For scientists, submitting a manuscript to a journal for peer review and waiting for good news of its acceptance is a defining experience. Imagine, in the future, receiving an email like this one from a prestigious (but fictional) academic journal:
“The Journal of Business Dynamics is happy to accept your manuscript titled ‘A financial analysis of South American football clubs: 1940 – 2020.’ While reviewer 2 still has a few concerns about the statistics used to analyze the simulation results, we believe the manuscript will be a worthy addition to the journal’s Unaffiliated Researcher section and of interest to the journal’s broader readership.”
It reads much like the beginning of a standard positive email, but for one difference: Our hypothetical journal has an “Unaffiliated Researcher” section. This is dedicated to the work of independent researchers, those with no formal academic affiliation or credentials. In this scenario, everyday people can formally participate in the research process, even the famously guarded institution of publishing peer-reviewed manuscripts.
Is this a horror story? Or does it represent progress? How would we feel about a world where everyone can participate in the formal enterprise of research? I argue that a future that democratizes research, making both its consumption and production more accessible, would increase the number of quality ideas in circulation and support efforts to defend science in the face of decreasing trust in scientists.
There are many reasons to fear a truly open world of expertise. In my own fields of study — computational epidemiology and disease evolution — the Covid-19 pandemic was a watershed moment for the perils and power of uninformed opinions, misinformation, and disinformation. And other pseudoscientific movements, such as race science, continue to stay afloat in part because of a dark web of imaginary “scientific” findings, some of them appearing in dodgy academic journals.
In addition, a war on ideas is emerging, which challenges the basic value of the scientific method. This has seeded doubt in the notion that expertise matters at all. Scholars have highlighted the central role expertise played in policymaking during the pandemic. But maybe we should rethink our reflexive defense of credentials and pursue an argument in the opposite direction: that credentials and other social signals-of-smart produce unnecessary barriers between experts and society.
How would we feel about a world where everyone can participate in the formal enterprise of research?
Is there an ethical obligation to promote public participation in the scientific process? One thread of reasoning stems from the fact that the public funds (through taxes) a lot of the research that we scientists build our careers around. Therefore, academic efforts at inclusion are often framed around doing “outreach” or citing the research’s “broader impacts.” These efforts encompass very important activities in schools, “citizen-science” projects, summer research programs, prison education curricula, and attempts to include scientists from the Global South in the process of publishing in prestigious journals and attending scientific conferences.
Other efforts focus on the democratization of data. One example is the open science movement, built on the idea that scientific data — especially that generated with public funding — should not be a private commodity, but instead a public property that all can freely access. These efforts are fused to the rise of open-access journals and preprint servers like arXiv and OSF.
These initiatives highlight how opening doors should be less about being a do-gooder and more about how to do better science. We should want access to the unexpressed scientific ideas that may lurk in the minds of young people, who may only be guilty of being born into poverty or in a country dealing with the aftermath of a genocide.
It isn’t hard to imagine a disastrous outcome from this attempt at democracy. Research is already diluted by shoddy work that is flawed, unhelpful, or cannot be replicated. Furthermore, nefarious new movements, promoted by those who benefit from ignorance, can peddle harmful misinformation and pseudoscience. To open the borders may further scramble science’s signal and stymie attempts to discern real from fake.
I would argue that the current gatekeeper structure of formal (mostly academic) research creates the conditions that foster a war on science. Much of current professional progress in research rewards chasing popular ideas that are sometimes based on a fragile foundation, leading to an abundance of half-baked science. In light of this, one can say that this disaster scenario already exists, even among the highly credentialed. Much of what we fear in a democratized research world is already happening in our gated research world.
How would an effort to democratize research help? And how would it work?
The first steps towards a democratized future might be easier than we think. People in academic leadership around the country could champion scientists’ efforts to create the necessary tools for democratizing science. Say a respected applied mathematician translates a data science textbook into the Quechua language, or creates a version that is digestible to curious children living in Kiev, Gaza, or Kinshasa. Or what if a renowned physicist develops an independent science platform, dedicated to evaluating the original ideas of uncredentialed scientists (much like the fictional journal that we began with)?
Can we rigorously argue that these democratization efforts are less authentically scientific contributions, as considered by promotion and award committees, than an original manuscript in a prestigious journal? On what grounds? Is it the notion, built on a lazy counterfactual, that science seems to be doing just fine as practiced?
Unfortunately, many researchers have built their professional self-worth around a dubious definition of scientific value and success in a supposed meritocracy. And no one should be so cynical as to deny a respected individual their place — many scientists are talented and hardworking, and deserve the spoils. But a less savory truth lives within our belief in science’s meritocracy: Exclusivity is the engine of prestige. This drives the narrow view held by many in the scientific establishment that not everyone can participate, and that’s what makes us great.
The good news is that there are real-world efforts to make education and cutting-edge ideas available to more people. And some seem to be working — or at least not failing. In the ever-important realm of funding, the National Science Foundation formally implemented a “Broader Impacts” component of their grant proposals in 1997. It requires “the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes.” This has encouraged basic scientists to think about the impact of their work in the world in which they operate.
A future should generate as many models for bringing society into the research paradigm as there are for simulating epidemics.
Other innovations are taking place within higher education. Under president Michael Crow, Arizona State University — roundly praised for its innovation — has embarked on a mission to revamp its approach. One of the central goals of the ASU project focuses on accessibility: to educate as many students as possible, from many life and educational backgrounds. It is an example of a major research university trying something new: an attempt to build a structure that aims to include, rather than exclude. While this model may have its detractors, it is difficult to fault the effort in the face of an exclusivist status quo that is increasingly hard to defend.
These existing models constitute the very beginning of a process to democratize science, and they need not be perfect. A future should generate as many models for bringing society into the research paradigm as there are for simulating epidemics. Competition between efforts would be the best sort of social engineering experiment, where we could more efficiently answer the question of how to close the ever-growing expanse between the practice of research and the people who benefit from (or are harmed by) it.
A successful effort to democratize science would demystify the research enterprise to the public and increase the number of good ideas that we can use to study the cosmos, govern society, treat disease, learn about the history of our species, build ethical AI tools, and much more.
Of course, this future will be difficult to create. But research is a powerful machine specifically because it meets the universe’s challenges head-on. And few obstacles have ever been greater than making science the product of our collective genius, no longer the exclusive domain of those who have spent most of their adult lives behind the gates of moneyed institutions.
This is a well intended article with the wrong set of assumptions. Authority, expertise, qualification and affiliation have nothing to do with the quality of science and the right to do research. That needs to be the fundamental assumption, not a novel viewpoint.