Hierarchies of values ​​and mechanisms of value control have long been established in the scientific community. Professional societies, universities, institutes, publishing houses and specialized journals, where only the most useful or valuable results, only the best people, appeared. The hierarchy of values ​​was clear, even if not necessarily exact – because we know from grammar: the absolute highest degree does not admit of comparisons. You are an excellent student, then you can’t do it anymore more excellent than others. At least not if you speak any human language correctly, whatever it is. What were the best universities, or the best journals, or the best publishers…it was obvious to anyone in the field. There was no need to count, score, classify.

In the early modern era, these hierarchies were for a time concentrated in continental Europe. Along with French, the unofficial language of science was German. After the Second World War, dominance passed to the English-speaking world, and for the communist space – to Russian. By the end of the Cold War, English had become the unofficial language of science almost all over the world. But the end of the Cold War, together with the material progress of the rest of the world, raised the level and ambitions of the periphery of the scientific environment. China has been at the forefront, launching a systematic campaign to make its voice heard as a world power, not only economically or politically, but also academically. Asking the question “how do we get to the top of the academic world?”, China launched a university ranking, unofficially called the “Shanghai Ranking” (ARWU). This ranking did something new: it proposed ranking universities to the decimal point based on strictly numerical criteria, primarily based on how much they publish in specialized journals. Then by quantity. This approach was liked by many, especially in the administrative environment – because it allowed to build simple and concrete plans, how to “climb the career ladder”. With more x hundreds of works per year rise in the rating p places how do you do it? It seems simple, you take measures: you pay those who publish better, hire people who publish a lot, arrange for someone “from the outside” to take you as a co-author of articles, etc. May there be many of them. Especially in countries on the periphery of science, the Shanghai ranking has become very popular: it has given us the impression that we know what to do to be at the top. what a big deal More jobs. Oh, of course, money is needed for work. Consequently, institutions and people on the fringes of the academic world saw an open path to the top. To the debunking of American, English or German universities/magazines/publishing houses. Today, the goal is to “dismantle hierarchies in science” – for example here.

In Romania, for example, UBB has set a goal of entering the top 500 universities of the Shanghai ranking. The Shanghai madness created proselytes. Today, there are several international rankings – some, perhaps, much more complex and realistic than the Shanghai one. In everything, however, it is the “quantity of…” that counts. Between them, as another model, stands the QS ranking, where an important component returns to the traditional model based on the qualitative assessment of experts, rather than blind counting of papers of any type. In fact, it is important to say that more and more rankings are starting to follow QS and move away from the paper counting paradigm – let’s call it “numerological”.

However, in order to issue more, there were not enough already existing mechanisms on the periphery. In traditional publishing houses and magazines, there was no place for the rapid ascent of peripheral ones. Not necessarily because of discrimination, but primarily because of value – a value that cannot grow as fast as we would like. Thus, in the last 30 years, countless new magazines have appeared, much more open to the periphery. The online environment has also helped, where, unlike traditional magazines, you can publish as many articles as you want. Gradually, those who published routine or lower-quality things found themselves in huge masses and streams of information, competing with the classic ones. Fools, but many, words of the writer. This vast mass on the periphery slowly distorted the mechanisms of quantitative assessment in academia. Many documents, many quotes – all of them say almost nothing in substance, but … count the number.

In a few years, classical publishing houses and magazines begin to give way more and more to peripheral ones. Complicating matters further, peripheral publishers have adopted a new economic model. They make their articles freely available on the Internet…but charge authors a fee for publication. Traditional publishers had a different model: publication is free, but access to articles is only by subscription. An expensive subscription that peripheral countries could afford rarely or with difficulty. And if you don’t have a subscription, you’re not up to date with cutting-edge science, so you can’t do cutting-edge science. In the traditional model, if you were good, you had access to resources, including money. With more money, you could be as good or even better. On the periphery, in less developed countries, with little money, you didn’t have the opportunity to catch up with those at the top – except for rare exceptions. A few years ago, the president of the Romanian Academy described our situation as follows: a few islands of excellence in an ocean of mediocrity. But sometimes with communist nostalgia (sometimes according to communist ideologies), the periphery increasingly began to say: we want free access for everyone to scientific literature. Let this capitalist model disappear, where those with money use the work of researchers from all over the world. This speech hallucinatingly resembles the speech of the Bolshevik revolution: out with the exploiters, let all be equal. And this is what the Bolshevik revolution did in Russia, and then in many other places: it swept away the old elites and replaced them on paper with equality among all. Except for those watching… the tie was more on paper. The old “white” king was replaced by a new “red” one. Boyars and patrons – with “party secretaries”. Kings with lifetime presidents. Royal dynasties with dynasties of party secretaries. All subsequent bloody wars.

Much the same is happening in academia today. Classical publishing houses are under siege by peripheral ones. Like the “whites” during the Bolshevik revolution, they find it increasingly difficult to cope with the wave of disillusionment on which those on the periphery, the “reds/Bolsheviks”, are saddled. And the Bolshevik discourse is now taking root even in Western scientific circles. You can often hear about the “greed” of traditional publishers and that access to works should be free for everyone. Publishers should stop charging us for access. Russia long ago launched the SciHub platform, where it pirates all scientific articles from any journal. Non-traditional publishing houses, such as Hindawi or MDPI, today collect about 80% of the “production” of works in Romania. And this, ironically, brings to the fore the problem of money: these publishers do not charge money to read their articles, but they charge a lot of money to publish them. And suddenly, after seeming like banners of equality in the academic environment, of defending the right of the poor to excellence, these new publishing houses have become as capitalist as the Western scaffolding with which they compete. Unexpectedly, but quite predictably for those who understood the Bolshevik Revolution of 100+ years ago, it is not about giving power to the masses, but about transferring power from one to another.

The publishers described above use the phrase “Open Access” and the ethical argument of everyone’s right to science. You just have to understand well: one is open access, and the other is that authors have to pay. Many Romanian journals have been open access for a long time, but they charge neither authors nor readers. Again, there are three topics that need to be discussed separately – and that almost no one understands: (1) everyone’s access to science, (2) getting paid to publish, (3) the quality of what you publish.

In Romania today we have a strong anti-open access movement in the form of a motley coalition between (1) purists who target only the most prestigious traditional journals and are concerned about the average or mediocre quality of most open access scientific materials. literature, (2) traditionalists concerned about the abuse of “numerology” with the number of papers in fields where publishing papers is not a normal practice of disseminating results/knowledge, (3) mediocrities who won’t publish anything anyway, so cling to any campaign against of any publication, (4) purists who say that paying to publish is unethical, (5) current elites who see themselves threatened by the replacement brought about by the Bolshevik wave exemplified by private Open Access publishers or ratings such as the ARWU . _Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro