#12: 🔓 Demanding Open Access
The Scholarly Publishing industry restricts access to scientific research and generates huge profits
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💬 In this Note:
🔓 Demanding Open Access from the Scholarly Publishing Industry
💊 MAPS Completes Its Phase III Trial of MDMA Assisted Therapy For PTSD
📚 For the Love of Sweat
🔓Demanding Open Access from the Scholarly Publishing Industry
The Scholarly Publishing Industry is broken.
Information is locked behind paywalls (Restricted Assess). Publishers require independent researchers to assess a manuscript’s originality, validity and significance for free (Uncompensated Peer-Review). And, even after that rigorous review, more than 50% of published studies cannot be replicated by other scientists carrying out the same experiments of research (Lack of Reproducibility).
→ This is part 1 of a 3 part rant about the scholarly publishing industry.
Let’s start with Restricted Access.
Information access is a huge barrier for science today. Most scientific knowledge is trapped behind publisher paywalls and inside private databases.
Making all data more accessible is the main objective of the Open Science movement, which is more than a decade old, and the newer DeSci Movement.
In a bold move that could radically change the scholarly publishing industry, President Biden announced a new policy on August 25th that by the end of 2025, federal agencies must make articles that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public as soon as the final peer-reviewed manuscript is published.
Why do we care?
In a nutshell, a scientist at a federally-funded institute will do ground-breaking work and then will pay ~$4500 to submit their article to a scholarly journal to publish their discovery.
The publication will ask experts in the field to review that article for free, and then once the article is accepted, it will be published in the journal and locked behind a paywall.
If you are not a member of that journal, or at a university that pays a license fee (re: Harvard paid $3.5 million in 2012 on journal subscriptions alone), then one single article can cost between ~$30-50 for 24 hours of access.
Hold on! The publishers are getting paid twice?!
They are. The scholarly publishers are for-profit companies operating two leading business models called “pay-for-access” and “pay-for-publication.”
In fact, these business models were so lucrative that the scholarly publishing market for scientific, technical and medical publications was $26.5 Billion in 2020.
With so much money flowing into academic publishing, some of those revenues must go back to the researcher, right?
Wrong.
The publishers own the copyright, so they get all the revenues from the researcher’s intellectual property. The researchers do not receive any royalties from the purchases or views of their article.
This model only exists because academic journals confer prestige on authors. Authors willingly give up rights to their own research because they believe it will help their careers.
Messed up, right?
The academic version of Robin Hood, Alexandra Elbakyan, agrees.
The Kazakhstani neuroscientist founded the website Sci-Hub in 2011 to by-pass publisher paywalls. To date, the online academic literature search engine hosts more than 62 million papers and articles for free, which is about 70% of the total amount of all scholarly articles published.
Sci-Hub is a life-saver for academics who do not have university access to view the journals, such as students in developing countries and researchers no longer associated with a university.
Elbakyan and Sci-Hub have been condemned by a number of publishers. In 2015 the academic publisher Elsevier filed a legal complaint in New York City against Sci-Hub alleging copyright infringement, and the subsequent lawsuit led to a loss of the original scihub.org domain. Despite this lawsuit, the website lives on proxied through various domain extensions such as sci-hub.tw, sci-hub.hk and sci-hub.la, just to name a few.
Who is following Sci-Hub’s lead?
1️⃣ The pre-print platforms Arxiv, BioRxiv, MedRxiv and SSRN have opened access to early research findings. These platforms allow academics to post early versions of their manuscripts online prior to peer-review.
2️⃣ DeSci Labs, founded by Christopher Hill, Philipp Koellinger and Sina Iman, is building new technologies to improve the accessibility, reliability, transparency, and value sharing of scientific publications.
3️⃣ Sci2Sci, created by Angelina Lesnikova, is an electronic lab notebook paired with a publishing platform to easily release research data to open access
4️⃣ Flashpub.io, led by Nate Jacobs, a platform for micro-publications and articles.
💊 MAPS Completes Its Phase III Trial of MDMA Assisted Therapy For PTSD
After 22 years of research, policy reform and self-funding, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies Public Benefit Corporation (MAPS PBC) announced the completion of the Phase III study of MDMA Assisted Therapy (MDMA-AT) for for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
MAPS PBC is now preparing to submit the data package to the FDA in the Fall of 2023, seeking approval in 2024. They have been sponsoring this clinical trial program since 2000.
The first Phase III study, MAPP1, examined the safety and efficacy of MDMA-AT versus therapy with placebo control in treating individuals with severe PTSD. MAPP1 demonstrated that 88 percent of the participants treated with MDMA-AT had a clinically significant improvement in their PTSD symptoms and 67 percent no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis.
The MAPP2 study protocol was essentially the same as the first Phase III study with two primary differences. MAPP2 enrolled participants with moderate and severe PTSD, while participants in MAPP1 had severe PTSD. In addition, enrollment of people of color doubled with the total participants of color representing more than 50 percent of the total in the study.
When MAPS PBC submits their application, it will be the first time that the FDA will be tasked to consider psychotherapy combined with a Schedule I substance in a drug approval decision.
📚 Book of the Week
The Joy of Sweat - The Strange Science of Perspiration by Sarah Everts
Sweat is a weird biological function and only happens in a handful of mammals, with humans having a unique history related to sweat.
Sarah Everts dives into sweat as an information source of biological information for digital health & forensics, as well as the cultures evolved around sweat, from saunas to anti-sweat products, and she busts the myth that sweating is a detoxification method.
⚡️ Check this out
How are you, really? This is just one question from the purpose-driven card game, We’re Not Really Strangers.
I just played the Family Edition on Thanksgiving and, there were tears. Good ones. The questions are so carefully crafted to make even the most guarded person will open up and share.
Pro tip: Buy more than 1 copy. Gift the deck to the person you’re playing with after the game. Thank me later 😉
If you dare: Follow WNRS on instagram. The founder hits you with some hard truths to help you self-reflect.
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