One of the original four pillars of the original Science 2.0 concept was modernizing publication of research. Open access, I have always said, is an important first step.
First step? Isn't the problem settled by open access, by taking down the subscription firewall?
No, taxpayers still pay for that, open access is just making a new kind of publisher wealthy using government money. Science 2.0 has instead advocated open publication, where no one has to pay to publish or to read. Obviously open access publishers say that is untenable - the exact argument they use against subscription publishers is modified only slightly. A subscription journal claims it costs them about $5,000 to publish a study, an open access publisher says it costs them around $1,000. It's simply different.
Publication can be free. No one has to pay anything. I can make it work. Not only can I make it work, I can pay people to publish their work, and I can pay people to review it.
Yes, you read that right, those baby steps companies keep trying to make are no longer needed. Science 2.0 has shown proof-of-concept that even on a small scale, everyone can get paid. No one does anything here for free. Nothing. And that can apply to the other 3 Pillars of Science 2.0 also.
Now, the first obstacle is the influx of articles that happens when something is free. As we have seen in the hyper-competitive digital world, not only are traditional publishers scrambling to pump out as many articles as possible with nothing resembling true peer review, PNAS with its female hurricanes and and hermaphroditic frogs and Facebook emotional manipulation stuff, open access really turns that amp up to 11 - PLOS ONE alone pumps out 120 articles every business day, all implied to have peer review. Imagine if it were free.
Publish or perish used to be a problem for researchers - they had to compete to get in print. Now, publish or perish is the mentality of corporations. They need to produce as many articles as possible. If some pesky editor at Journal X won't publish your article, the company recommends you go to Journal Y at the same company.
Journals stand the risk of being overrun because scientists are good people, in most cases - they believe in science as an endeavor for the public good, and so they will do things like peer review to give back to their field. There already aren't enough peer reviewers, true Open Publication would cause a complete breakdown, with a backlog of 5 years.
Marlow is basically writing an endorsement of Academia.edu, a competitor to ResearchGate (1), and they have the right idea but their idea of 'incentivizing' reviewers is still tasking someone else with changing the culture to meet their Utopian ideology. Now tenure committees and grant committees are going to have to change to recognize that a researcher does peer review or blogs or whatever?
That's not going to happen, the government is spending $60 billion a year for research, not for blogging or peer review, Johns Hopkins pays scientists to keep $1 billion in NIH funding coming in, not to do blogging or peer review. We can't redefine 'getting paid' and promise some mythical future where scientists will be lauded for things they do outside their real job.
If we want the best people to do peer review, pay them. Don't use some 'incentivize' buzzword, pay people. Real money. Even if it is not a lot, it tells them their knowledge has value.
While American tenure jobs are quite lucrative, prior to that academic science really isn't. A brand new Ph.D. who decides they want to give back to academia is hit with the realization that they are going to make as much money as an intern at a private company. That's a problem we created by spending $5 billion on STEM outreach to convince people they should go into academia - there are 6X as many PhDs each year as there are jobs for them.
(1) Academia.edu has never tried to poach Science 2.0, so they are automatically superior to ResearchGate, though in fairness ResearchGate also claimed to be Facebook and last.fm, so they initially sought to define themselves by piggybacking on more popular concepts. In general, Germany has a bad habit of trying to hijack Science 2.0, even their academics do it. They are, however, not as crazy as Russia, which even created a (now defunct) Science 2.0 TV show.
