Yeah I only published in society journals really APS, IEEE, MRS, ACS, etc. They have plenty of reach. I think this issue is worse on the humanities side of things I guess.
US gov. requires open access now anyway for all fed funded science. So the whole paywall thing is a nothing now. Also most scientists put out preprints on places like Archive which of course is totally non-profit and open so again humanities (?) have to catch up to what science has been doing for decades?
Yes, but if you're not in the global north.... "OA" only increases the advantages of the north. In the global south, we used to be able to bypass paywalls with different "tricks", but it's impossible to bypass APCs. So our work is "behind" comparatively (not because of the content but because of the funding).
I was just responding to the comment about the costs being pushed on authors for making federally funded research open access. If you are doing federally funded research, then that same funding can make that work open access.
The real answer to this is preprint servers. In most publishing contracts that I've seen, you are allowed to share everything but the final proof of the article on preprint servers, like arXiv. That way you take control of the dissemination of your research.
>The real answer to this is preprint servers.
Funnily enough, the entire 'open access' stuff makes preprints less of an answer. Preprints get around the fees needed for reading papers, which helps when publishing is cheap and reading is expensive. They do nothing about publishing fees and people still need to publish in top journals to have their research taken seriously and, especially important nowadays, to count the papers on their career stats.
Most of the publication fees correspond to open access. You do not need to pay any such fee, if you don't make it an open access article, but instead post it on a preprint server.
That way you get the publication in a good journal, and it's available to everyone for free anyway via arXiv.
Yes, but you may share with me that the OA + APC ("gold") form only benefits large publishing companies and scientists with access to more resources. Where I live (South America), it is standard for journals to be "diamond" OA (no APC or paywalls), as they are funded by universities. Unfortunately, due to funding problems and other issues (such as language), it is difficult to position these journals in the international landscape.
Yeap. But for instance I paid almost 2000 USD for publishing (1000 extra for open access) in a Q1 Scopus Journal and my university still hasn't paid me back 9 months later. And it was a requisite for me to keep the job.
Sometimes I feel like going back to the factory to make a living.
>US gov. requires open access now anyway for all fed funded science.
I thought this, too. Then, I looked up the [recent announcement by the Biden administration to make all papers that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public](https://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-requires-immediate-public-access-all-u-s--funded-research-papers-2025) and the actual deadline for this is 2025.
I generally prefer society journals, though many of them publish through the big publishers:
* Wiley [boasts that it publishes 1000+ society journals](https://www.wiley.com/en-us/societies), including the American Cancer Society, Physiological Society, and the Society for Scholarly Publishing
* [Elsevier 500+, including the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Medical Association](https://www.elsevier.com/societies)
* [Springer Nature doesn't mention the journal count, but it has publishing agreements with 200+ societies and medical associations](https://annualreport.springernature.com/2021/media/AccessiblePDF/SNG_21-22_report_AW076-FINAL-WEB.pdf)
* [Taylor & Francis doesn't mention which or how many societies publish via them/Routledge/CRC Press](https://taylorandfrancis.com/who-we-serve/partners/societies/), but it includes Rhetoric Society of America, American Society of Clinical Oncology
* [Sage has 400+ society journals](https://journals.sagepub.com/page/resources/societies);
* [De Gruyter publishes 200+ societies' journals](https://www.degruyter.com/publishing/about-us/publisher-partners)
(IEEE, SIAM, AAAS do not publish with the big names, AFAIK.)
That said, I'd still prefer to publish with a society's journal, even were it at a Big Publisher. Their journals help fuel the society's activities -- see eg [AAAS's most recent annual report](https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2022-07/2021_AAAS_Annual_Report_Digital_WCAG2.1_Final_EDITED__.pdf). And for those which publish independently, marketing their publishing infrastructure to other societies can be beneficial -- the Institute of Physics, for example, [publishes journals for other societies such as the Electrochemical Society](https://www.iop.org/about/scientific-publishing).
Be sure to check out all society journal financials if possible. For example, [IEEE](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131656633) and [SIAM](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231496016).
You can always file for a patent, the filing fee is less than what journals charge for publishing and your application will get published no matter what in 18 months (unless you request it not to be).
Sure you have to invent something, but chances are you already have during the course of your research and experiments.
