Academics reason through problems, create innovative solutions, and often make the world a better place. However, sometimes, they are not the best at fashioning change. Slacktivism, which is defined as trying to create change or stand up for a cause with minimal effort, commitment, or sacrifice, can emerge from complacent academics. Recently, there have been a slew of smug social media posts pertaining to editor requests for reviewers. These posts call out the for-profit publishing enterprise profits and demand payment for the review. Some even show an invoice they send, claiming to stick it to the man.
Unfortunately, these micro-protests only “stick it” to the junior faculty and graduate students trying to build a career. They cannot publish if no one reviews their work. Real change is hard, and it requires sacrifice and persistence. Although some micro-protests can build and generate change, the slacktivism form of micro-protesting such as clicking repost on social media, sending a strongly worded letter, or (worst of all) disengaging from the enterprise altogether get us nowhere and robs academia of the “can-do” reputation it deserves. So, what can academics do to rekindle that reputation and simultaneously become more self-sustaining and make it more rewarding to be in academia?
Let’s start with journal publishing. I recently posted on LinkedIn the need for free, academic-driven, open-access journals. To my surprise, many existed! So, why have I not heard about them? Well, commercial publishers do a better job of promoting the journals, because they have employees and resources. That said, I am in no way excusing the current system. If publishers are going to profit from our work, then reviewers and authors, who are the very lifeblood of that work, should be compensated. However, most publishers dwell within capitalist societies, and most for-profit industries do not readily share profits, that is, unless there is incentive or punishment involved that forces it to make financial sense. So, we could write a letter and tell publishers like Taylor & Francis or Elsevier to “share the love” but, unsurprisingly, those letters fall on deaf ears. The alternative is to stop publishing in the journals owned by those publishers and support these well-established, free, open-access journals.
So why don’t we? Because the creme de la creme of prestigious journals are owned by for profit publishers. So, when an author has a top-shelf idea, who would waste it going to a yet-to-be-premier journal when they could submit to Science or Nature? Prestige is the drug of choice among academics, and few are willing to pay the cost in weening themselves off it. Until scholars send top ideas to lesser-known but free, open-access journals, these journals will languish, much like the strongly worded letter that found itself in the recycle bin of the publisher’s office.
To be clear, there are extremely successful examples of academics who dedicated time, effort, resources, and energy to making the academic world (and the world, full stop) a better place. When personality psychologists started charging for their assessments, Lewis Goldberg created the International Personality Item Pool that (to avoid copyright infringement) slightly reworded items that were just as valid as commercial scales, and he made all items freely available with no strings attached. Those who design, and those who openly write, packages in the statistical programming language R, are changing the landscape of statistical computing for the better. When the replication crisis struck science (particularly social psychology) hard, preregistration and open science practices were selflessly pioneered by Brian Nosek and Jeffrey Spies with their Open Science Framework (OSF) website.
The reason why OSF is so valuable has to do with the unwillingness of the field to change. For example, when the replication crisis first struck, I was a Ph.D. student in psychology at the University of British Columbia. During a meeting, one faculty member suggested that M.A. theses should be dedicated to the direct replication of a previous, but apocryphal, conclusion. One faculty member retorted, “Okay, so who wants to sacrifice their Ph.D. student’s career on a project that won’t go to a top journal?” It is this unwillingness to sacrifice that perpetuates the status quo. To be clear, the field has become welcoming of registered reports and direct replications, but the overwhelmingly dominant model remains, “Do something novel.”
Now, to be clear, I have no problem with for-profit endeavors, and I have no problem with academics charging for their intellectual property (hell, I do it). Websites like Prolific or software like Mplus provide valuable resources, but they do it for a profit. So, while I applaud these innovations, they are not solving the problem of inaccessibility of resources, and in the case of Prolific’s annual $300 million profits, they are well compensated for their efforts. Creating a better academia takes sacrifice. If you want to do something, build something. If you choose to profit from it, that is your choice, and there is nothing wrong with that. But the true heroes of academia are those who give back either breaking even or at a personal cost.
Although not every academic has a significant impact, and not every publication in an academic journal will change the world, we are lucky to have academics. Private research costs significantly more than academic research. Whereas private research costs labor, academic research is baked into most faculty positions as part of the job. Whereas there are no volunteers doing private research, academic faculty and students conduct research out of passion, curiosity, and sometimes just for the experience. Further, once completed, all research generated from private endeavors is proprietary. The public cannot build on it, because the public can never know the intellectual property behind it. Academic research is typically open source and publicly available.
I recently attended a biotech startup event, where many teams were searching for top academic researchers because they are the holy grail of collaborators: They have intellectual prowess and create open-source information. Academics make information publicly available and have no exclusive rights to their own intellectual property. Most academics just seek some solid kudos, a strong performance evaluation, and academic prestige. The creator of one of the most popular free statistical packages (lavaan), Yves Rosseel, basically said that he does not do this for money but just for a citation when you use his package (a ridiculously reasonable request). Thus, the price of academic research is staggeringly low, and the returns on investment are enormously high, but these efforts sometimes go unappreciated.
In sum, real change requires sacrifice. Change will never come with the click of a mouse, a snarky email, or a strongly worded letter.
Daniel N. Jones
Daniel N. Jones is a Professor of Management at the University of Nevada Reno. His research is related to deception and manipulation such as the Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism) and Dark Tetrad (Dark Triad + sadism) of personality. He has designed interventions to protect against manipulative harm (TEDx) and has a book with Oxford University Press, “Falling Fast: The Perils and Possibilities of Emophilia.”
