A commentary on ‘The economic implications of alternative publishing models’

Jay Stone is a final year Ph.D. student based at the Institute of Ophthalmology in London. She is attempting to identify novel therapeutic targets for the treatment of vascular proliferation in retinal disease. She believes that to be effective in the laboratory, scientists need to communicate their work to all audiences. She currently writes articles for the British Society of Cell Biology and BioNews.     

The jurisdiction of the subjective expected utility (SEU) approach to risk-taking in science – A response to Franzoni and Stephan (2023), ‘uncertainty and risk-taking in science’

This paper discusses the SEU approach with regard to its “jurisdiction”; i.e. where it should and where it should not be applied. It is argued that the SEU approach must address the fundamental tension between exploration and exploitation; that it should be applied only to disciplines or fields that have low degrees of both technical and strategic uncertainties; and that funders need to prevent the SEU approach from spilling over to evaluations of exploratory projects, for which it is clearly not suited. In addition, the paper argues that the SEU approach needs to respond to the “fund people, not projects” argument. Finally, it calls for many more empirical and preferably experimental studies with the aim of shedding light on how the SEU approach works in practice. In this regard, novel techniques should be used more frequently than today, such as specification curve analysis that encompasses all reasonable explanatory specifications that are both theoretically consistent and statistically valid and non-redundant.     

The long march to catch-up: A history-friendly model of China’s mobile communications industry

This paper develops a history-friendly model of the process of catch-up by Chinese firms in the mobile communications industry. It aims to explain how the sectoral environment in terms of segmented markets and generational technological change facilitated the catch-up of domestic firms with respect to foreign multinationals. Segmented markets provided a nurturing environment in peripheral markets for the survival of domestic firms starting with low level capabilities in their infant stage. Generational technological change opened windows of opportunities for domestic firms to catch-up with foreign multinationals in new product segments. Segmented markets and generational technological change allowed domestic firms to leverage their initial advantages in peripheral markets to catch-up in core markets. Counterfactual simulations highlight that the process of catch-up was facilitated by relatedness across technological generations. This paper contributes to the literature on catch-up and industry evolution by illustrating the role of technological change and market regimes in the process of catching-up.     

The subjective expected utility approach and a framework for defining project risk in terms of novelty and feasibility – A response to Franzoni and Stephan (2023), ‘uncertainty and risk-taking in science’

In their Discussion Paper, Franzoni and Stephan (F&S, 2023) discuss the shortcomings of existing peer review models in shaping the funding of risky science. Their discussion offers a conceptual framework for incorporating risk into peer review models of research proposals by leveraging the Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) approach to decouple reviewers' assessments of a project's potential value from its risk. In my Response, I build on F&S's discussion and attempt to shed light on three additional yet core considerations of risk in science: 1) how risk and reward in science are related to assessments of a project's novelty and feasibility; 2) how the sunk cost literature can help articulate why reviewers tend to perceive new research areas as riskier than continued investigation of existing lines of research; and 3) how drawing on different types of expert reviewers (i.e., based on domain and technical expertise) can result in alternative evaluation assessments to better inform resource allocation decisions. The spirit of my Response is to sharpen our understanding of risk in science and to offer insights on how future theoretical and empirical work—leveraging experiments— can test and validate the SEU approach for the purposes of funding more risky science that advances the knowledge frontier.     

Against misleading technocratic precision in research evaluation and wider policy – A response to Franzoni and Stephan (2023), ‘uncertainty and risk-taking in science’

Franzoni and Stephan (2023) recommend a probabilistic ‘subjective expected utility’ technique for addressing challenges of uncertainty in research evaluation. Whilst acknowledging strengths in F&S's analysis, this Response highlights a series of important practical, theoretical and methodological deficiencies. The stakes are raised, in that these are widely shared in a growing body of practice across research policy and beyond. This practice seeks to reduce and aggregate real-world complex, ambiguous, qualitative, multidimensional and contested challenges through ostensibly precise calculation. Taking associated problems in turn, this Response shows how F&S: make scientifically dubious claims; understate the depths of uncertainty; overstate the sufficiency of quantification; neglect foundational limits to calculation; and ignore crucial interpretive dimensions of policy making. Highlighting roles for greater methodological diversity, this Response points at the end to alternative methods that collectively allow more robustly plural approaches to contrasting aspects of incertitude. In the process, the steering of directions for research can become more rigorous and accountable and less vulnerable to manipulation and inadvertent bias. With globally growing ‘post-truth’ authoritarian populism arguably partly provoked by the kind of technocracy criticised here, research evaluation may in a small way help re-invigorate democracy by ‘opening up’ in this particular area, the hiding of politics behind expertise.     

A confluence of new technology and the right to water: experience and potential from South Africa’s constitution and commons

South Africa’s groundbreaking constitution explicitly confers a right of access to sufficient water (section 27). But the country is officially ‘water-stressed’ and around 10 % of the population still has no access to on-site or off-site piped or tap water. It is evident that a disconnect exists between this right and the reality for many; however the reasons for the continuation of such discrepancies are not always clear. While barriers to sufficient water are myriad, one significant factor contributing to insufficient and unpredictable access to water is the high percentage of broken water pumps. Previous studies have reported that between 20 and 50 % of all hand operated water pumps installed on the African continent are broken, or out of use. Monitoring and maintenance of pumps, which in South Africa is the responsibility of local municipalities is often ineffective, in part due to the distances between municipal centres and rural communities and the consequent costs of site visits, as well as breakdowns within the local bureaucratic system. The emergence of new telemetry tools that can remotely monitor water applications constitutes a novel and cost-efficient alternative to undertaking regular sites visits. Sustainable, appropriate, low-cost telemetry systems are emerging that could be used to monitor the operational performance of water pumps, or a wide range of other field parameters, and to communicate this information swiftly and cheaply to water service providers, using SMS messages. Data on the performance of water pumps could also be made available to the public online. This is an example of how ICT can be used for water resources management and environmental regulation, as well as in the governance of socio-economic rights: helping to optimize water allocation by improving communication and strengthening accountability.