On taking on big science's gatekeepers.

Is There a Scientific Establishment?

David Klinghoffer March 15, 2016 4:30 PM

The term "Establishment" is controversial. It invariably implies a critical stance, suggesting a system, a power structure, in need of a shakeup or worse. It's not a description anyone would welcome having applied to himself. Nobody wants to be seen as defending entrenched privilege. Depending on the context, some deny the existence of such an entity to begin with.

What about in the world of science, and specifically biology? Is it fair to speak of an Establishment there, primed to be updated by "rogue" outside forces? It seems so. Or perhaps "rigidly calcified mindset" is the better phrase. Today in the New York Times, Amy Harmon reports on hints of decalcification, a modest but significant move in science research publishing toward "preprints." That is, publishing directly online without first submitting your work to the official gatekeepers: peer-reviewed journals.

Don't worry -- it's not as if this research then goes unreviewed or uncriticized. Instead the review process happens immediately and organically. Those interested enough to read your work can tell anyone and everyone what they think. Minus the online aspect, it's the way Charles Darwin published his ideas:

On Feb. 29, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the third Nobel Prize laureate biologist in a month to do something long considered taboo among biomedical researchers: She posted a report of her recent discoveries to a publicly accessible website, bioRxiv, before submitting it to a scholarly journal to review for "official'' publication.

It was a small act of information age defiance, and perhaps also a bit of a throwback, somewhat analogous to Stephen King's 2000 self-publishing an e-book or Radiohead's 2007 release of a download-only record without a label. To commemorate it, she tweeted the website's confirmation under the hashtag #ASAPbio, a newly coined rallying cry of a cadre of biologists who say they want to speed science by making a key change in the way it is published.

Such postings are known as "preprints'' to signify their early-stage status, and the 2,048 deposited on three-year-old bioRxiv over the last year represent a barely detectable fraction of the million or so research papers published annually in traditional biomedical journals.

But after several dozen biologists vowed to rally around preprints at an "ASAPbio'' meeting last month, the site has had a small surge, and not just from scientists whose august stature protects them from risk. On Twitter, preprint insurgents are celebrating one another's postings and jockeying for revolutionary credibility.

One diagnostic of a genuine Establishment would be that its members maintain that the system, for everyone's good, couldn't be much different from how it is. In this case, there's nothing necessary about the traditional manner in which biologists publish their work. Physics, as Harmon notes, has had preprints for decades, and the field is healthier for it:

Unlike physicists, for whom preprints became a default method of communicating discoveries in the 1990s, biomedical researchers typically wait more than six monthsto disseminate their work while they submit it -- on an exclusive basis -- to the most prestigious journal they think might accept it for publication. If, as is often the case, it is rejected, they try another journal. As a result, it can sometimes take years to publish a paper, which is then typically available for a time only to colleagues at major academic institutions whose libraries pay for subscriptions. And because science is in many ways a relay, with one scientist building on the published work of another, the communication delays almost certainly slow scientific progress.

True, it's not that preprints are intended to replace traditional publishing. Those interviewed for the article are careful to say they aren't rejecting the big journals. You wouldn't want to offend the Establishment!

Many have taken pains to reiterate their wish not to disrupt the journal system, only to enhance it. With enough scientists pushing to legitimize preprints, they hope journals will allow the systems to coexist.

"It's not beer or tacos," as James Fraser, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco put itat last month's conference, "it's beer AND tacos."

Still, this sounds exactly like a revolt, if mild, seeking to slip out from under some of the bonds of a burdensome hierarchy -- one that up till now has controlled the flow of ideas and artificially constrained debate through access and credentialing, with an eye to maintaining its own power and prestige. What will it mean for insurgent scientific ideas like intelligent design and the critique of Darwinism? Time will tell, but the development seems like a hopeful one.