooza. I'm going to zoom out a bit so my visions make sense to everyone.

https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1339778865229524992

I'm Dr. William Gunn, PhD in Biomedical Science, researched stem cells, launched Mendeley, co-founded the Reproducibility Initiative, lhelped get #altmetrics going, worked for Elsevier for 10 years, & generally have been making mischief in science and scholcomm for two decades.

The first thing to say is that change in academia is slow. Academia will be different 10 years from now like a bank account paying 1% APY will be different 10 years from now. The subscription model is already going away, though.

At the current rate, it will mostly be gone by 2030. This is my perspective as an industry insider & it's widely shared, but I am not personally involved in any of these deals, so this is not investing or any other kind of advice.

I don't want to spend too much time on the wonky details of the industry - I'd like to paint a vision of publishing in 2030 - but we have to roughly sketch in the map a little first. Publishing is hard to understand, for some of the same reasons healthcare in the US is hard.

There are a whole bunch of stakeholders with often conflicting individual incentives all working for a shared overall objective. In healthcare, it's to keep people healthy. In academia, it's to generate new knowledge.

My perspective is mostly US-centric and biomedicine centric, I am familiar with other systems of research assessment & funding and will mention those when appropriate.

Stakeholders include researchers, funders, publishers, librarians, university administration, federal agencies, healthcare, tech, and the general public. Basically what happens is this: Researchers need funding to carry out their research.

Most research doesn't yield a revenue-generating discovery for decades, if ever, so they rely on public and private grants to carry out their work. Funders need to know who to give money to.

Even the research could be funded through licensing deals or whatever it's more valuable to society for it to be grant-funded because then the incentive for researchers is to share their work, as opposed to work in secret to preserve their intellectual property.

Researchers demonstrate they're worth funding by landing a fellowship at a prestigious university and publishing their work in prestigious journals. Funders look at these things, among other social factors, to determine who to award the grant to.

But the funders don't decide this only themselves. They typically bring scientists in the field together on a panel to discuss, score, and rank applications for them. Likewise, journals use academic editors and peer reviewers from the field.

If everything goes well, funders allocate funding to researchers most likely to use those funds to advance knowledge, which is then published & widely read, priming the next discovery. Things do not always go well. My 2030 visions will imagine proposed solutions being applied.

Feel free to suggest some solutions and I'll riff on what it could look like if those solutions were implemented. These are by no means in the order of likelihood or desirability.

Imagine universities no longer pay subscriptions in 2030. Journals still work just as they do now, but instead of paying to read, it's pay to publish. Fees will be bundled & paid at the university or country level. Everyone can read, but money changing hands is basically the same

Just this tiny change would be great, especially for patients & the general public. It might be less good for researchers in developing countries, but there would be some sort of subsidy as there is today for them. Yay, knowledge is free, but this seems underwhelming, doesn't it?

Now comes the part where I speculate irresponsibly, because that's the whole point of @threadpalooza, and because academia changes so slowly that I don't expect much to be different in kind, only in degree, over the next 10 years, and that would make for a boring thread.

So wild speculation #1, "Universities in decline". Again, not in any likelihood or preference order. Universities face decreasing revenue from declining enrollment, increased pressure to admit more disadvantaged students for lower tuition, and tuition cancellation legislation.

Library budgets get squeezed as read-and-publish deals increasingly take spending authority away from the library and into research admin.

Eventually, funders just cut universities out of the loop entirely and run their own publishing systems. Because funders need to keep low overhead, they don't invest heavily in new technologies to improve their publishing systems.

Eventually publishing starts to look more like uploading a PDF to a funder repository. Funders won't employ large editorial staff, so errors & readability suffer. Commercial publishers, who have pivoted mostly to databases and analytics products, still keep some subscriptions

Society journals, which don't get enough revenue from per-article fees and whose conference revenue suffered post-pandemic, either sell to commercial publishers or eke along with memberships. Overall, no major changes industry-wide, but everything is just a little bit shittier.

Wild speculation #2 - "What if we just stopped calling it publishing?" When a scientific researcher writes a paper, they're doing something fundamentally different than what a humanities professor does when they compile a poetry collection or whatever.

A scientific manuscript is not the work, it's merely a report on the work. Researchers produce all kinds of outputs these days that look nothing like text and shouldn't be squashed down into a textual PDF representation.

So what can we do, keeping in mind the funder-publisher-researcher-society loop I sketched above (in which everyone will find something to hate, but Twitter forces brevity, so deal ;-) )?

I'm at 25/100 on this thread now. Lots more to say, but I will take a break for today.