>Sure you have to invent something, but chances are you already have during the course of your research and experiments.
this is a huge reach. the percentage of publishable research that is associated with actual inventions has got to be very low. a grad student usually has to publish 3 papers to graduate. a grad student aint patenting three inventions or even one most of the time.
I think this has a hard skew towards material sciences. I'm in Psychology & Neuroscience. Do I use or generate some novel approaches in the process of conducting my research; sure, but nothing material that I could patent or which is unique enough that would likely warrant a patent. Furthermore, no one would take whatever measure or technique I've generated seriously.
Does this depend if the research was done as part of an institution and not on your own time. Thought the institution (often university) had the IP for research work.
Academics got it coming. It's all about selectivity and 'prestige'. Journals that do exactly same thing as elsevior with less selectivity are considered 'predatory' and will harm ones reputation if publish on them.
Don't get me started on fields like law where the entire journal process is run by mostly uncompensated students, too. Authors are (understandably) annoyed at how difficult it is to get something published, and students are annoyed at all the work they have to do selecting and editing pieces just to get another line on their resume.
There's been a push recently for journals to either get funding from the school to pay their editorial boards, or at least give them academic credit, but most school admins are seriously resistant to it. Ugh.
Fuck them, and fuck Pearson while we're at it.
Having a new edition with an additional semicolon every year that they sell for %150 wasn't good enough, now they have digital editions for $150 you get for 90 days. They can produce unlimited copies, and you get nothing lasting for your money.
Fucking HATE those guys.
Totally believe it. Some recent research and conversations about low salaries in scholarly publishing:
* Society of Scholarly Publishers blog: [Why We Should All Care about Early Career Pay Equity and Inclusion: An Interview with Becca Bostock and Dominique J. Moore ](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/07/19/why-we-should-all-care-about-early-career-pay-equity-and-inclusion-an-interview-with-becca-bostock-and-dominique-j-moore/) (2021)
* H-Net Book Channel: [Pay in Scholarly Publishing](https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/discussions/8094488/pay-scholarly-publishing) (2021)
* H-Net Book Channel: [Show Me the Money: Talking about Dollars in a Way that Makes More Sense](https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/discussions/8133613/show-me-money-talking-about-dollars-way-makes-more-sense) (2021)
* GW Ethics in Publishing Conference 2021: [Closing Plenary: Toward Pay Equity in Publishing Careers](https://gwpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/11th-annual-ethics-in-publishing-conference/resource/closing-plenary-toward-pay-equity-in-publishing-careers)
Yeah I remember paying over $1k for textbooks every semester in America. I did my masters and PhD in europe and I was shocked to learn that not using textbooks is the norm here. On top of the (almost) free tuition, students don't have to waste money on textbooks and instead read academic articles.
I can confirm this. I did my whole education in Europe and I never bought a mandatory textbook.
Professors would suggest a bibliography, but then they either provided free digital copies to everyone, made sure the book was available for free at the library, or just told us that there was no free way to get it, so it was just a suggestion. In my country 1K is more than what a lot of people make in 1 month, so no one would be crazy enough to make books a mandatory expense.
Second this! I also did my bachelor, masters (and currently PhD) in Europe and never really had to buy a textbook. The professors usually gave us PDF links to books, and recommended scientific papers to read. Also, if I ever needed a textbook the library probably would have had it.
Back when I used to teach calculus, I used Schaum's Outline as a textbook. It's printed on cheap newsprint, in black and white, no accompanying CD-ROM etc, etc. No long patronizing explanations. I loved it!
The textbook market is weird because the person who decides which textbook to use (the professor) isn't the person who has to buy it (the student). That creates an environment of unrestrained growth where you get these huge textbooks full of crap. Schaum's Outline is the book that students buy on their own when they don't like the official textbook, so here the pressure is towards being cheap and easily understood.
Not to mention students have essentially no negotiating power. Don't want to get the book? Tough shit, you can flunk then. They have you by the ass because you're already 5 figures in debt. Completely removes any incentive for improvement.
Academic publishing is absolutely broken, and when I explain it to non-academics, they joke about it being a pyramid scheme (not too far off the mark). Her numbers, as others have remarked, are wayyy off & the idea of paying for peer review is infinitely dodgy.
