Nature Communications published a paper last week that argues that the media pay undue attention to people who do not worry much about climate change. The journal and authors are now in all sorts of trouble because they identified those people, smeared their name, and released personal data. The journal editor confirmed that she did not check whether the paper had IRB approval.**

UC Merced confirms that the paper had no such approval*** and argues that it did not need such approval because no data were collected on political views or academic qualifications.**** Yet, paper and press release refer to views and qualification, the paper obliquely as "political origins" and "non-scientific experts", the press release explicitly with its "false authority" and "lack [of] scientific training". If no data were collected on political views and academic qualifications, then how do the authors support these remarks?

Regardless of the above, the paper is bad. At its core, it compares a sample (A) of researchers who are well published and cited in climate research to another sample (B) who are skeptical of climate policy and prominent in the media. They conclude that sample (A) is better published and cited in climate research while sample (B) attracts more media attention.

It should be trivial to support a trivial hypothesis, but the authors managed to mess it up. Samples (A) and (B) overlapped and people were removed from sample (A). Rob and Ray Bradley were mixed up. Barbara and Harold Betts, realtors praising the climate of California, were seemingly mistaken for Richard Betts, a climate modeller.* Or maybe its Kelly Betts, a photographer for the local newspaper.* Judith Curry may have been mistaken for a dish of Indian origin.* Media attention for Marc Morano was mostly from Morano's blog. (A secondary conclusion in the paper is that non-conventional media pay more attention to people like Morano.) And the paper ignores those who, without academic credentials, argue for climate policy in media, such as Al Gore, Leonardo di Caprio and Greta Thunberg.

How did this paper get published? The authors are trained as natural scientists and, moonlighting in the social sciences, may not have been aware of the rules that apply to working with human subjects. For two years, the authors worked with human subjects and never paused to wonder about the ethics or consult with a social scientist. You cannot just go around and identify someone with a "lack [of] scientific training" or as a member of a "political movement" -- not if you collected data to prove your point and certainly not, as seems to have happened here, without such data.

The editors did not stop them either, nor did the referees.

The referees did not spot the basic flaws in research design and data collection, errors that were very quickly found post publication. The paper's acknowledgements refer to anonymous referees and James Painter, whose own research does not go beyond basic descriptive statistics.

Over the last few years, we have seen published a number of papers on the science-media interface that are very bad, so bad that the idea should have been killed over the first coffee. Those papers were challenged but never corrected or retracted. Editors therefore now have a pool of referees who do not know the first thing about research ethics or experimental design.

If the Nature Communications paper stands, Petersen, Vincent and Westerling will be asked to review similar papers in the future.


*Ruth Dixon argues that all references to the Laguna Beach Independent were removed in an intermediate step not described in the paper.
** De Raneiri, personal communication, 20 August 2019.
*** Eric Kalmin, personal communication, 23 August 2019.
**** Luanna Putney, personal communication, 28 August 2019.

Elsevier Weekblad plaatste een interview met ondergetekende op 23 Maart 2019. Het gesprek ging over van alles en nog wat. Op de titelpagina roep ik dat een "CO2-heffing [op] bedrijven het domste [is] wat je kunt doen". Dat was voor mij een bijzaak, maar de redactie gooit natuurlijk graag olie op het vuur.

Een CO2-heffing in een lidstaat van de EU op uitstoot dat al onder het Europese systeem van verhandelbare emissierechten (EU ETS) valt, verhoogt de kosten van klimaatbeleid zonder de uitstoot verder te beperken. De grenskosten zijn oneindig hoog dus dit is echt het domste wat je kunt doen. Dit is het zogenaamde waterbedeffect: De emissiedoelstelling is Europa-breed, en meer doen in een land betekent minder doen in een ander land.

Stephane Alonso van het NRC viel daar over. Milieuactivisten roepen graag dat ze in naam van de wetenschap handelen, maar hebben vaak weinig kaas gegeten van de klimaatmaterie. Alonso bestempelde mijn uitspraak als "grotendeels onwaar". Hij lijkt niet de relevante regelgeving bestudeerd te hebben, hij schijnt de literatuur niet geraadpleegd te hebben, hij heeft mij niet gesproken, en hij lijkt ook niet met de verantwoordelijke ambtenaren in Brussel en Den Haag gesproken te hebben. Hij heeft twee mensen gesproken die wel wat verstand van zaken hebben, maar laat die eigenlijk nauwelijks aan het woord.

Er is een overschot aan emissierechten in het EU ETS. Op de korte termijn treedt het waterbedeffect dus niet op, maar aangezien uitstootrechten voor altijd geldig zijn, is het waterbedeffect op de lange termijn onverkort geldig -- al kun je stellen dat de verschuiving meer door de tijd dan door de ruimte is. De EU heeft met aanvullend beleid de overschotten teruggedrongen, maar door het waterbedeffect op de korte termijn versterkt wordt -- precies het tegenovergestelde van wat Alonso beweert.

