With academic publishing in crisis, could a knowledge club model offer a way out for scientific researchers?
Some of my latest posts and videos have discussed academic publishing and alternatives to democratizing scientific dissemination. We’ve experienced time and time again the irreconcilable relationships between publishers prioritizing revenues and authors and the public prioritizing scientific progress and learning.
Realizing these rooted contradictions reveals another one—this time within ourselves. We’re confronted with a dissonance between our altruistic or scientific values and our current worldview. The most natural question becomes, “How can we solve these issues considering a company’s need to make their profits, after all?”
It’s a complex issue, especially if we base our solutions on inside-the-box thinking with limited imagination. That’s why I value suggestions that might not immediately match our current reality.
A so-called motley group of Australians has proposed a response to what they depict as a broken system led by wealthy publishers. They argue that “a journal is a club,” a community of scientists based on specific fields and scientific interests. They refer to this setting as a knowledge club, which allows members to share knowledge, collaborate, and contribute to their reputation. This model seeks to solve the publishing issues for the producers and consumers.
What’s a knowledge club?
A knowledge club replaces the current academic publishing model by sitting somewhere between a shared resource accessible to everyone (like public goods) and a resource with limited access (like private goods).
Today’s scientific journals combine public and private resources to disseminate knowledge. Public funding supports academic institutions, libraries, and research grants via taxes to ensure society produces data and expertise. The private industry manages the editorial process, peer review, printing, and distribution—but it also secures the profits.
The current publishing model should not be confused with the club model, which aims to balance shared access and member benefits. Private publishing relies more on restricting access for profit, even when supported by public funding.
The Australian motley group suggests that knowledge clubs can rescue knowledge dissemination from a broken publishing model where desperate libraries and overworked editors are at the disposal of wealthy publishers.
The idea is based on club goods, developed by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan. It describes a club restricting access of its product—knowledge—to its members only (in economic terms, this is called ‘excludable’). Once members are part of the club, the knowledge can be shared widely among them without reducing its availability or value to any individual member (this is referred to as ‘non-rivalrous’).
For example, we could start a club with members interested in science communication. We’d interact with other like-minded club members, learn from them, and contribute by reviewing their content. Our membership and client expenses could cover the necessary costs to outsource external services and distribute the knowledge.
The Australian colleagues propose that researchers form these knowledge clubs based on field expertise and research interests. The model would facilitate knowledge sharing between researchers, advancing science in the process.
Knowledge clubs set the researcher at the center
Shared interests become the motivator of continued knowledge sharing rather than profits. We can imagine such an arrangement works because the knowledge clubs empower the researchers without concerns about publishers exploiting their work, which the open-access idea has struggled with.
I found the idea fascinating while reading the introduction to Potts and colleagues’ review for the first time. Clubs create an effective counter alternative to most of our open-access issues by relieving the authors from paying excessive article processing charges. Potts and colleagues also emphasize the increased reputation scientists can gain if the clubs play their cards right.
But what about the rest of us? How does this arrangement benefit the rest of society, including the public?
Although Potts and colleagues suggest that the knowledge club idea addresses the publishing crisis, their priorities eventually become clear. Knowledge clubs—as they’re described—benefit researchers exclusively. Researchers are the club members and will reap the fruits of this supportive and self-determining format.
The emphasis on specialization within the clubs becomes more explicit once they reflect on the importance of specialized language (jargon) within the clubs. They claim that the jargon offers specificity in the communication and excludes outsiders.
There’s nothing wrong with scientists wanting to form exclusive, jargon-packed clubs, especially if these can help researchers connect. But we can imagine that this reinforces the formation of bubbles that shield the clubs from seemingly unrelated fields—and the public. How does it incentivize members to make their knowledge accessible to the public, as the Australian motley group alludes to?
We currently try to open science to the public for better scientific literacy, public engagement, and transparency. This is especially relevant since tax-funded research should serve society and its members. An exclusive club model may push these efforts in the opposite direction.
Problematic knowledge silos
There’s no getting around the issue that a club model, through its emphasis on exclusivity, likely will create a tendency to shield experts from the rest. The arguments for a knowledge club suggest these tendencies already exist in science and mirror the scientific revolutions Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper proposed. Scientists continuously test, challenge, and sometimes replace dominant paradigms through collaborative and competitive interactions.
Research’s collaborative and club-forming nature is true, but its exclusive tendencies can work against scientific understanding and revolutions.
“…the more prestigious or authoritative the other members, the more exclusive and therefore valuable is their membership.”
Potts and the group indirectly highlight this limitation, arguing that “the more prestigious or authoritative the other members, the more exclusive and therefore valuable is their membership.” With such a foundation, the club model fails to motivate inclusivity or collaboration across disciplines, which is vital for scientific revolutions.
Still, we could imagine that separate knowledge clubs merge or network to enhance collaboration between clubs. The problem with that is that especially one crucial concept of the club theory may discourage such mergers: externalities. Externalities are unintended side effects of an activity that impact others. They can be positive, such as when knowledge spills over and benefits non-members, or negative, like when competition between clubs creates inefficiencies.
A prestigious club could avoid mergers, collaborations, or networks since that could require more resources, such as researchers’ energy and time. Prestigious clubs may then avoid negative externalities, such as sharing resources or diluting their exclusivity.
Considering the lack of practical examples of how knowledge clubs could incentivize collaboration, networking, and interdisciplinary research, the collaborative aspect is secondary at best.
How the knowledge clubs affect scientific revolutions
A knowledge club offers an attractive publishing alternative to for-profit models and its never-ending “business model crisis.” Researchers will be empowered by a model that connects them with like-minded peers and allows them to support each other and their reputation while controlling costs.
But that’s it. A club model may solve the publishing issue for the producers and consumers, but they are both the same exclusive group of individuals. The model, unfortunately, fails to offer an answer to those of us who seek a wide-spanning democratic answer to the publishing crisis. Although the knowledge club model wants to balance shared access and member benefits, it primarily focuses on the benefits it brings its members rather than the general public. Outsiders will have to seek solutions elsewhere.
The Australian colleagues also acknowledge that financing knowledge clubs remains complex and unclear. Academic libraries and public funding shoulder most of the financial burden today.
Potts and colleagues invite the reader to continue analyzing how to fund knowledge clubs. They explain that “[using] the lens of club economics [club theory] does not immediately solve the financial problems of scholarly publishing, but it allows us to see these problems in a new way.”
And that’s true. It’s a creative angle with valid reflections on the current publishing issues and researchers’ needs, but it’s not an all-covering solution. If anything, knowledge is a part of science we want to open up more rather than bury inside expert bubbles.
Setting aside the exacerbated public disengagement in science, I suspect club formations, as suggested by Potts and colleagues, can cripple science in some aspects. Paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions often arise from multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary fields. We find breakthroughs at the intersections of different disciplines, where diverse perspectives, methods, and knowledge bases converge to challenge existing assumptions and create new frameworks.
What happens to the scientific revolutions if we standardize exclusive club formations as the primary model for knowledge dissemination?