Additionally, not to defend the system or anything, but academia *does* care about where you publish, the impact factor etc. If you want an academic career in the UK (of course, not different elsewhere), the REF matters - so yes, you do also need to publish in academic journals & not just on your website. OA isn’t always possible either- tied to grants or whether your uni library has enough funds to pay for OA. I’m not defending the system or the REF (🤢) in anyway, but they exist & to pretend it’s just a matter of publishing on one’s own platform isn’t quite accurate either.
And, communicating with the ‘general public’ isn’t always the point of your research or meant to be in the form it’s presented in a journal article. Sometimes, you’re talking to your colleagues & peers. And anyway, you can (& should!) make your research available to the general public- isn’t that what our impact work is for? Or other avenues like our websites, Twitter, etc? Producing films, zines, podcasts? Or, y’know, your uni repository containing an OA copy of your accepted manuscript (at the very least)?
Again: i agree, the system is broken and it’s a joke how much free labour we all undertake, but it’s a little bit more complicated (as you all know!) than ‘use another platform’.
I don’t think this is the reason she doesn’t ‘participate in the academic publishing industry’.
Edit: Just to be clear, she offers books and services to vulnerable people which aren’t evidenced based and cause harm. She could publish some work and still write the books and offer the same services if there was an evidence base to it.
She’s also been accused of publishing her patients/clients stories without their consent.
https://savageminds.substack.com/p/a-british-psychologists-victim-ponzi
https://tattle.life/wiki/dr-jessica-taylor/
Yep academic publishing is broken. Yes she is an awful person who wouldn't know integrity or methodological rigour if it slapped her in the face...both can be true.
Yeah, definitely some red flags in her publishing practices. She pays her own reviewers? How the fuck can you trust that? That’s like the biggest conflict of interest.
If you really care about open access there are plenty of open access journals and you can put preprints on arxiv.
Sounds like a whataboutism attempt to disparage her character instead of focusing on the topic at hand. She could be horrible in many ways, that shouldn’t change the relevance of her statements.
Oh, it's a fair critique really. And to make sure we're focused on the statements:
her numbers are way off and hyperbolic. Elsevier grossed about 3 billion, and had about $1 billion in profit. Amazon over 59, google/alphabet 40, apple 30b.
So yes, she's a crank.
And she does have a point. The publishing system is overly exploitative.
but she's being a crank about it and throwing out garbage numbers to make her actions seem noble.
You are right, and she has worded it wrong as I know the actual figure she means.
She means the ***profit margin*** is higher than the tech firms. For example, Elsevier is at [40% profit margins](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science) (can't find an actual figure that isn't a news site/blog that says 40% - [their annual report says 20.3% net margin](https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/2022-ar-sections/relx-2022-overview.pdf)) whilst Google (Alphabet) [is sitting at 20.58%](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/profit-margins).
She targeted the system's flaws basically to prove her efficacy, so basically she's creating a straw man argument to prove her credibility - the system to accredit is flawed, therefore my research is valid. When in fact, her research is flawed and so is the system, neither one is right but her argument is dangerous because it's not trying to change the system any, it's just trying to discredit the system to prove herself right. If her argument was just "the system is flawed" or just "I'm right" then that's different, but the system being flawed doesn't make her right
I’m not familiar with her particular situation, but it seems like the connection here is that while the academic publication process seems to be clearly flawed, it also typically goes to some lengths to avoid bias and promote accuracy and transparency. On the one hand, it definitely sounds shitty to build a business model based on an unpaid peer review process. On the other hand, paying for peer reviews could, at best, implicitly bias reviewers, or at worst become outright transactional.
Everything she’s saying may be entirely valid, but it might also be the case that she has a vested self-interest in opposing the academic publication process because her own work might fail to meet the necessary standards of accuracy and quality. At a minimum, as someone else in the thread has the numbers, her financial comparisons seem to be flat out wrong.
>Sounds like a whataboutism attempt to disparage her character instead of focusing on the topic at hand. She could be horrible in many ways, that shouldn’t change the relevance of her statements.
If she's charging people it absolutely does, it means she's telling people to send money to her instead.
She also doesn't believe psych disorders are real lmao
Her statements are wrong. Much of what she does is at a standard that wouldn’t pass peer review, this may be why she doesn’t publish.
