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Transcript

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0:00Who are the characters behind science? This is Science Behind the Glass, illuminated in human sight. In this podcast, we unveil the human sight of laboratories and science. Scientists share personal experiences, and we’ll discuss their meanings from different perspectives and fields of research. Welcome to Science Behind the Glass.

0:29In this episode, we have the privilege of hosting Dr. Ana María Cheto, a distinguished theoretical physicist from UNAM. with an impressive academic background. She is the president of the Mexican Physical Society, president and founder of Latindex, and has made multiple contributions to physics, including significant contributions to quantum mechanics and electrodynamics. Dr. Cheto has made an indelible mark in science, but has also been actively involved in initiatives for peace consolidation, notably through her role in the International Atomic Energy Agency. Additionally, The Latinx system she founded in the 1990s decade is a cooperation network supporting open access to quality scientific knowledge. This has helped transformative initiatives in science communication in Latin America. In today’s episode, we delve into the world of scientific publishing and learn how the research and discoveries are disseminated.

1:25We will discuss the impact of research and how it’s measured. Of course, how these aspects affect the human side of science. Get ready for an enlightening conversation as we explore the insights of a great woman in science in Mexico. Welcome Dr. Cheto and thank you for joining us. This is a summary of the original interview. To start, Dr. Cheto, what led you to choose a body in science and in particular in physics? Well, since I was young, I was intrigued by how the world around us works. In particular, the physical world.

1:59Without knowing when I was young what physics was, I did have a lot of curiosity to understand phenomena related to physics. And well, that curiosity, thanks to my parents and some good teachers, not all of them, led to the path of physics. I also really liked biology and geology. But by that time, biology curriculum in Mexico was still very descriptive, and the geology as well. Great. Apart from the passion you have for physics, we have also seen that you have worked a lot on the scientific dissemination side. making it more equitable for everyone.

2:35Could you explain to us how you’ve seen the evolution of scientific publishing in recent years? It has changed immensely. When one looks back at the 20th century, the transformation that the world of publication has undergone is remarkable. At the beginning of the century, there were only a few journals, and the vast majority of them were distributed nationally, meaning they were German, English, French, and Danish journals, but all were published locally, and also used the language of the author’s mother tongues in most cases. At the first half of the last century, new journals were also created, and to some extent, became international. Researchers began to use journals’ editors’ work. With the institutionalization of science came the creation of researchers’ positions that practically didn’t exist in the 19th century. But in the 20th century, departments, institutes, etc. started to be created, and researcher positions were established, leading to the flourishing of science careers. Since then, publications had multiplied. By the middle of the 20th century, there was a noticeable difference. Many journals and spaces had been created for these researchers to publish their work, especially after the end of World War II, when industrialized countries and the ones that had participated in the war decided to invest substantially in science. Scientific production multiplied. Well, what we call scientific production now, which wasn’t even spoken of before.

4:07It’s a term that comes from the industrial area, but it was also transferred to science. Indicators were created to measure the scientific production. It’s a kind of prestige stamp that was assigned to the indicators. Not only indicators of journal production, but also articles referring to the individual production of researchers. And that’s what we are. These indicators carry a lot of weight and have led to the proliferation of many commercial journals that charge for publication, and authors have to figure out where to get the money to pay for their articles to be published.

4:40Normally, its universities or research entries are the ones paying for this, but that’s where we end up paying commercial companies to distribute the product of our research. The article itself doesn’t generate these impact values. How does this work? Yes, it is the same people in the publishing field who introduced these indicators, not only of production quantity but supposedly of the impact of the articles. Originally, this was more for understanding how researchers relate to each other through the research network. That was the original intention. However, this numerical information was quickly seized upon the invent a quantitative measure. referring to the number of citations each article in a journal receives.

5:25Later on, this impact factor, which somehow measures the impact of the journal, was used to measure the impact of the researchers based on the number of the articles they publish in journals, which is a particular impact factor. But these things are changing because… There is now a strong movement to set aside this impact factor because it is a very partial and unfair measure of the value and quality of the publications. Yes, but precisely speaking of how this evaluation system and the publishers have evolved, how do you see universities and institutions have adapted to all these transitions? Do you think they have simply gone with the flow or is there some kind of counterproposal? Well, initially, they mostly went with the flow. The trend started in the northern countries, especially in the United States and Europe. And well, as usual, we followed the trend. We didn’t have the interest or the initiative to come up with our own criteria that could better reflect our own situations and our context. It was a domino effect that occurred.

