Thanks to The Economist, I read yesterday about a paper in PLOS Medicine that suggests there are analogues between academic publishing and economic scarcity.  Yes, I am arguably burying the lede of the Economist article – that the paper explains why most scientific research is wrong – but I think the more interesting dilemma is the notion that scarce space in the top-drawer journals (usually considered as Science, Nature and Cell) artificially inflates the value of that work.

The problem comes from the selectivity of the journals.  Much like selective colleges, these journals reject most of what is submitted to them.  The assumption is that what is left must be top quality work.  However, selectivity does not necessarily equal quality.  The authors argue that the constraints of scientific publishing have artificially restricted the amount of space in top-flight journals to the point that not all high-quality work could be published in a timely fashion.  You may have noticed this is a not-so-subtle argument for open access publishing models that have significantly reduced costs and the ability to publish much more quality research.

As I posted yesterday, open access models are making progress.  But the biggest stumbling block to addressing this problem of artificial scarcity is dealing with the associated reputation.  Tenure committees and other bastions of academic bureaucracy will look down their noses at publications that lack the pedigree they are used to.  I know there is ‘gray literature’ in some fields (like physics) where online archives have flourished.  But I don’t know if that literature has effectively contributed to tenure and other reputation decisions.

This economic arguments made in PLOS Medicine resonate – at least for me – with the supply and demand arguments that Roger and Dan Sarewitz made in a paper they released in Environmental Science and Policy last year.  However, the supply and demand discussed in the PLOS Medicine article is arguable distinct from the supply and demand that Pielke and Sarewitz discuss in their article.  Part of this is because the economic selection of research made in scientific publishing is not the same one that Pielke and Sarewitz suggest would be made of research for public policy.  How those competing economies are reconciled (or not) is a perennial frustration in science and technology policy.