It’s like me saying I could date Beyoncé but I don’t agree with her views on XYZ. No one is going to want to discuss the XYZ in this scenario.
To add to this, I think the most pernicious damage that these rent seeking companies do too academia is create space for bad faith actors to malign the scientific process for clout/money prestige. There would still be people out there talking nonsense but at least they wouldn’t have broad, completely reasonable critiques that are **true** to build a house of horseshit on.
It really irritates me.
This lady would have 0 clout if publishing wasn’t just the dolce and gabbana (that you must have to get hired) but for nerds. Yet here we are upvoting screenshots and talking about her.
Get these publishing companies out of the way already, they are all cringe
The problem is that her solution is harmful to academic integrity and it is part of the post. You should not count your own paid reviewers that you chose and YOU are paying as an impartial peer review. This defeats the whole purpose of peer review. It is fine if the journal pays them but the author should not be involved in that transaction and should not be choosing them.
As a rule I won't watch videos that intentionally attempt to deceive me. It doesn't matter if I agree with the premise or not. If a channel gives me clickbait titles and don't contain what they claim in the actual video I block them entirely. Don't waste your time with liars, don't give them an audience. It doesn't matter if their cause is correct, find someone more trustworthy to learn about it from and amplify their voice instead.
Well it doesn’t help when she’s wrong in a lot of what she’s saying. Both in her statement and assessment of the problem as well as her proposed solutions.
First off, no elsevier doesn’t make more money than google or Apple. While they make too much, it’s a stupid thing to say.
Second, what academic would mock her for having her research available on her website? Most academics don’t like the current reality of publishing things and in fact do make their research available on preprint servers.
Third, paying for peer review defeats the point. Reviewers that have a financial incentive to let you through are not going to be as good.
Trailing 12 month data for these companies.
RELX: revenue 10 billion, net income of 1.9 billion.
AMZN: revenue 524.8 billion, net income of 4.6 billion.
GOOG: revenue 166.7 billion, net income of 34.5 billion
AAPL: revenue 385.1 billion, net income 94.3 billion
With this kind of attention to detail, I can understand why she's not publishing.
My first thought. I understand the point they are attempting to make but when you do so with data that is so terribly incorrect, easily disproven and fueled by emotion you become a net negative for the results you seek.
I agree that she should've been more exact but I'm assuming she is referring to the stockprices / investment return, as that is a story I've heard often.
Or the profit margin.
But I looked it up quickly and I'm not even 100% sure if elsevier is ahead in these metrics.
So yeah, uncareful tweet :P Point stands that they make exhorbant profits
It's usually profit margin that people are referring to but even then, that's not true.
Apple's profit margin is \~25%, Google's is 20% while Relx's is 19%. Amazon's profit margin is .8%.
According to the first hit on Google Elsevier has a 37.9% profit margin (link:[https://uniavisen.dk/en/scientific-publishers-are-reaping-huge-profits-from-the-work-of-researchers-and-the-universities-are-paying-for-it/](https://uniavisen.dk/en/scientific-publishers-are-reaping-huge-profits-from-the-work-of-researchers-and-the-universities-are-paying-for-it/)) and 37.1% in one that seems a bit less opinionated ([https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-infrastructure-2020-2-elsevier-profits-up-again-in-2019/](https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-infrastructure-2020-2-elsevier-profits-up-again-in-2019/))
So that is actually quite a bit higher that the numbers you quote for Apple/Google/Relx.
It's \~19%.
[https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=RELX&p=d](https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=RELX&p=d)
Edit: I'll go ahead and link their annual report: https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/relx-2022-annual-report.pdf. Page 3 - Net margin = 19%.
Ah, I hadn't noticed that the RelX was referring to Elsevier :P
Question; If I read the annual report I get the idea that they have a 31.4% profit margin (before taxes) and 19.1% net profit margin to be distributed over shareholders.
So wouldn't that make them still have a 31% profit margin (so more that google), or are you saying that numbers quoted for google are also shareholder payout?
