In this interview, sociologist Philip N. Cohen discusses his work on developing open platforms for social science research and his research on family inequality.
Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and researches the sociology of families, demography, social inequality, and scholarly communication. He is also the director of SocArXiv, an open archive of the social sciences. Here he spoke with us about his work on open science frameworks and his research on family inequality.
Your blog features your interest in open science. Most recently you wrote a blog post about Sci-Hub, which is a clearinghouse for pirated scientific articles that are behind the paywalls of journals. You note in your post that you use the service, but don’t “contribute anything to the system.” Instead, you just “free-ride off their criminality.” How do paywalls for scientific research exacerbate inequality in access to information?
The thing about putting information behind paywalls is you’re denying access to people who aren’t subscribers. You’re also raising the money that you need to do the publication work. So selling published work has always been a way of financing the work, just like authors sell books and so on. The problem with science specifically, and I include social science in that, is it really requires openness and transparency to work as science. So in the old days it was really expensive and difficult to print and distribute scientific literature or literature of any kind. And so we had journals and they had to raise money to bind and ship their journals to libraries. Everything was a lot slower.
Now, we can do it a lot faster and we can open the process up to people who can’t afford to pay. And, we can do that very cheaply. But we’re still sort of tied down in this old sort of 19th century system of publishing that involves paying subscriptions for journals when we could reduce the costs a lot, publish a lot faster, and more openly and more inclusively. That would also improve the quality of science by getting more feedback, getting more interaction, opening ourselves up to scrutiny to find errors and fix things, and yeah, make it better.
You are the director of SocArXiv, which is an archive of primarily social science papers on the Open Science Framework platform. The Stone Center is participating in the archive with our new working paper series on inequality. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of the archive and where is it going?
Before there was SocArXiv, there was ArXiv, which was for math and physics and is a couple of decades old. It takes a long time to publish papers in math and physics. The peer review process is very slow and the publication process is very slow, and they just didn’t want to wait that long to also have everything distributed with paywalls. So they came up with a preprint system of distributing papers before peer review. And it was very successful. The interesting thing about it is, it did not kill the journal system. They still have peer review, and you still have to publish in journals to get fancy jobs and tenure and stuff like that. But, in the meantime, everybody can read the work.
It became normalized in those disciplines to share work earlier for free as the work developed. So we came up with SocArXiv for social science. We’re mostly sociologists and librarians who did it. We do want to be disruptive and challenge the publishing system, but we don’t believe we can simply replace it with this. So what we’ve done is basically added a step in the publishing process where you write the paper, you have a draft, you share it, and then you can also go on and publish it in journals. But in the meantime, it’s faster, cheaper, and free for readers.
We think there are other parts to democratizing and opening scholarship that we want to do. I’m including the peer review process. The peer review process could be more open. We could imagine a world where reviews are themselves scholarly contributions, where people can read reviews, where reviewers are accountable, where editorial decisions are accountable in a more substantive way. We’re also thinking about ways that we might end up breaking down the barriers between types of work where there’s this very rigid thing called a paper, which has a moment when it’s done. We think that with the technology and communications we have now, you can have an evolving stream of research with feedback from different actors at different points. It can be split off into separate projects with different collaborators.
Your blog is prolific. It is primarily on family inequality — your area of expertise — and you’re producing a fair number of charts to go with your analysis, such as your “11 Trends for Your New Decade’s Holiday Party” or your analysis of the New York Times essay, “The Coming End to Babies.” How does your blog help drive the conversation around family and inequality?
The great thing about the blog, especially as it developed and I got more readers, is it increased the research metabolism a lot. So I can get work out at an earlier stage and get more feedback. It’s also part of what preprints and SocArXiv is about — getting work out earlier instead of going through all the gatekeepers of peer review, journal publication, or a book publication, which is even slower. I can do more half-baked ideas and work and put them out and get responses from people who are interested in the things I’m interested in. So it’s been great for, “Hey, what do you all think about this?”
When it comes to preliminary results or minor findings, like here’s the chart of just one trend, it’s a place to put them and attract the attention of people who are interested in that specific thing. It links up with Twitter and other social media so it becomes a hub for my engagement with all kinds of other readers and researchers.
Your recently updated book, The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, addresses many trends in contemporary family life, including how growing inequality challenges families in areas such as health, wealth, and well-being. When it comes to families and inequality, what should we be paying attention to?
I think there’s some questions we’re used to thinking about with inequality like rich people have rich children, parents with high paying jobs get their kids jobs. Poverty may compound intergenerationally through things like wealth, access to education, neighborhoods, race and racism.
In the family realm specifically, I like to expand those, especially to look at who gets a family and who gets the family they want: If you want to get married, can you find a spouse? If you want to have a stable family, do you have the resources to protect your family from economic shocks, from unemployment, from housing discrimination, healthcare, and so on. So, I like to think of family as an inequality outcome also. If you look at kids in the foster care system, they don’t get to live with their biological parents. So they’re disadvantaged in that sense in terms of family as an outcome. They may end up in some other better situation, but that’s one of the things we look at, is who gets to have the family that they want. This is also big with same sex marriage. Can you marry? Or interracial marriage, can you legally marry the person you want to marry or is the law preventing you, literally making it illegal for you to have the family that you want?
Is anything else top of mind that you want to share on family trends and equality, open science, even politics?
You know we’ve had a huge increase in interest in inequality, basically since the Great Recession, and Occupy, and the 1 percent and all that. There’s new data. There’s new methods. There’s great new interdisciplinary collaborations really being driven by public interest in an exciting way. There are huge blind spots in that. We have a massive conversation about social class inequality that often substitutes for or pushes out race in awkward ways. We have politics and policy questions which are not well-defined. You know, we’re going to have a wealth tax. We’re going to raise income tax rates. Or are we going to slash income tax rates? It’s very much up in the air. So it’s an exciting area and I’m really looking forward to this stuff that you all [distribute] in your series.