6:29It started in the north and ended up affecting all universities, practically worldwide. It continues this way in most universities, especially ours. And it’s because the domino effect always has a delay. But there are starting to be reactions, and it started some time ago. For example, the San Francisco Declaration, DORA. This declaration emerged during the Biology Congress in San Francisco. The president of the National Academy of Sciences in America was present there. It was thanks to his initiative and some of the… his colleagues that the issue of metrics, the abuse of metrics in the evaluation of academic staff and institutions, was put on the table for discussion. From that congress, the Dora Declaration emerged, which has already been translated into Spanish. Latinx, along with colleagues from other countries in Latin America, took the task of translating and disseminating and is also assigning it to adhere to it. Recently, there have been other demonstrations in several countries and universities against the abuse of impact factor and other metrics that are simplistic, partial, unfair, and do not take context into account. There is already a controversy surrounding this, and we can say with pleasure and pride that many colleagues from Latin American countries are also participating in this movement that opposes the abuse of metrics and are seeking alternative ways to value and evaluate the work of the scientists and publications.

7:58Of course, with that contest you have provided, but do you think researchers who continually seek to publish in renowned journals can be affected personally? Yes, well, they are affected in many ways. Publishing in high -impact factor journals doesn’t necessarily mean that they are the best journals. Researchers have to join a circle that already has a certain prestige or presence in those journals. It is very difficult to enter from the outside, especially if you are a researcher from a country that is not dominant in science.

8:27It is hard to penetrate those circles and we realized this when submitting a manuscript because the editors and referees of those journals are unfamiliar with our work. well, often don’t even know our names. And it doesn’t mean that we are doing a bad work. We could be doing first class work, but we don’t belong to their circle of acquaintances. And that counts to publish, even if it is not admitted or there is no awareness of it. So a young researcher in one of our countries who want to succeed in that sense has to establish their connections. This influences the choices of research topics. And there are serious analyses that demonstrate that and conclude that this way of evaluating work has influenced the thematic of the research or the topics that are developed in research, in guiding and redirecting this research in all the countries. And that’s the case for many people. Many people have to change even their preference to fit into what is being published predominantly. Yes, indeed. That’s why it is so important to respond to that. seek alternatives and demonstrate that we are also producing quality work. And considering this, how are the publishing industry and publishers reacting? Do you see them starting to recognize precisely those laws that exist in their impact measurement indexes and seeking alternative ways to evaluate the merit of the research they intend to publish? Not from commercial publishers. Actually, there is no indication of talentation or recognition.

9:56Their main goal is profit and anything that contributes to their business. They monitor the reaction of scientific communities and universities to ensure that their business continues or even multiplies. The consortia are getting larger and larger, buying out small publishers, resulting in a small group of publishers dominating over 50 % of the publishing industry today. But there are also more independent movements precisely to promote non -commercial, non -profit open access publishing. Some universities are already directly reacting against the business practices of large publishers and taking significant steps.

10:34For example, by canceling contracts, they have with some of those major publishers, as is the case of California University. And also, more recently in France, the CNRS, the research century, decided to cancel its contract with Scopus, which is the major indexing service that comes with impact factors. So these are very, very important steps. Steps that don’t happen overnight. I mean, there’s been a lot of work behind it because this resistance is strong. There is a conflict of interest here. And it’s important to note that universities are mostly the ones paying the bill for all of this that ends up in the hands of commercially profitable publishers.

11:16There’s also a major issue, the issue of proprietary journals. And what effects do you consider they are causing in scientific development and in the lives of scientists from this perspective? There is a whole range of journals. There are some suspicious, there are some deceptive, some are downright fraudulent, and some are simply poor quality. For me, they are a product of the dominance of the publishing business. An scrupulous individual saw that there was a business and created journals offering cheaper and more accessible publishing spaces, and also offering researchers a simple review process was the way. every day we discover new tricks that have been invented to grow their business and the number of fraudulent journals has grown a lot but not in our region no not only in our countries because it’s not profitable where they grow the most is where it’s in private hands Of course, all these dynamics of the free market start to occur in companies by other companies and eliminate competition and seek monopoly and so on. Yes, sometimes these publishers manage to deceive a prestigious entity who is somewhat confused or offer them an alternative space and they fall for it. And then that gives prestige to that journal and then others fall like flies. Yes. Well, many times precisely the arguments are to maintain this business and these arguments of the system of publications is that they see that they provide quality edition services

12:48and the open science could compromise this quality ethics and some other things. I don’t know. How do you see these arguments? If you think that the survival of publishing companies would be at risk with open science? Open science is not against quality. On the contrary, we can see the statistics of the number of papers that have been retracted. Those ones are the ones that have been published in commercial journals by major prestigious publishers, not by genuinely open science journals like ours. In our journals, no, because they are freely accessible and not for profit. So we are outside of the circle of commercial interest. And it’s good that way because we have an alternative that counters the vicious cycle. Do you think that these publishing businesses see their survival threatened by the existence of these open science options? No, not because they have the ability actually to update themselves.