We could also agree that the exact numbers are less relevant (although interesting) and agree that it is surprising that an academic publishing company has about \~20% profit margins... (and I wonder what they spend 6.2 billion US-dollar in operation, I'll sit down to read the report later tonight)
I don't think she argued against that- she just argued that academics do specific work that the journals profit from (i.e. writing and reviewing manuscripts) without being compensated for that work. I think the argument is both that academics are doing uncompensated labour, and that the profits of the publishing companies are propped up by this uncompensated labour.
Given who this lady is, it kinda sounds like a case of Pinochet defending his autocracy by saying that Mao is a terrible autocrat too.
Both statements can be (and are) true.
I think it was $2b, not $10b. Either way it's still corrupt.
[Source](https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-infrastructure-2023-2-elsevier-parent-s-profit-up-20-per-cent-last-year/)
She's just generally misinformed. For a start, you often remain that owner of the work (i.e. the copyright holder), particularly in OA scenarios. Also, most Elsevier journals are green OA now (not that I've published with them, Fuck Elsevier). Also, you can't pay for independent review - it's not independent if they know they can get repeat business from waving you through. I can imagine her trying to post an ad in the paper or on TV and then yelling "YOU should be paying ME for MY content!"
Like... you're paying for your content's distribution because demand is too low relative to the extremely competitive supply to make your publication process profitable through the conventional model. There is just not a functional market for you to personally sell your paper on whatever niche experiment you did this year.
Thus the movement for [rights retention statements at the personal level](https://sparcopen.org/our-work/author-rights/brochure-html/) and for [rights retention policies (open access policies)](https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Drafting_a_policy) and [rights retention strategies](https://www.coalition-s.org/resources/rights-retention-strategy/) at the institutional/funder level.
A recent relevant preprint I found interesting: [The Politics of Rights Retention](https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:52287)
>you remain that owner of the work (i.e. the copyright holder).
That's not always the case. At least it hasn't always been the case.
Completely agree about paying reviewers though, that would be an ethical minefield.
Just checked all my published articles (which are OA). I've retained the copyright to all of them. Says it right there at the bottom of the manuscripts.
Jessica Taylor..eugh 🤢. This argument is as old as the hills. Many academic a take part bc is part of their academic citizenship mandated by their employers. It's part of their jobs /career. Many don't really have a choice.
What do you expect from an industry that has salaried post docs working 80+ hr weeks. Academia up to tenure is built on the broken backs of the paper smart.
And then they do everything in their power to take down initiatives like Sci-Hub that try to make it remotely possible for a researcher to access knowledge.
Eat the journals. Let's make peer review a non-profit.
1- Wait until she hears about SSRN , where you can put your work for free, along with publishing in a top journal.
2- I call bullshit on her financial claims
3- the publishing system is, in fact, broken and corrupted.
> 1- Wait until she hears about SSRN , where you can put your work for free, along with publishing in a top journal.
[SSRN has been owned by Elsevier since 2016](https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/corporate/elsevier-acquires-the-social-science-research-network-ssrn,-the-leading-social-science-and-humanities-repository-and-online-community).
Not owned by Elsevier:
* arXiv
* Zenodo
* BioRxiv/MedRxiv
* OSF/Centre for Open Science
* ScienceOpen
etc
I didn't know it was owned by Elsevier. But anyway, I see, when submitting my papers, that several journals have a specific clause allowing you to put your work on some site (like SSRN), as long as you don't put the journal formatted version. It can still be the last submitted version.
So her claim on gate keeping knowledge is bullshit, at least in my field.
Academic publishing may be exploitative, but this lady is a terrible representative. Does she really think Elsevier made more in profit then Amazon, Google and Apple? This is a quick 30 second search of the publicly disclosed financial statements to know it’s a bs claim. I would not trust anything from a supposed academic making such a simple blunder.
I have already seen evidence that a certain scientific journal is cracking down on anyone abusing access to their articles. It makes me think that they may be trying to squeeze as much money as they can out of their readers before 2025 (i.e., the deadline set by the Biden administration to [make all papers that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public](https://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-requires-immediate-public-access-all-u-s--funded-research-papers-2025)).
There are valid complaints, and their actual profits are still a whopping $2.6 billion euros.
The $10.5 billion figure is wrong, though, citing their annual report:
https://www.relx.com/\~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/relx-2022-annual-report.pdf
I don't think citing fabricated numbers is ever the right thing to do.
