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.
Fun (random shit I heard on the internet): the enshittification of journals mostly started with Pergamon Press which was founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father.
There's a behind the bastards about him.
Are we sure that current events aren’t just one long behind the bastards episode?
It's bastards all the way down
Bastards... what a bunch of bastards.
ACAB but not ABAC
Sometimes I feel like everything shit in the world can be traced back to like a dozen people and their parents and grandparents.
In grad school I remember being encouraged to submit a paper to a journal that would have charged me a few hundred dollars to put it in for peer review, and I told my advisor no, I needed to buy groceries, I would not throw my money away for an extra line on my CV. He got all flustered and it was a great example of why higher education is so fucked. My advisor, who ostensibly understood my background and means, could not understand how such a relatively small fee would be so prohibitive. He was incapable of understanding that I was essentially unemployed while enrolled as his grad student, and every dollar of funding went to bare essentials so I could continue breathing. He had access to discretionary funds for this exact kind of issue (I found out later), and didn’t think to offer.
Without independent wealth and deep personal connections it’s incredibly difficult to succeed in academia, regardless of the quality of your research.
I got lucky in that my publication was through a journal that doesn't charge money for access or submissions. It's part of our professional organization and our annual membership fees cover the journal's expenses.
Without independent wealth and deep personal connections it’s incredibly difficult to succeed in academia, regardless of the quality of your research.
Always has been, ~~why do you think he's called SIR Isaac Newton?~~
EDIT : Turns out his knighthood was afterwards, but he did have connections. There are several examples of science being the domain of already rich people.
Uuhh, beyond the fucked up publishing system, your advisor was a self destructive dick. It was his job to pay that. His lab and career benefit and hes the one that gets funding for research operations.
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.
In my univerity, they just told me how to pirate articles, straigt up, as if it was just normal and legal, very based but it was surprising.
Nobody cares anymore about leech capitalism, almost nobody defends this companies and i'm so so happy it is that way.
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.
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
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.
world governments currently waste $13B a year on publication fees -that’s money that should be in labs doing research.
And only a tiny fraction of that $13B can buy a lot of lawyers, lobbyists, and favors to make sure things don't improve.
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.
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.
“Clearly something you want me to do because you keep on paying, lol.”
You can thank Ghislaine Maxwell's dad for that shit.
Once again Scientists (do science for exposure and pay us) and Artists (get paid in exposure) being screwed over the MBAs.
"and for the hours of peer review, we pay nothing."
You missed the part where like half the time they don’t actually do the peer review part
Peer review is often done by other PhD candidates for free.
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!
They control the means of distribution and accreditation of science publishing. Business should not be trusted to control anything.
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
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.
Not just science. I own a small art business. The magazines in my world all do this. I see my competitors paying hundreds of dollars for “interviews” in them. The entire magazine is an ad masquerading as some type of journalism. I don’t even pay for ads and I’m buried in work. So it’s not needed, at all (who reads this stuff? At least a science journal makes sense).
Honestly it’s shameful across the board. Anyone participating should feel bad about it.
Needs text alternative.
Images of text break much that text alternatives do not.
Losses due to image of text lacking alternative such as link:
Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images. They don't do much: they're obsolete middlemen.
It's funny, because researchers at CERN invented the World Wide Web long ago to solve this problem: a web of hyperlinking[^hyperlink] dissertation articles. Then physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory who were building a central repository of electronic preprints seized on the web to create arΧiv for sharing those preprints, thus pioneering open access. The NIH, inspired by arΧiv to do similar for biomedical & life sciences, dreamt up E-biomed
The goal of E-biomed was to provide free access to all biomedical research. Papers submitted to E-biomed could take one of two routes: either immediately published as a preprint, or through a traditional peer review process. The peer review process was to resemble contemporary overlay journals, with an external editorial board retaining control over the process of reviewing, curating, and listing papers which would otherwise be freely accessible on the central E-biomed server. Varmus intended to realize the new possibilities presented by communicating scientific results digitally, imagining continuous conversation about published work, versioned documents, and enriched "layered" formats allowing for multiple levels of detail.
but capitulation to industry pressure led them to settle for almost none of that with PubMed Central
Under pressure from vigorous lobbying from commercial publishers and scientific societies who feared for lost profits, NIH officials announced a revised PubMed Central proposal in August 1999. PMC would receive submissions from publishers, rather than from authors as in E-biomed. Publications were allowed time-embargoed paywalls up to one year. PMC would only allow peer-reviewed work — no preprints.
So, the technology to solve this has existed since the web began, but parasitic special interests who are pretty much obsolete inhibit their realization.
[^hyperlink]: so hyperlinks could replace citations & references
I honestly don't understand this. It's not that expensive to just host a website where you publish your research to instead of using these scheisters.
It’s a feedback loop. In order to raise your academic profile and potentially get a job, you need a solid CV full of peer reviewed publications. In order to get published in the first place, you often need money and institutional backing.
If you circumvent that cycle by self-publishing (a solidly logical idea btw), then you’ll have an even harder job getting people to take you seriously and will alienate yourself from “mainstream” academia. It’s messed up. Some open access journals have tried to solve this, with some success, but it’s a systemic problem.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
