column | The whole world communicates with each other for free, except for the flag

The Spinoza and Stephen Prizes have been awarded this week to four scientists. These prices are an absolute dream. With this money, the researchers buy freedom and space for their pure curiosity. They can ask exactly the questions they want, regardless of whether they are considered fashionable by juries and committees.

Don’t forget: a lot of scientists get no money at all to do science. They are paid for the patient care or education they provide. They have to raise money for their own research by applying for grants.

The idea behind this is that the best applications are awarded funding, and evaluated by other scientists, of course. an opportunity A successful application fluctuates between 10 and 20 percent, but thanks to the high degree of randomness and chance, it still makes sense to place an order ten times, just as it makes sense to keep buying charge cards if you keep getting one-tenth the chance of winning the jackpot.

All sciences are designed to judge one another. Academic freedom is nice and sweet, you can hang your own garlands and set your own accents. But anyone who wants money for their project or wants to publish something has to go through the polls. This is sometimes a useful exercise that improves your search. Often it is mainly about cosmetic corrections and the obligatory repetition of experiments.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is just beginning to communicate openly with each other on social media. I’ve always found this frustrating. Why couldn’t we live-tweet our experiments in the university lab and put the articles online as blogs? It has partially become a reality. Articles now appear first on a type of blog, called a “preprint server” where you post your knowledge at the touch of a button.

That was a storm during the corona crisis. There was no time to poll, when it got really urgent the way was to get in touch quickly.

But she wasn’t called for nothing.”prepress‘-server. It still means that a real article has been approved by anonymous peers and published in an official journal, the so-called “printing pressOnly then will your publication list be credited. Then you can use it as an academic medium of exchange through which you will receive subsidies and promotions.

Surprisingly, a huge bill followed. The whole world communicates with each other for free; Blogs, posts and publications. Except for science. He pays about three thousand euros to publish such a manuscript on the publisher’s website. The list of widely published Spinoza Prize laureate publications costs the university about 30,000 a year. A billion dollar profit for publishers at the lowest cost.

This afternoon in my country to do-List: Review an article by colleagues who have been online for a long time. And here and there I modify my own article which has also been on the Internet for a long time, so that I also get new means of exchange, for the payment of a few thousand euros. In 2020, researchers collectively spent one hundred million man-hours evaluating the work of others. Sometimes it takes years before the article is finally read. Everything is done for that suspicion that this sport has not been proven by the jury The quality is getting better.

In 2023, that’s a completely dubious claim. Papers in which errors have been deliberately added are also rated excellent. Papers with falsified or faltering results were also judged sufficient for publication. And what happened during the Corona crisis? There is now a good capacity for self-purification of the scientific community beyond the traditional ones Peer review. Bad apples are removed from prepress servers by explicitly discussing the reliability and quality of such an article. free.