13:44For example, the Plan S, which makes all published materials openly accessible, has ensured that organizations funding research in rich countries pay them, even in advance. In fact, the business they make in Nigeria represents a larger percentage than Microsoft or Google. They are very lucrative businesses because they know how to adapt. They know what interests them. They know what is prestige.

14:10They know that prestige is a currency, both for researchers and for institutions. That’s what they create or promote the creation of university rankings. And those who do those rankings provide the data to the publishers. The rankings are based on data provided by the commercial companies. Sadly, that part of open answers, as you did mention, is the orders or institutions that have to pay a high price from $2,000 to $3,000 or even more, depending on the journal. But the orders don’t receive anything. The amount of new journals titles created every year is impressive, but not because there is a need or because a new area of knowledge is emerging. This is not contributing to scientific advancement in the sense that important new discoveries are being made. It is simply producing more for airmeans’ sake. With all the strategies that publishers have, what have been the researchers’ strategies to counter publishing businesses? For example, tell us a little more about Latindex and the alternatives you promote for open science and how this could promote other changes towards science that everyone can access. Ethindex was created at the time when the internet was just beginning to be used, around the 90s. For us, it never occurs to make a profit. What was important for us was to give visibility to the scientific production of Latin America and Ibero -America and to recognize that there is also a quality of journals. That’s why we produced both the directory and the catalog, which contains journals

15:41that have gone through an editorial quality filter. And it was at the beginning of this century when the new wave of open access began. For us, access had always been open. We thought, okay, now everything will be open access. But the concepts of open access began to distort. and the charges were transferred from libraries and also transferred to the authors so editorials establish their agreements and their businesses with the major foundations that finance science in rich countries and with that they ensure the survival of their business but we continue to promote open science and free access and what has been very important is to find allies to find out that we are not alone in this we have allies for example at the international level we have always worked with the International ISSN Center, which assigns numbers to journals and registration numbers.

16:35we have worked with and supported the creation of Latin American directories repositories that also promote access to publications and what has been very important is also to promote the elevation of the quality of our journals our own universities and scientific societies produce quality journals unfortunately many universities in our region especially public universities have taken great care in producing their journals.

17:00But we have the problem that we don’t handle the English language with the same ease that is used today for communication in science. And the topics working in our regions often are not of international interest, meaning there are many other factors operating against us. But still, we believe that this is not a reason to stop promoting these changes. And now that you mentioned this part, English is a significant barrier for Latin American countries. and not only Latin America but also Asian and African countries. How could we close this gap between these two worlds? Well, so many other socioeconomic, cultural, political, and economic interests come into play and different ways of managing their economies. So in the meetings we have had with our counterparts in Europe, it has been evident that the commercial model still operates a lot there. I think we have made progress in establishing a dialogue and understanding each other more, but that doesn’t mean we will operate in the same way. However, we have found that in those European countries we have started this dialogue, there are people people who like our model, who find it attractive, and who see it as a good alternative. That’s super valuable. To conclude and having all this in mind, I don’t know if you would like to close with any particular message or anecdote on the topic we have discussed today.

18:15Well, yes, it could be an opportunity to return to this transition from open access to open science, which is also being worked on in many parts of the world, especially following the recommendation that was approved by the UNESCO General Conference in November 2021. Because the intention of the UNESCO recommendation is not only to open up publications, not only to advance in free and open access to publications, but also to scientific data. There is also the intention… for science to open up more towards the society and towards the other knowledge systems. And this means if you want to do it well and truly, that we must think about more structural changes in the scientific system, including the way of publishing. So that’s a process. It won’t change in short term. But this process of opening up science is very favorable.

19:08That’s why we must actively participate in this process to influence how it happens, to separate it from the commercial model, and to seek a fairer, more equitable way of shaking knowledge and to be able to relate to the rest of the society. I hope that progress can be made, and especially that our communities take advantage of our opportunity, connect with society, and think more about the problems that affect us. Many of us, which are local, others are global. and that deserves to be addressed from our perspective. We need to change how we see science, data, and information, not only as a product, but as a social good.

