When good nonprofits collide: the battle between Open Access and Academic Societies

[This is a copy of my blogpost, previously on thespectroscope.com.]

 "Money Plant", TaxCredits.net, CC-BY

Many academic societies do wonderful things for science, scientists, and society. They advocate, educate, support trainees, organize productive conferences, act as publishers whose goal is to improve rather than reject any given paper. As a geneticist, I have attended many of the GSA’s yeast conferences since 2003, and they were always a highlight of my academic training. The GSA was and continues to be an early and key supporter of our protocols.io startup. I am a big fan of Stefano Bertuzzi, the head of the ASCB, and I worship ASCB’s career improvement workshops at the annual Cell Biology conference. I am also volunteering for the SSE’s diverse careers task force to bring ASCB-like career mentorship to the Evolution conference. I am a track chair for the 2017 SLAS conference.

I am a big fan of academic societies. I am also a big fan of PLOS and open access. As such, I find myself torn between entities that are fundamentally at odds with each other. The societies are threatened by open access and many senior scientists detest PLOS and PLOS ONE for “sucking up all oxygen and undermining society journals.” The problem is that for many societies, the majority of their revenue comes from subscription publishing, and PLOS and open access are a real threat to the financial sustainability of these societies.

As I converse with editors and executive members of these societies, we often start with a general argument over open access. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have heard “almost everyone who needs access has it; subscription paywalls really don’t hurt anyone.” I push back strongly against this, because this line is deeply flawed. And then, invariably, we end up at “But our society journal cannot go open access. We would need to charge $4,000-$5,000 for each paper, and we could never compete with PLOS ONE and the other PLOS journals in that case. But unlike PLOS, our society does a lot of good for scientists.”

I can write pages and pages on the good that PLOS has done for science and society. But instead, I want to focus on a simple argument – if scientists won’t pay $5,000 per paper to publish with you, you are charging too much. Open Access publishing model brings this cost to light, and scientist rebel. Subscriptions hide the cost to everyone except the librarians, propping up the 30%-40% profit margins that Elsevier, Wiley, Springer and many professional society journals enjoy.

I cannot accept the argument that because societies do a lot of good, charging $5,000 for a paper with a 40% profit margin, is somehow justified. Paywalls to research hurt scientists and non-scientists alike. They hurt patients, journalists, teachers, academics who are not at elite institutions. The Gates foundation is right to require OA-only publishing starting in 2017 from all scientists funded by its grants.

To argue that societies do good, hence we shouldn’t move to OA and we should continue to pay exorbitant fees to publish and access the research papers – that is like arguing that because medical schools do a lot of good in education, it’s acceptable for hospitals to overcharge patients. It is not. I worry about the academic societies because they do provide a valuable service. I worry that many of them might evaporate over the next 10-20 years because publishing will become entirely open access. I hope the societies can find alternative sustainable revenue sources. But I aggressively reject the argument that we need to prop up subscription publishing for the good of academic societies.

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Note: I am not making an argument that the society journals are not useful. Many of these journals are good communities that serve their fields well. They care deeply about improving science and they review to improve the papers and the science in them. As I recently wrote, there is a lot of important work that a good journal does. I do not want society journals to die. I want them to switch to open access and for their societies to figure out how to be sustainable without overcharging for the publishing work.

What is the ethical compensation for nonprofit executives? (Should you boycott PLOS?)

[This is a copy of my blogpost, previously on thespectroscope.com.]

Over the last week, there's been a storm over the executive compensation and financials at the Public Library of Science (PLOS). It was started by a series of tweets from Professor Andrew Kern, looking into the financial disclosures of PLOS and learning that they pay good salaries and have operating margins. Andrew then concluded:

PLOS's financials reveal that they are merely trying to maximize their personal and corporate profit, like any company. They are padding the wallets of their executives and taking our grant money and putting in in the stock market. They are merely another Nature or Science that aims to maximize profits while cloaking itself in the white robes of OA.

