To corroborate the above data, let me explain that two weeks ago I received an invitation to deliver an invited talk at an AI conference that will be held in Singapore next June. I did not know that conference series, the offer seemed too good, and there was no apparent link to the inviters; so the pointer of my mouse quickly hovered on the "delete" button. Yet at the last moment the name of the sender looked familiar. Upon checking, I discovered it was the name of a Nobel laureate in Physics. The mouse thus returned decidedly to the trash bin icon (this can't be him), but then I decided to double check the organizing committee members. And so I discovered that one of them was a colleague with whom I have been collaborating since a long time ago. A quick email to him sorted the matter out: the invitation was real, the Nobel prize winning scientist was indeed asking me to deliver a talk, and I should of course accept it.
If I had dumped that email at the first occasion nothing bad would have happened, of course: the conference would successfully take place without my presence, my life would go on as happily as it is, and I would have no idea of the lost opportunity. But I like to take opportunities when they arise, so the lesson is clear: there is no substitute to careful screening.
The rest of this article could just be a rant on how bad the situation has become, how rotten the system is, how difficult it is to make good science in a situation where money governs everything from the dissemination of good science, to the award of academic titles, to the distribution of high education. But let us take a step back and observe the situation from outside; for I have a couple of points to make instead of lamenting about the status quo. To do that, I need to tell you a second anecdote.
Image: Storyblocks
This came under my radar during my activities as President of the USERN organization (https://usern.org). USERN is a non-profit network devoted to fostering interdisciplinary science across borders. It does so by creating the opportunity for researchers to meet, share data and organize common activities and research, and for scholars around the world to do some pro-bono activities to support scientific education, particularly in the developing world. Every year at our congress we give a cash and research prize to five under-40yo researchers in as many macro-areas of science who distinguish themselves; we organize PhD schools, seminars, collaborative papers. We have 26000 members around the world and a very distinguished advisory board of scholars in 21 disciplines who help us sort out the nominees for every year's prize, and who participate to our yearly congress.
In summary: USERN is a great invention, and a unique organization. But what does this have to do with today's topic? Well, it turns out that a blogger of the "Lubos-Sabine" kind (i.e., Academia drop outs who try to get revenge at the "corrupt system" that kicked them out) picked on USERN to claim that its yearly congress is a "scamference". He did so by spreading a lot of lies, although it took him some time to gather data - time he could have used to convince himself that USERN is in no way a scamference, that the prizes are real, that the event takes place regularly, that the participation fees are extremely low (<100$, to allow participation of young students).
I suspect he did understand that USERN is a real and commendable organization, but was running out of subjects so he decided to launch his smear campaign anyway, just to collect his daily dose of visitors. But that is beside the point. What the above anecdote leads me to say is that today it may be less than immediate to figure out whether a conference is a motivated, genuine science dissemination event or whether it is instead a way to collect registration fees. For even by digging into web sites and checking profiles, you may be left in doubt.
That leads me to provoke a discussion by asking you: what distinguishes a high-brow, long-tradition conference in some scientific discipline, you name it, from a new event with no pedigree proposed by some honest group of scholars, less well-known than the boards of advisors of those high-brow events? No, wait, don't walk away, it is a real question. Of course, the creme de la creme of scientists from all over the world fight to attend or give a presentation at those well-established events - it gives them prestige, enriches their CV, allows them to listen to high-quality science, and to meet highly esteemed colleagues.
But what if the same people gathered for a before-unheard event organized by those unknown but well-meaning individuals, and gave the same talks, met the same colleagues, got the same experience? Of course, their CV would not be enriched just as much, but the other boxes would still get checked. The difference is, of course, that there are established institutions that can ask for very high registration fees without having anyone blink, and new conferences proposed by non-established groups, where a high registration price is an immediate flag of a scam.
Where am I getting? Well, I think the core of the problem is that the academic world lives a prosperous life in an environment where there are other priorities than just profit. But that is not what happens on this planet today - here profit (direct cash or higher prestige and ranking, which in the end still gets monetized) is everything. If profit is all everybody cares about, I cannot see how we cannot drift into a system where the original goal - the dissemination of knowledge, in the case of conferences - is completely offset by the imperative of making more money. The shortage of funds to Universities and Research centers pushes from all directions into bloated administrations, absurd self-ranking systems where the number of publications is all that matters, and conferences which must grow, because only if they grow they make a profit.
Take the publishing world now. The same applies: new journals are popping up like popcorn in a heated oven. I work for one of the biggest, more well-reputed publishers around (Elsevier) and am the editor in chief of one of their journals and an editor of another. Luckily for me, those journals are well-enough established that they do not need me to proactively search for authors, exploiting my scientific network and my leverage power over younger colleagues. But that is indeed what happens in most of the "reputable" journals around - at striking non-variance from what "predatory journals" are doing.
Competition is so strong that stuff gets published real quickly, peer reviews become less and less strict, quality goes down, paper mill activities become impossible to flag or stop, and all the final production smells of something else than rigorous science. Again, what is the difference between a predatory journal and a well-established one? Both work for a profit - here we can say it even louder because these companies have a name and are registered enterprises, rather than groups of scientists from a few top universities. it would be okay to work for a profit if that were *not* the only goal. But in this case too, I am starting to lose the capability of seeing a distinction.
In the end this article has indeed become a kind of rant. And that was not my real intention, because to be honest, the academic world may have a lot of bugs, but it is still the best system we have - we should protect it and try to improve it, or at least avoid it from getting polluted by centrifugal forces. If we remind ourselves that we live in a world where some individuals are allowed to amass disgustingly large wealths and others are denied even the most basic needs, the problem of business-driven academia suddenly becomes a very minor one. And in addition, I have no recipe to counter those centrifugal forces.
I see what isn't working, but can't do much about it because there is really no good alternative. Or maybe I am too pessimistic?
Comments