More Bullying from Wellcome

The bullying of publishers by funders continues, because in the world of techno-utopianism, anyone interposing themselves between information producers and information consumers deserves a wedgie while having their lunch money stolen.

That’s the cyberlibertarian stance in a world where Mark Zuckerberg equates “moderation” to “censorship” ala Elon Musk, with both bowing and scraping in a most undignified manner to petulant right-wing politicians.

I’ve been wondering for years why funders sparked this confrontation, and why they persist in pushing publishers, editors, and information professionals around. What I wrote in 2017 about this still seems pretty correct:

• Belief in technology. The belief that technology changes everything seems to inform many of the OA mandates coming from funders, or what David Golumbia described as the belief that if it’s done with computers, it’s somehow heroic.
• Antagonism. Various factors — profit margins, manuscript rejections — have probably fulminated some antagonism, or at least stirred a hero complex as technologists believe they can save the day (see above).
• Natural incentives. Funders have a natural incentive to make sure their funding decisions look productive — that is, the funded research gets published, read, and cited.
• Low investment thresholds. Our market is relatively small to rich funders, and it doesn’t take actual investment in most cases to shake things up — just a mandate or a press release.

Now, the Wellcome Trust is back for more bullying, trying to use its position and power of the purse to create an unnatural OA monoculture. This comes on the heels of the Gates Foundation bullying us away from the idea of expert intermediation at all via its abandonment of APCs — which is fine, if you support other ways to pay for expert evaluation, but not fine if you support preprinting and trash expert mediation.