Science or business: The urgency of the choice

Abstract

I may simply be naive, but when I chose a science career, I was aiming at the thrill of discovery, the pursuit of knowledge, the excitation of understanding the way nature does it. It never crossed my mind for a second that all of it had to be reconciled with business-as-usual principles.

Nevertheless, after a few decades I struggle to find it the way I dreamed it. It seems that science, like most of our activities has been strongly permeated with the for-profit arena. Of all of scientific activities, it is perhaps the publication world where this seems to be more obvious. In a time where the publish or die principles is the rule, huge businesses have emerged making the publication activity a for profit organization instead of a for-the-development-of science activity.

In this context, professional associations and academia must unite to change all this towards a less profit-oriented arena. It will not happen easily, it may even backfire. In fact, we have seen just that in the context of the open access format. It emerged to promote the free dissemination of scientific knowledge, but quickly became a way of changing the cost from the reader to the author, making it even less easy to publish.

It is because of all this that fully free publication journals, such as Athena-Health & Research Journal, must be encouraged to increase in numbers and activity. This is only possible if the academia is willing to get back the control of its production. In fact, the business of publication is even controlling the bibliometric tools, effectively discouraging authors to publish in fully open access journals because of their younger age and lower impact factors. Careful thought must however be taken into consideration by all payers in the process. Are we willing to allow businesses to dictate where science money is to be invested (in business journals)? Shouldn’t we be gradually shifting towards academia-controlled journals (or professional/science associations-controlled ones)? Even if it is done at the cost of a transient lower author h-index! Shouldn’t we expect the grant agencies to take this into account? Should we still use a significant amount of grant money to ensure payed open access publication when fully free journals are available? Shouldn't we be promoting the creation of these journals and embrace them with our papers?

I believe this is a much-needed revolution, and at Athena-Health & Research Journal we are more than willing to do our part. The question remains. Who is willing to join?

P.S. The current text is the sole opinion of the author and in no way can be looked as he opinion or the policy of Athena-Health & Research Journal.