Het aanvullend beleid van de EU is onafhankelijk van flankerend beleid door de lidstaten, zodat het lange-termijn waterbedeffect gelijk blijft.

De reactie van het NRC was veelzeggend. Pas na lang aandringen erkenden ze mijn bestaan. Alonso schreef een hautaine email, waarin hij onderstreepte dat Pieter Boot en Sander de Bruyn* toch echt wereldvermaarde experts zijn, en ook zijn eigen expertise benadrukte: Hij is een Latijns-Amerikanist, die direct na zijn studie journalist werd.

Na herhaaldelijk aandringen heeft het NRC uiteindelijk een brief geplaatst. Mijn aanname was dat er fatsoenlijke en vakkundige mensen bij het NRC werken, maar die mening heb ik toch wel bijgesteld.



*Sander en ik werkten tegelijkertijd aan onze proefschriften in de economie aan de Vrije Universiteit.

Research used to be open access. To read a learned paper, you went to a university library. Academics had privileged access because that library was near their offices. Papers have now moved online, often behind a paywall. Search has much improved and faculty (or their research assistants) no longer have to walk to the library. Others are not so lucky. This is wrong in principle, but the proposed solution, Plan S (Coalition 2018, Measey 2018, Thornton 2018, Rabesandratana 2019), is wrongheaded.

Plan S, supported by research agencies across Europe, demands that all research funded by public grants should be published in open access journals. Anyone should be able to read any paper.

The vast majority of people outside academia never read a scientific journal. They can be given free access to, say, six papers per publisher per year. Few would take this offer, but the political demand is satisfied: Taxpayers can read the research they paid for. Newspapers and magazines have successfully implemented this freemium model (Kumar 2014).

The costs of publication need to be covered somehow. Open access therefore means that subscription fees are replaced by submission or publication fees. Submission fees are more lucrative for publishers as most academics overestimate their chances of getting accepted. Publication fees incentivize editors to accept subpar work.

A shift from payment-for-reading to payment-for-publishing is fine in principle although many universities will struggle with shifting budget from the library to the departments. Poor universities now have limited access to research, but in the future may have to ration publications. Emeriti have library privileges (at zero incremental cost) but universities may be less keen to pay their publication fees.

Even if all new research is open access, universities will need to pay subscription fees for older journal volumes. Subscription fees are typically paid for collections rather than individual journals. Publishers may extend those contracts to include block waivers for publication fees. If so, Plan S would not change much. Universities will continue to hand over large sums of money to publishers. The general public will still not read my latest paper.

Plan S does not address the key issue. Publishers have a monopoly on titles. Professors must read their journals to keep up to date and have no choice but to pay the asking price. Academic publishers make excessive profits, employ excessive numbers of people, and pay excessive wages. Innovation is slow. In short, publishers behave like textbook monopolists (Mankiw 2014).

Open access does not solve this. Researchers must publish in the best journals for promotion, grants, and prizes. Plan S replaces the monopoly of subscription fees by a monopsony of publication or submission fees. The best journals can and will charge excessive fees.

Monopolies and monopsonies are best controlled by new entrants, but it takes so long to build the reputation of a journal that this is not a realistic option. The next-best alternative is regulation. Road, rail, power grid, and water treatment are all natural monopolies. When in private ownership, regulation is and should be tight (Mankiw 2014). Academic publishers are like utilities. They provide an essential service and face no competition. Publishers should therefore be treated like utilities.

Utilities are regulated differently in different countries. The simplest solution is price regulation (Laffont and Tirole 1994): free access for the first six papers, and a flat, low fee for the rest. Aggressive price regulation may bankrupt publishers. Regulators may therefore instead put a cap on the return on capital, and perhaps regulate costs as well, so that prices are lowered rather than white elephants build (Liston 1993).

The details of regulating a monopoly need careful study. But we first need to recognize the reality. Privately owned companies are sponging vast amounts of money from the largely public higher education sector. Plan S takes a principled stand on a minor problem but ignores a bigger one.



Coalition, S. 2018. Plan S: Making full and immediate Open Access a reality. Science Europe.

Kumar, V. 2014. Making 'freemium' work. Harvard Business Review (May 2014).

Laffont, J. J., and J. Tirole. 1994. Access pricing and competition. European Economic Review 38 (9):1673-1710.

Liston, C. 1993. Price-cap versus rate-of-return regulation. Journal of Regulatory Economics 5 (1):25-48.

Mankiw, N. G. 2014. Principles of Microeconomics. Nashville: Southwestern College Publishing.

Measey, J. 2018. Europe's plan S could raise everyone else's publication paywall. Nature 562 (7728):494.

Rabesandratana, T. 2019. The world debates open-access mandates. Science 363 (6422):11-121.

Thornton, J. 2018. Transition to immediate open access publishing under Plan S will be smooth, promise backers. British Medical Journal 363:k5019.