Björn Brembs
@brembs@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago
@glynmoody

Thank you for this!

It is deeply disturbing thatit always needs a catastrophe to get people to act. People have warned about the fickleness of databases for decades, see, e.g., slides 19-22 from 2013:

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/the-three-infrastructure-crises-in-science/15079538#19

or with explicit PubMed mention on slide 6 in 2014:

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/making-science-open-by-default/31885784#6

We have known that this was a problem for many, many years, I was not the only one pointing this out, of course.

And yet, nothing happened.
Björn Brembs
@brembs@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago
@glynmoody

Even now, when people start #SafeguardingResearch we are making the same mistakes again! As you point out in your article, all our outputs are in danger, be it research data or papers. And GitHub is a single point of failure foir scholarly code, too!

All of our outputs are under threat. If we had to invent infrastructures for our outputs, nobody would invent different silos for each output, so linking code, data and text together would be made more difficult, rather than easier?
Björn Brembs
@brembs@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago
@glynmoody

This is why, already several years ago, we have proposed to replace the journals with a decentralized system that no government can control, and use the saved funds to incorporate solutions for all our research objects:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230206

With most countries only being one election cycle away from their own Trump, how can we prevent our institutions and scholars from repeating all the old mistakes over and over again?