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Elsevier has a 3 billion dollar income, while most of its research is publicly funded. You are paying for the research, then paying again to access the results of the research that you already paid for. The executives can hang.
It is so much worse than that.
I spend my time researching the literature on a topic so that I can spend my time and energy writing a grant. It probably won’t get funded.
If it does, I get to do a bunch of work. It might involve travel, where I will do everything at minimum expense to save enough money for the coming lab work.
I will spend significant time getting the samples analyzed, spending most of the grant money. Then I will come up with a logical way to interpret the data.
I will spend more time sending a document around to coauthors. This may take months, or even years if the coauthors fight.
We eventually submit to a journal. It gets rejected.
We rewrite and submit again. A few months later, congratulations, you get to publish. Money please.
I work for the money to do the work, I work for the writeup, I fight for the acceptance, and I have to pay to publish.
It’s a stupid system.
They have bonkers profit margins too. 38% in 2023. They’re in the same category as Microsoft or Google when it comes to profitability. Absolutely insane for a company that’s supposed to disseminate scientific information.
The scientific journal industrial complex is one of the highest profit margins in the world. It’s consistently at like 30-60% pure profit. Obviously not all journals are the same, some are reasonable, but some are insane. LOOKING AT YOU ELSEVIER
It’s like music. There’s a lot of value in the back catalogue.
The labor is in the peer review and they pay nothing. Then they setup a system where peer reviewers get “credits” not one cares about.
Fucking wooden nickels.
I’ll just start my own journal with blackjack and hookers.
Remember that 80s magazine OMNI?
Science, tech, sci-fi, Mensa-caliber games… by the very same Bob Guccione who published Penthouse!Every issue had an in-depth interview with a prominent and interesting scientist, figures like Alan Guth or Luc Montagnier or Morris Berman.
One issue was a little more off-beat, the interview was with an anthropologist, whose student life and career went like this:Attending the University Of Montana in Missoula, this student loved drinking every day, so he asked the question - “What’s a relatively easy major with little math, that will interfere the least with my drinking?” - and landed on Anthropology.
After graduation, the next question became - “What will I do my thesis about?” - a friend gave him the vague advice to do it on something he knew or was passionate about, and like a “eureka” moment, it hit him: “I’m gonna research drinking culture, bars!”
And so, he became one of the rarefied few for whom drinking on the job was basically a requirement!
Omni! I remember being a teenager, and eagerly getting my subscription copy every month in the mail. In fact, i think i still have them in a box in the garage.
I thought Omni was awesome, and that they did a good job of trying to make science more accessible to people. I just wish that they had succeeded.
OMNi was not a scientific journal.
True, I am aware that OMNI was an entertainment magazine, I just wanted to drift towards a general science direction aiming at the “blackjack and hookers” punchline, and “bars” was the nearest I could stick the landing.
A journal about the science of blackjack and hookers?
sure why not
IHMO: All science should be freely accessible, free as in freedom and price.
The more eyes can actually see something and find flaws, the better. There is no such thing as institutional credibility. Everyone makes mistakes and it takes everyone to find them, even more so the more complex something is. Leech publishers are not only problematic because they prohibit access, but also because they make real science considerably harder.
IHMO: All science should be freely accessible, free as in freedom and price.
Taxpayers pay $13B/yr worldwide to the private publishing industry, for content they cannot read.
Everyone makes mistakes
Except psychopaths who know their claim is garbage but lie through their teeth to get it published. That’s not a mistake, that’s corruption.
Nah, real science starts with a conclusion and then works backwards to find evidence for said conclusion. I think it is a more modern approach. Instead of validating reality, we are validating feelings.
Why not create open-source online “scientific jorunal” with service provided by donations then? Am I missing something?
This idea has been around over 20 years. It dies every time because major lab PIs, usually in US, HATE the idea of not being able to gatekeep research publications in journals of “high impact”. This impacts how institutions are assessed, because, God forbid people actually have to read the papers. This feeds back to Editors, so the number one factor that influences Editors now is zip code.
If we went to a simple repository archive, with transparent peer review, then no one could imply their research is more important because of where it was published. We would let citations determine impact. Science publishing has always pushed the idea that if Einstein drove a Honda, everyone who drives a Honda is a genius.
Meanhile, The Lancet (JIF 105) took 12 years to retract a paper linking autism to vaccines, when it was clearly fraudulent from day one. Nature, Science, CELL, just stopped retractions, at best, they have “statements of Editorial Concern”. This high JIF model is why Alzheimers research has stalled behind a flawed hypothesis only reinforced by fraudulent work not retracted for 25 years. Some people, like the President of Stanford, rose to the top tier on fraud and journal gatekeeping.