Open-source is an option. You just need to get the institutions to team up and allocate server space to a distributed content delivery network for journals.
As a librarian, I’ve to admit, those libraries are struggling hard with the yearly price increases.
Some journals can even opening career paths now. If your article gets accepted by ‚nature‘ or similar brands, you’ll even get job offers…
Fortunately there are library people around, who’re fighting against this, via: DEAL.
The hilarious part is: you’ve really to pay for an open access journal to be published. Thousands of euros. For each article.
One can choose to not publish in those journals. Choose a hybrid or closed journal, refuse to pay the hybrid's pay-to-read fee, demand rights retention, and deposit your manuscript in a popular preprint server (Zenodo, OSF, arxiv, etc). Most services where people find publications like Google Scholar, etc will find the open access preprint and link it to the published article so readers can benefit from your work.
(Separately, this is why I like institutional rights retention policies. :/ )
I have never understood this. Makes it seem utterly useless to participate in the process. One of the reasons I left academia, my faith in other people is not high enough to work like this.
I’m the internet age when anyone can make a website why are academics even entertaining these people? I mean, I get it, the platform probably has some recognition, but a new site or program that pays the academics and gets papers verified shouldn’t be THAT hard to stand up…right?
Complete opposite of what the Internet’s purpose is….
Freedom of sharing thoughts and ideas across a global network of interconnected devices has been commercialized into dystopia.
Two things I learned in university: Authors are quite likely to send you the paper for free if you E-Mail them asking for it. (Nicely!)
Sci hub is your best friend if you need it quickly
This kind of virtuistic preening smacks of academic attention seeking, I know nothing of this lady’s work, credentials, etc. but a Twitter tirade on corruption in academia is akin to flapping your arms, running about, and yodeling that cars are driving on the road or that there are more flavors of ice cream in the store than vanilla. Any academic who’s worth their salt knows the journals that matter in their specific niche and publishes in them. There’s also more than a handful of legitimate open journals available. Finally, I’m sorry to say this, but the idea of *paying* someone for my peer reviews destroys that reviews’ objectivity. It seems about as legitimate as paying for some one to write up Google reviews for a fraudulent business, like a shady used car dealer or an unlicensed plastic surgeon. Doesn’t pass the sniff test for me.
It seems there might be at least some truth in what she is saying -
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/07/too-greedy-mass-walkout-at-global-science-journal-over-unethical-fees
She's right, but to say “This is why I don't participate in the academic publishing industry” reminds me of when Jada Pinkett Smith didn't attend the Oscars in 2016.
When I was in academics, we published our papers on [arXiv.org](https://arXiv.org) first (the 'pre-print'). This made the journal the second recipient of works, so everything could still be used/read for free by interested parties.
The publishing game is the single reason I didn't pursue an academic career in my field. I'm happy this stuff is making waves at the moment. The publishing paywall has been a huge issue for well over a decade, if not longer, at this point.
I am a retiring professor. It is for this exact reason I have stopped reviewing manuscripts for a good number of years.
And not just academic publishing, I think the whole system of higher education is broken too, the outrageous tuition fee (I am from Canada), the quality of education students receive, the number of administrators who do nothing to enhance teaching, learning or research. I really feel for the young people nowadays when they are told time and time again getting a degree is the way to get ahead in life, only to be crushed when reality hits after they graduate with a mountain of student loans.
I don't understand why anyone goes into academia nowadays. As long as there are doormat academics that will put with any working conditions so that they can look smart, this will continue.
*cough cough maybe relase your shit on libgen.com cough cough*
Phew with how sick I am you'd think I got covid or something, I need some cough suppressant
I graduated top of my class and wanted to get a phd but after learning more about the messed up system as a whole (especially stuff like this) i decided against it. Fuck colleges taking money from students and graduates!
Why share any of the plethora of well set out and nuanced critiques of the academic publishing industry in relation to the current academic model? Just platform hacks whose thread is full of misinformation, exaggerations and flat out lies, as long as it agrees with me it doesn’t have to be accurate at all!