Not surprisingly, many scientists were outraged and accused PLOS of being evil. I was puzzled by the strong negative reaction to the fact that PLOS pays the people who work for it competitive salaries. Clearly, many academics were shocked to learn that six figure salaries are normal for executives of large nonprofits. It doesn't seem "fair" to many. So, I asked:

Simple question to Andrew Kern and all upset with PLOS salaries - if YOU were on the board of PLOS, how would YOU set exec salaries? (No doubt there's been corrosive excessive growth of CEO salaries for decades now. But for a given organization that you want to see succeed, given market executive salaries, what would YOU do?

The are many who replied to me. It was a good discussion. But the concerete answers to my question were of the type: 

• Maximum of 5x of the minimum salary at PLOS
• Below the max of a professor at a public university
• No more than double top-paid professor
• Andy Kern, "5x grad student pay tops, if I ran the organization"
• No more than $200,000/year

Let's pick one of them - Andy Kern's maximum of "5x of graduate stipend". That's about 5*$30,000 = $150,000/year. So if Andy ran PLOS, he would pay the executives at most $150K, and that means Andy would simply run PLOS into the ground because he would lose all the talented executives. And since Andy is an advocate for open access, I don't understand why he would want to destroy PLOS. Sure, he says that executives who would leave are simply "not into the mission," so good riddance. 

But, I am genuinely puzzled over how people who support the push for open access can simultaneously advocate for the destruction of PLOS. Looking at 990 forms of other societies, it quickly becomes clear that the executives at PLOS have competitive but not at all obscene compensation. Quick check, comparing salaries from 990 forms at PLOS, ACS, AAAS.

Those are comparisons to other large non-profits. How much lower can PLOS go in paying its executives before they leave to be publishers at other nonprofit societies or to Elsevier/Wiley/Springer?

While much of the outrage was centered around the salaries, some people were upset that PLOS has margins and savings. Again, this seems to stem from the misunderstanding of how nonprofits work. All successful societies have operating margins and reserves. In fact, as Michael Eisen writes, most scientific societies have larger "assets to expenses" ratios than PLOS.

So my plea to everyone who is outraged by PLOS finances and threatening to boycott publishing there - please think about the above as though you are running PLOS and want open access to succeed. Remember that when it comes to publishing, many societies are making $5K-$6K per published paper, from combination of subscriptions and publishing charges. These societies have often 30%-50% margins on the publishing, compared to the 20% at PLOS. And at the end, the papers are locked behind subscription paywalls.

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P.S.

Randy Olson was one of the people upset by the high salaries. Instead of answering my question of what he would pay, he replied that what bothers him most is that PLOS isn't trying to make publishing cheaper. And that's another puzzle. First of all, PLOS already made publishing cheaper at ~2K/paper instead of the average $6K that subscription publishers get. Second, it's clear that PLOS is investing the extra capital into infrastructure, and I imagine the goal of this is exactly to lower the publishing costs. After all, PLOS has to compete with PeerJ, F1000 Research, and a sea of other open access journals. Because PLOS pays its employees well and has devoted and talented folks, I'm sure they are keenly aware of the need to reduce the publication charges.

An open letter to the Scientific Advisory Board of Elysium, the anti-aging supplement company

[This is a copy of my blogpost, previously on thespectroscope.com.]

Dear Members of Elysium's Scientific Advisory Board:

I am a geneticist and have been absolutely fascinated by aging research since 2003. I write to you to ask you to reconsider your participation in the scientific advisory board of Elysium Health, Inc.

The amazing research into the genetics of aging is undermined by a premature rush to consumer pills. Particularly, the reputation of the field is compromised by the association with the supplement industry. As Dr. Derek Lowe just wrote, 

It [Elysium Health] makes the legitimate research in this field seem a bit less respectable, which isn’t good, and it makes the supplement hawkers seem a bit more respectable by association, and that’s probably not what Elysium was planning on, either.

