A copy of this Reddit post:
In this article I consider a hypothetical situation when a scientist blocks research in a certain area instead of advancing it. Looks like that I found a possible loophole in modern science practices and ethics. Maybe this situation has come real?
For the example of the situation I will consider the real situation with my research. I can’t concisely enough prove that the situation with me is real (you may ask if my amateur research is a crackpottery and I can’t prove you otherwise except of forcing you to spend days reading many pages with formulas). But this does not matter for the scientific thesis (or rather hypothesis) of this article, because a similar enough situation obviously can happen (if not with me then with somebody other) because clearly the probability densities of the “coordinates” are not extremely low and there are not so many “coordinates”.
So, in the first year of the university study I discovered a new mathematical axiom that leads to a new big fundamental branch of mathematics. Later I was forced to be withdrawn from the university by religious discrimination (as a Protestant almost dying of hunger in Russia), not receiving any degree.
I withdrew from the degree obtaining, but not from the research. So after years I produced a hundreds of pages text with a new fundamental branch of mathematics. Now my discoveries include among other a generalization of limit for an arbitrary (even discontinuous) function at every point, so allowing to research discontinuous analysis, and a definition of “space in general” (I exaggerated: in fact, it encompasses just all these kinds spaces that are met in general topology, for example, topological spaces, uniform spaces, and metric spaces, locales, and frames.) and many other related things.
I did also another, unrelated, discovery: I discovered an algebraic axiomatic system for “formulas” or kinda theory of infinite formulas. Funny enough, mathematicians produced axiomatic theories for almost everything but like the babushka from a joke forgot to search the glasses on her own nose forgot to axiomatize formulas. In my personal opinion, this axiomatic theory is the base for the future electronics, probably.
Because I had not enough money to buy the right of my work to be paid (it is called “scientific degree”), I had no incentive to publish journal articles and published just one (I’d say of a mediocre scientific value) journal article [1] on a related topic.
So instead of writing articles I switched to a holistic approach of writing it as a long monograph, not doing the pseudo-scientific “surgery” of cutting this “living” book into parts.
Being misled by widespread claims that publishing open access would increase adoption of my work, I put Creative Commons on my book. As it turned out it does not apply to amateurs because the book publishers don’t publish open access work unless paid big money for and there is no way for an amateur to obtain funding except as by being unusually successful in running his own business. (I tell it as the world best expert in amateur science. :-).)
Later I succeeded to publish my monograph [2] (to be precise an old version of my book) with a Russian publisher INFRA-M. They published even despite it is open access.
When I send my article about generalized limit to a journal, the journals repeatedly “politely” say that it does not conform to their standards. I strongly guess that the real reason is: They realize that they need to obtain a copy from a Russian language site to check if my monograph to which I refer in the article to verify that I really published it and they don’t want to read my book to verify proofs in the article.
I also tried to publish in arXiv, but:
- As not being affiliated with an institution, I had no default submission rights and so sought approval (being mostly ignored) from somebody already published for a long time to be allowed to be published.
- I received approval after all and published my book and several shorter articles at arXiv. Shortly after publication they were removed. I asked the moderation why they were removed and received no explanation. Apparently they choose to train my brain by forcing me to guess their reasoning. Maybe the removal was because I submitted too many articles in a single day (I asked if it was the case, but they choose to ignore an undermensh.), maybe because they assumed that my claims are too grandiose to be likely true.
- They told that I need to publish in a peer reviewed journal before publishing in arXiv.
- Later I tried to submit again and it was again removed:
- “Our moderators request that you limit your submissions to those that have already been published in mainstream conventional journals. Submissions that do not contain a journal reference and/or DOI (that resolves to a journal’s website) will be removed. If a significant number of your articles have been published over a reasonable period of time, we will reconsider this status.”
- So, I’ve submitted an article published in a mainstream conventional journal with a reference to journal website. [1]
- They decided that they should apply lying (see the quote from the email above) to mitigate undermenshes and removed this article, too.
Now scientific ethics comes to play:
- I would possibly re-publish the book as several articles in journals, but scientific ethics forbids to publish in research journals results already published elsewhere and my book is published by INFRA-M. Moreover, to split it into parts and communicate with journals is much work and would possibly take years (while I also need to earn money). So, it is near to impossible to re-publish my book as journal articles.
Therefore it is greatly hindered to publish my (accordingly to the considered be it hypothetical or real situation, producing a big scientific revolution) articles in an “ethical” way.
I also tried to formalize my research in a proof assistant (a computer program that checks correctness of math proofs), among other reasons to publish it in their database of computer-checked proofs, but I found that not every genius is able to use such software in the state of hardness to use it has in this decade (even despite the fact that I was able to make several small new results in the fields of computer-assisted proofs research in the way of trying to rewrite my book in a computer language).
Funny? I may have blocked science development: I can’t publish on this topic and nobody other can publish on this topic because scientific ethics forbids to publish results discovered by others.
So, it looks like that a fundamental research topic (not only my research but also everything that would depend on it!) became non-publishable (to be precise non-reviewable) at all. It’s like genetics and cybernetics in Stalin’s USSR, but now the trouble covers the entire Earth.
Maybe this problem will incidentally resolve (for example, if I earn enough money to save the science to be blocked (for centuries?)), but it looks like the possibility that this problem or a similar problem (e.g. with another amateur researcher) may grow big. Maybe we already have past instances of similar problems of different size of impact on development of science with other researchers (not necessarily not finished education, they may for example just lose the diploma during a flight, or even deliberately block science).
As a possible solution I propose to create a site for re-publishing open access works (including books) of another publishers for free. Another important direction is helping me (and others) to receive a Bachelor degree in mathematics without spending money.
Please forgive me for being light-minded, I lightly assumed that the problem would likely “dissolve” by itself. Now you need to solve it if you have a university connection.
Bibliography
1: Victor Porton, Filters on Posets and Generalizations, 2012
2: Victor Porton, Algebraic General Topology. Volume 1, 2019
