Fixing the de Solla Price Problem

Happy April Fool's day, but unfortunately, it will be increasingly hard to tell which articles in scientific publications if any are a joke as opposed to just poorly contrived nonsense. We have reached the fin-de-cicle on a cycle forseen by Derek de Solla Price.

In spite of being one of the grandfather's of information science and the progenitor of the MOOC if not online education, Derek de Solla Price will probably never receive the acclaim he deserves for various reasons, including the fact that he was a bit of an elitist.

As both a physicist and historian of science he saw many problems in science coming that even few scientists would have imagined in the 1940s. A few of de Solla Price's

choice observations of his are listed below:

"Scientists have a strong urge to write papers but only a relatively mild one to read them."

"It is clear that we cannot go up another two orders of magnitude as we have climbed the last five. If we did, we should have two scientists for every man, woman, child, and dog in the population, and we should spend on them twice as much money as we had. Scientific doomsday is therefore less than a century distant."

de Solla Price also noted that the number of significant important scientific publications had not grown with an increasing number of scientists and publications. Unfortunately, de Solla Price's elitist ideas seem in sync with reality.

Great scientific breakthroughts have not multiplied as phenomenally as the amount of fraud in scientific publishing. The proliferation of fake science journals and now fake science conferences seems to be a phenomenon of the late 20th and 21st century. Even prestigious journals from reputable publishing houses are known by those on the inside to have a problem with , em , oversight... to be specific, peer review. Peer review , or lack of it, is the core of the problem. Many articles were written about peer review scandals - when there was no real peer review- but equally scandalous is the amount of bias, the number of conflict of interest cases and just plain out academic incest going on.

de Solla Price foresaw a problem of a glut of publication from an army of mediocre scientists, but he didn't see the worst side of the phenomenon: that this deluge of watered down science would eventually lead to a shambolic mess where every researcher gets daily requests from fake open-access medical journals, and it has become hard for even scientists to even know what is real.

But the peer review could be cleaned of these problems given a few changes in the system. As more and more scientific people have moved toward understanding computers, it opens the possibility of peer review that is as well version controlled as a group programming project on GitHub or Bitbucket. Some people had to learn Git, probably think this is a ridiculous goal..but think about it: If you want to see how I made a computer program, you open up my GitHub- and you can track things like what and when I did for the program- and how much of it was mine. You can't figure out how much of it was me sitting on my husband's computer, writing under his name, or vice versa...but you can get a pretty good approximate idea of what I did. And if I really cared to differentiate myself from any other programmer, including my husband, I could do that as well.

Introducing a version-control like version of peer review will inevitably bring brand new problems. Not the least of which will be to enhance the inequalities in science research that keep it by and large a game of well connected people with more resources...on the other hand, scientists themselves are so sick of the nonsense- I would guess the transition is inevitable. As I poked around on the internet I saw a project that may have already tried to create the technology: Aletheia. Unfortunately, it met the fate of so many open-source projects, it seems to have died out, and left no obvious easy to dissect codebase. That death may have been a very good thing, because looking at some documentation, Aletheia strove for community moderation controlled peer review- an idea that in the wrong permutation would simply give birth to all of the worst problems of the old peer review system, and a whole bunch of new ones. What does seem to be surviving and thriving is a sort of half sibling to version controlled peer review - FOAM (I'm looking at you Radiopaedia, and your April Fool's joke too). Nonetheless, the idea of open source, free publishing with version controlled peer review is slowly going to get around even science's neglected corners like plant biology. The only question is how to implement it to fix things.