By lending your names to Elysium Health, you help to give confidence to a supplement pill that has zero evidence of doing anything to delay aging in humans. The supplement industry thrives on evidence-free placebo effects, to the point of generating $25 billion in sales per year. With Elysium prominently featuring each of you on their website, there is a sense of scientific gravitas and anti-aging promise that is unheard of in this industry.

Considering the ease with which supplement producers already take advantage of the consumers with the marketing of placebos, Elysium is in a remarkable position to take such behavior to a new level. With your names backing the company and the natural human quest to delay aging and death, Elysium stands to make billions of dollars. Elysium could make these billions long before there are any data to indicate whether the $50 per month the consumers will spend has any benefit for their health.

I respect each of you as scientists, and I sincerely hope that you will weigh the impact of your affiliation with a rush to market of an anti-aging supplement pill.

Kind regards,

Lenny Teytelman, Ph.D.

CEO, protocols.io

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The /team page of the Elysium website features each of you prominently.

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On the company landing page:

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The problem with the nutritional supplements industry:

A reproducible effect: failing to credit women scientists for their leadership.

[This is a copy of my blogpost, previously on thespectroscope.com.]

There is no shortage of historic examples of women scientists not getting the credit they deserve due to sexism (a few of the countless examples). This is so pervasive, there is actually a name for this, The Matilda Effect, and papers like this have been published about it.

While we all know about this, it’s been shocking for me to personally watch this unfold in the case of Dr. Elizabeth Iorns, the key person behind the Reproducibility Project Cancer Biology (RPCB). As we learn from RPCB that reproducing cancer research is extraordinarily hard, we also get a demonstration of just how strong and reproducible the Matilda Effect still is.

As a cancer researcher, Dr. Iorns had personal painful experiences, trying to replicate published work. Later, as the CEO of ScienceExchange, she noticed that many scientists were asking for validation of cancer research results. This inspired Dr. Iorns to start the Reproducibility Initiative in 2012, in partnership with PLOS and figshare. As a next step in 2013, Dr. Iorns collaborated with Dr. William Gunn to put together a proposal for a major study of reproducibility in cancer research. Together, they brought in Dr. Brian Nosek of the Center for Open Science to collaboratively apply for a grant on RPCB.

A few weeks ago, the first results from RPCB were published, with extensive coverage by major news outlets. I was stunned to see just how many of them minimized or entirely ignored the role of Dr. Iorns.

I went through the January articles covering RPCB, and half of them fail to mention the role of Dr. Iorns altogether, quoting and mentioning only Dr. Nosek. Two others, Gizmodo and Wired mention both, but erroneously credit Dr. Nosek with the RPCB idea. Dr. Nosek even publicly corrected the Wired article:

one correction to history described. @elizabethiorns and @mrgunn initiated the project idea and brought me in, not the reverse.

— Brian Nosek (@BrianNosek) January 19, 2017

The history of RPCB is not a secret. Some journalists like Ed Yong in The Atlantic got it exactly right, but Ed Yong is in the rare minority here.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ks3PW0PscXQ-TutOH7miP_JVpQnmMt7u4amKurm6e3Y/edit?usp=sharing

I know all of the people involved with RPCB personally. I like all of them. I doubt that Dr. Nosek intentionally tried to hog the spotlight, at the expense of Dr. Iorns, nor do the journalists have an agenda to minimize women's contributions. That’s probably the hardest part of the Matilda Effect – it happens automatically, without an explicit nefarious attempt by someone to introduce bias. We all have to be aware of this and have to try extra hard to avoid erasing the contributions of women.

Personal thoughts about William Gunn

(I am writing this down because every few weeks, William gets attacked as a corporate shill and a sellout human being. That's because he works for Elsevier and because most people have no idea who he is. I know William and am writing this down so I can refer to it, every time he is attacked on Twitter.)