2020 saw the world arguing over ivermectin based off a paper “reviewed” overnight, with the journal Editor as an author. The journal 5 years later refuses to prove the paper was peer reviewed at all. 3,400 citations.
Then we have predatory journals that will publish literally anything for page charges. Examples:
Get me off your fucking mailing list.
and
Chicken, chicken chicken chicken, Chicken? chicken. (Cited 35 times)
I have no clue how to improve this situation, but I appreciate this comment, especially the cited papers.
Chicken, chicken, chicken…
It’s simple. Have a central repository similar to Axriv or BioRxiv, but one step further where a manuscript is modified after peer review. The site publishes the paper and the peer reviews (few journals publish peer reviews). Readers can then decide if the science is valid, or not. It should be supported by a consortium of countries, because the world governments currently waste $13B a year on publication fees -that’s money that should be in labs doing research.
The current situation is so broken, important research can get held up for YEARS by some cunt at Harvard or Stanford who wil delay the process while his/her lab catches up. Soem of these prize winners owe their careers to “inspiration” from studies they reviewed and rejected.
The site publishes the paper and the peer reviews (few journals publish peer reviews). Readers can then decide if the science is valid, or not.
…So like Wikipedia for papers? With the “peer review” being the discussion section?
That sounds like a great project for Wikimedia TBH. That + Arixv’s nice frontend is literally the stack to do it. And they have the name recognition to draw people in.
It was a game changer for chicken. Still anticipated for the first Chicken Nobel Prize. Spun off three chicken companies.
The difference is the peer-review process. Without a good peer-review process, those journals won’t have a strong cite score and so they will be considered unreliable.
Without a good peer-review process, those journals won’t have a strong cite score
So why do they charge $6000 to publish, and pay $0 to reviewers?
The top JIF journals also lead with the most retractions. The journals also game the scoring system. Years ago, the number of printed paper journals affected impact factor scores, so Nature just started sending our paper journals free to game that number. Or, they gave out free subscriptions, because the real money is in page charges to the research labs.
All this has been discussed at the NIH and in government, always shut down by US Ivy League schools.
Error correction policies like retractions mean the journal is better, not worse, right?
Except that Nature was leading the world in retractions. The problem is the Editors form a cabal with top lab heads, because they want the best papers, first. So they close an eye to problems seen in peer review. Retractions revealed the Emperor had no clothes.
Why does Science, CELL, Nature, etc., keep reviews secret?
For a modern scientist, we now have to scan https://retractionwatch.com/ once a week as well as https://pubpeer.com/, where HUNDREDS of fraudulent papers have been outed without any formal retractions.
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Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
sorry, not the first time I saw you saying that.
Lmao i love this
I do agree 100%,. rich people should be scared. was just being a bit silly.
They control the means of distribution and accreditation of science publishing. Business should not be trusted to control anything.
This article in the Guardian is definitely worth a read if you’re not intimately familiar with just how it got this way… It’s 8 years old so it won’t cover recent history but does give you an idea of how it started.
And yes Robert Maxwell (father of Ghislaine) is mostly to blame.
This comic is partially right. If you pay, you get open access, so no cost for readers. If you go old-school you don’t pay and the article is paywalled. Terrible system either way, but open access is necessary nowadays, as otherwise you will get cited less
The readers are taxpayers, they are paying whether they like it for not. The solution is to post articles on preprint servers, like Arxiv or BioRxiv, which are open and free to read.
I refuse to pay open access fees and use BioRxiv for all my publications.
💯 with you on this.
We also do preprints 100% of the time, but academic incentives are baked AF. Not ‘publishing’ means a large proportion of other academics simply won’t read or cite your work as they don’t believe in preprints. Additionally, funding bodies care about prestige publishing in top ranked journals, so if you don’t do this, the grant pool you have access to will be smaller.
The incentives need to change, where journal venue is irrelevant, or weighted far less than it is.
“and for the hours of peer review, we pay nothing.”
Ctrl+C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-P. Another hard workday done.
Once again Scientists (do science for exposure and pay us) and Artists (get paid in exposure) being screwed over the MBAs.
What scientific publishing really needs is a cost-free publishing system that is run by the universities, and where the universities publish all their papers in.
Governments support this nonsense by not attaching publishing requirements to research grants.
