Why is this project needed?

Academia is trapped in a collective action problem: individual researchers are incentivised to act in ways that hurt their community’s best interest and, ultimately, their own (e.g., publishing in legacy journals, or keeping one’s code and data private). On top of this, scientific journals are demanding higher fees than ever, with university libraries being charged up to $20,000 every year to subscribe to a single journal, in some egregious cases of publisher profiteering: http://openscience.ens.fr/ABOUT_OPEN_ACCESS/ARTICLES/2011_08_29_The_Guardian_about_academic_publishers.pdf

Any one individual could take a stand against this pressure, of course, but by doing so they would be placing their career at risk. Fears like these have held back progress in academia and perpetuated a system that is unjust, inefficient and contrary to the spirit of scientific research.

How could we fix this problem?

Imagine if every researcher in the world decided that from tomorrow, we would do things differently. We might decide to boycott legacy journals in favour of fee-free open access journals (‘platinum’ or ‘diamond’ open access), thus boosting their reputation and allowing us to support them without fear for our careers. We might decide to publish all of the reviews we write, thus exposing predatory journals (which pretend to conduct peer review, for a hefty fee) and normalising reviews as valuable research contributions in their own right. Or we might decide to share code and data for all of our research, thus exposing fraudsters and facilitating collaboration on a global scale. By acting together, the research community could wield incredible power in reshaping academia in line with our needs and values because, collectively, we are the system. This strategy has been used for centuries to address collective action problems in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., industrial strikes, Kickstarter), but remains to be implemented within academia in any kind of systematic way.

What are we doing?

At Project Free Our Knowledge, we’re building the world’s first collective action platform for researchers. Our website hosts campaigns that are created and developed with input from the research community, and seek to increase support for open and reproducible research practices, as well as promoting more fair and aligned publishing practices. Researchers can support these campaigns by making a ‘pledge’, which is a commitment to adopt a particular action described in the campaign. Depending on the campaign design, pledges can either activate immediately (i.e., at the time of signing), or once some critical mass of pledges is met (these are called ‘conditional pledges’). By gauging community support in this way prior to taking action, ‘conditional pledges’ seek to protect researchers’ interests until such time that they can move together with their broader community. Think of it like Kickstarter, but for motivating behavioural change rather than products.

What is our vision for the future?

In the early days, we expect our campaigns will ask small cohorts of researchers (tens or hundreds of people) to adopt simple actions (e.g., upload some data, post a preprint, or join a new platform). In the future, however, we plan to build on these small-scale successes to host ever-larger and bolder campaigns that ask thousands or tens of thousands of researchers to adopt progressively bolder behaviours (e.g., permanently changing one’s publishing practices, or pressuring institutions to change their hiring practices). By probing the academic system from multiple directions at once, across multiple fields at once, we hope to tap into the latent desires of different research communities and, through collective action, empower disenfranchised researchers around the world to create positive change in academia.

About the Committee for Collective Action in Science

I am a fourth-year PhD student at the faculty of psychology and neuroscience at Maastricht University. I have witnessed firsthand the flaws and perverse incentives inherent in the current publishing system and I believe this is an area I can make a significant impact. I am also part of the New Science of Mental Disorders consortium, a project which includes research groups from six universities across the Netherlands and Belgium. This gives me many opportunities to disseminate pledges among other scientists and recruit additional support for the project.

The other members of my team include Wim Pouw from Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Daniel Hudson from Osnabrück University, and Tomasz Steifer from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, all of whom have significant experience with open science initiatives and activism.

Dan Hudson and Wim Pouw have been working together for over a year to create a pledge reducing profiteering in academic publishing. During this time, they have connected with interested researchers at numerous universities, nationally and internationally, and have reviewed a plethora of sources: journalistic, academic and national/funding body policy documents. Dan has also conducted research for various UK government departments, and analysed regulations and policy as a Business Analyst, furnishing him with the skills to understand stakeholder organisations and to position the project within a broader context.

How much money do you need?

$10,000 would allow us to hire a part-time student assistant for one year to promote the aforementioned collective action campaigns. Anything more would allow us to pay the assistant for longer or for more hours per week, or the funds could be directed to improving the website.

Links to any supporting documents or information

The project website is https://freeourknowledge.org and the current collective action campaign can be found at https://freeourknowledge.org/2024-01-30-collective-action-in-science-diamond/

Estimate your probability of succeeding if you get the amount of money you asked for

I estimate that with the additional work of an assistant, the first planned campaign for Diamond Open Access publishing will reach 500 signatures within a year with about 80% odds. Without the assistant, relying only on the efforts of the current team this will be closer to 50%.