I first met William Gunn in 2013, when protocols.io was just an idea and we were nearly broke. William instantly connected to our mission and became determined to help us. He connected us to Victor Henning, the cofounder of Mendeley, for a Skype call. That call was critical and the advice from Victor may have saved our nascent startup.

After that, William continued to advise us, advocate for us, and helped us to succeed with our Kickstarter. He was so genuinely supportive and gave us so much of his time, I offered to make him an advisor and to give him standard advisor equity in protocols.io. William thanked me and replied that he was helping because of what we are doing for science, not because of compensation. I insisted, as I didn't want to take advantage of people who help. William asked to think about it. A week later, he e-mailed me to say that he thinks it would be a conflict of interest for him to take advisor equity, given his employment with Mendeley/Elsevier.

Since then, William has continued to help us consistently and in big ways. He is also a terrific scientist, one of the strongest advocates for open access, and a passionate supporter of innovation in science publishing and communication.

I don't have many warm thoughts about Elsevier, but I have tremendous respect for William and deep gratitude for his support. Those who attack him simply because he works at Elsevier are confusing individuals with corporations. I am lucky to know William as a person and will try to never make the same mistake.

Because of Donald Trump, I'm speaking up publicly for the first time about being sexually assaulted.

Twenty years ago, an elderly tailor in Brooklyn, NY sexually assaulted me. I was 19. I never reported it. Only my closest friends and relatives knew about it until now.

I came in to shorten pants from a hand-me-down suit. The tailor closed the curtains and asked me to take off my jeans. He measured my legs. Then he pulled down my underwear and proceeded to do things that I am not able to share even now.

I didn't scream. I didn't beat him up, even though I was way taller and bigger than him. My brain froze. I thanked him and left. 

A few years later I saw this episode of Friends. While millions laughed, I lost the ability to sleep for a few nights.

I am sharing this now because of the accusations against Trump and because of Trump's response:

Why didn't the writer of the twelve year old article in People Magazine mention the "incident" in her story. Because it did not happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 13, 2016

I am sharing this now because of every Trump supporter who is saying, "These are fabricated stories that are politically motivated attacks. If these charges were true, the women would have spoken up before."

I haven't spoken up before. Many reasons not to, even for a man like me. Even against an old shriveled pervert tailor, I didn't speak up. For a woman to speak up against Donald Trump would be infinitely harder.

I didn't say anything 12 or 20 years ago. However, if that pervert tailor surfaced publicly now and tried to run for political office, you bet I would have decided to come forward, just as I did here.

Let's not pretend there are still lines left to cross for Trump.

I have lost count of the number of headlines with, "Trump has finally crossed a line..." The problem is that short of openly calling for genocide, there are no more lines left for Trump to cross.

I understand the shock and outrage with each new despicable utterance from Trump. The problem is that by reacting to each new one with "this is the final one!" we implicitly pardon everything else that he said. We suggest that everything before was forgivable. We give cover to the people who still endorse him.
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[just a small sample of the "crossed the line" headlines]

Sept. 20, NPR: With Donald Trump's Birther Spin, He's Crossed A Line.

Aug. 9, Esquie: The Moment You Realize Trump Finally Crossed the Line (On Trump suggesting "Second Amendment people" should kill Hillary Clinton)

Aug. 1, 2016 Chicago Tribune: Trump crosses line on Muslim patriots who balance religion, duty (After Trump attacked Gold Star parent Khizr and Ghazala Khan)

July 29, Chicago Tribune: Trump's comments on Russia cross a line (encouraging Russia to hack HRC emails)

July 6, Boston Globe: Rep. Moulton: Trump crossed line by praising Saddam Hussein

June 2, The Guardian:  Donald Trump's judge-bashing crosses a line (Mexican judge cannot be impartial because he is Mexican)

Feb 8, 2016, MotherJones: Donald Trump Just Crossed a New Line in American Politics

July 21, 2015, CNN: GOP to Trump: You crossed the line (Trump said that John McCain is no war hero because he was captured)