I recently read this article and podcast on how scientists in the U.S. who are facing a severe government clampdown are appealing to Canadian scientists for help, who recently went through something very similar under the Harper administration. Now politics aside whenever you have any centralized organization be it a corporation or government controlling the purse strings for your research then not only does that create a bias towards the interests of that organization within your research but also it means that organization has the power to censor your data. This is true of academics as much as it is true of personal data on the net (ex. posts on facebook). Up to this point there has seemed to be this belief that government scientists are somehow neutral. No they are not. They are just as biased as any other group. And more to the point they are just as vunerable to authoritarian dictators under government as they are within a corporate empire, that means censorship and researching what they're told to research. That means having your funds cut or not provided for at all if you're not researching something that supports the agenda of your boss. And that folks is not objective science.
We talk a lot about decentralization and the freedom of information in terms of piracy but we also need to remember that science was often considered heresy throughout history and subsequently censored. And there is nothing so uncomfortable for a politician or a business as scientific facts that conflict openly with their spiel. They also don't tend to like it when scientific data, which is true, but that casts them in a bad light, is leaked to the public, especially when it reveals them to be liable for some damages. So just pirates use decentralization to overcome censorship so too do academics. We can no longer allow scientific data to be centralized and controlled by governments and corporations. Is that not becoming abundantly clear? Is it not clear that governments cannot be trusted to act as neutral parties? Nor can they be trusted to act in the best interests of the people. There is so much distrust of corporations but the simple fact is that whenever you have a centralized power you get the same kind of power dynamic. And so this is why scientific data should be decentralized.
Thankfully we have the tools for this and will create more as time goes on. With any luck the SAFE will hit beta this year or next. (Good god I hope it's this year.) But even with that aside we already have blockchain tech, tor and the internet as it is which could be used to develop a way to distribute scientific data to the world and anonymously assign credit and payment for research done. If we can develop something like Steemit why can't we develop a similar platform for distributing and voting on the reputable status of scientific papers? There are also projects like SciHub which is already decentralizing scientific data by pirating peer reviewed scientific papers so anyone can read them. That in itself is a problem. If a scientist needs to read hundreds of papers to do a single research project then charging $50 or so per paper is cost prohibitive and again results in censorship and an information bottleneck. Yes scientists deserve to be paid for their research but their papers can't be so costly no one can afford to read them, especially if they're reading a lot of them.
So what I'd propose is this:
- We stop trusting centralized authorities be they government or corporate when it comes to our data, especially academic data.
- We develop a system that allows academics of all sorts to publish their data anonymously while still gaining reputation and financial compensation for it.
- That we base the latter on code and not government policy, see point 1, and that that code remain open source and forkable so that others can use and improve it.
I'm not going to go into a long plan about how to do all this. That can come with time. I just want to get these basic concepts across. We can't keep turning to centralized authorities for scientific funding and then naively being surprised when they screw us over. Scientific data will get censored just as much as copyright gets censored. It's about maintaining power. Freedom comes when you are self sufficient and can control your own data. It does not come when you have to ask permission from some centralized authority, ever.