19:48Thank you very much for accepting the invitation for this interview and for your time. What a fascinating conversation. I believe something we must mention is that scientists are the ones who must obtain funding for their projects, conduct experiments, and write scientific articles. From here to publication, they must use the money from the projects, which sometimes is not much to pay for publication costs, which depending on the journal can range from $1,500 to $10,000 in the most famous journals, such as Nature of Science. What do you think, Dani? Yes, this is one complicated topic. The journal charges whether it is open access or not. As much of the open access content is available through agreements. and institutional subscriptions that also involve other payment models. This is far from, for example, the entertainment book publishing industry, like The Lord of the Rings or this kind of literature. Here, the only benefit that scientists may receive is to improve their performance evaluation at the institution where they work.

20:51These evaluations, as Dr. Chetto mentioned, are based on the number of publications they have and their impact. Now, editorial companies like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, etc. are the ones that send the scientific articles to other researchers that are named academic peer reviewers for review. These reviewers do not raise money for the review, and this process takes a lot of time. After the reviewing process is completed, the editorial sends comments back to the authors and practically asks them to do the editing. the author or authors do not receive any penny from the publication.

21:27Yes, this is also a problem for the personal realm of researchers, because in addition to the pressure of obtaining sufficient resources to publish their work, they also have to allocate time to contribute to on -page reviews, which do not represent benefits for the researcher in terms of editorial services or facilities to publish in the journal for which they are reviewing. On the other hand, when we talk about the new options to make scientific knowledge more accessible, we mention Plan S. All research journals must have the option to publish open access. But who pays? Academic institutions, state financial organizations, for example, the European Union, pay a large amount of money to these publishers. Elsevier, Black & Wild, Taylor & Francis. We end up financing these prestigious publishers. generating profits up to $19 billion, controlling 50 % of the market. This is equivalent to, as Dr. Sheto says, even greater profits than Google and Microsoft. Scientific publishing is one of the most lucrative businesses worldwide.

22:35Yes, it’s something that seems absurd, especially when you think that the poor budgets allocated in countries like those in Latin America end up largely paying these fees of commercial publishers. Furthermore, as we were seeing, all this ends up in reinforcing the evaluation indexes of universities, journals, and scientists. From the ministries of science and academia, I believe it would help a lot to seek new ways to evaluate the impact of scientific research and its protagonist. That’s right, Dani. We need a revolution, but it’s not easy. One of the scientists and promoters of this massive change for science to be freely accessible has been persecuted like a criminal.

23:17She is Alexandra Elbakian, the creator of the Cyclops Shadow Library. This platform allows free access to scientific articles without having to pay. However, she has been sued multiple times in different countries for publications and distribution rights. And guess who sued her? Yes, Elsevier, Black & Wild, Taylor & Francis. In her defense, Alexandra Elbakian questioned the morality of these companies and their legal methods, referring to the Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares the right to science and culture, precisely being the guarantee of this right of one of the main objectives of Sci -Hop, which does not seek profit but to provide free access. Yes, it is a striking case. Let’s hope they don’t sue us because we don’t have a penny. I hope not. We must question why these publication businesses have been maintained for so many years and why the scientific committee allows it when in reality funding entities and project funds come from the people who contribute with taxes. So one wonders why they end up with private publishers. Yes, that’s right. So we are left with the question, how can we change?

24:30things we mentioned several ways changing the way the impact of journals research and scientists is measured strengthening peer reviews so that there are no biases like with double blind methods reducing the commercialization and monetization of scientific knowledge and as dr chettham mentioned creating collaboration networks from institutions and without intermediaries That’s right. We should make science open and accessible to everyone, not just scientists, but the general public as well. Science is a tool that allows decisions to be made critically. This should be applied in all areas. Science should allow the exchange of information, changing the publishing system to be multicultural and adaptable to different contexts. Yes, that’s right. To conclude, we want to thank our interviewee once again and the audience for tuning in to this episode of our podcast. Science behind the glass illuminating the human side. This episode was inspired by the seminar of the Institute of Ecology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Open science among actors and shareholders and the article is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing but for science. We leave the reference to this material and other materials in our description of the episode.

25:49And you can follow us on our social networks in X, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. You can also listen to other episodes in Spotify and YouTube. This podcast is self -funded and self -edited and self -sustained by its host. The original music is by our friend and colleague Bernardo Aguita.