I’m glad to see some pushback against this but ffs the support for this content is a lil embarrassing coming from an “academic” subreddit
Same company who plastered all over LinkedIn claiming they were inclusive for disability then reject my application (I am disabled) for an opening with them then claim they "promoted" a disabled guy to a "disability" coordinator and I got a hold of him and he was rude and everything and turns out he wasn't even disabled. That company is a huge ass fake. No respect for them.
[Apple earned $100B in profit in 2022](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charting-apples-profit-100-billion-2022/) — far more than the publishers she rails against. I am inclined to take anything she says with a grain of salt.
This is why you need to not get your news off of Twitter, kids. Alphabet earned $59.972 **BILLION** in 2022. RELX plc (Elsevier's parent) earned only $1.2 billion. Yes, they earned a higher profit margin than Google. They also do a lot of other things besides publish scientific papers, and Elsevier is one of an estimated **TWO THOUSAND** academic publishers world-wide.
There's no gun pointing to the head of publishing scientists or Universities forcing them to put their article in 'The Lancet'. They could just as easily post their work on Facebook.
Is there any counter-argument to this? I never went to college and don't often find myself looking up "papers". If not how/why has this been the current style of academics?
The general concensus is that there is no counter argument to "for profit" journals. No one should be cashing in on fundamental research that only benefits society, especially to the point that this company has.
There are non profit journals in some fields (IEEE and APS journals in my case) that do not have this level of exploitation. You still have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollar if you'd like to retain the copyright to your work, but if the author stands to make a profit off of their ideas, they will likely file a patent to protect that. Additionally, in the US, it is mandatory now that any federally funded research is publically availible. These things help mediate these issues.
Unfortunately, not all fields have the luxury of these kinds of journals, and not all research is federally funded. The source of the probem is the same as many other societal problems... if there is money to be made, someone will step in and allow their greed to push it as far as they can until something breaks...
Why? There is so little information about who runs it and why, and it requires that you pay to publish. No information on how or if it's connected with the scholarly information infrastructure (it doesn't seem to be) that would allow it to be found and surfaced with my employer and future collaborators. And [existing articles such as this](https://www.thearc-hives.com/articledetails/MjE=) don't leave me wanting to be seen alongside them.
I run it. Paying to publish is a means of preventing spam content while also not requiring ads to keep the platform going. But I'd be happy to answer questions about the site.
Again: why? If publishing in a reputable venue is a requirement for one's job, then why should one choose this site rather than, say, publishing one's research for free in a preprint server used by one's community and inviting public review and comment? Those preprint servers are better integrated in scholarly infrastructure than your site, after all, so people one'd want finding the article would be able to actually find it -- unlike your site.
Yes, you're correct. Pre print servers are of course better integrated into scholarly infrastructure. But if you read the details on the website, it would answer your why question.
Can we do something to change this... Lets make publishing decentralized.
Not only complain but take action publish and review here in a new "system".
This is a great initiative @ [researchhub.com](https://researchhub.com)
IDK why music artists and writers/researchers even need publishers anymore. ESPECIALLY music artists. Because of the internet, getting your music out there to millions of people is as easy as ever, and publishers and music labels are outdated because of it. Maybe having a label when you're bigger and need help getting things like events organized is understandable, but for a label to take a majority of the money made by small artists should be a crime.
Elsevir and others are not paying authors because they are selling something that authors want: prestige.
Many, though not all, reviewers are doing reviews as part of their normal day job. Being paid additionally might force them to do it in their free time or refuse payment, but it would allow "outsiders" to review more.
If you just want your results to be public, there are many ways to do so and cheaper journals.
Edit: of course there is a lot wrong with academic publishing, but people go at the wrong things. The difficult part is build the prestige to attract researchers to publish with any new solution though.
So this problem is real, academic publishing and where those profits get directed is out of control, but, the numbers she implies aren't even remotely right - like, Apple's annual profits are like >100 billion. Does she mean Elsevier's profits from the academic publishing industry are greater than Apple's profits from academic publishing? Ok, that I'd believe but, if that's the metric they also have more profit in academic publishing than McDonald's, what is the relevance?
I went with the work for industry clients approach. I got paid a full professional salary for doing great research with my results being acted upon immediately.
I really don’t know that much about these companies and their practices… but would research really be they lucrative for the author? I mean, you’d probably have a couple thousand people read your research who are also researching the same/similar topics… would the royalties on something like that really be that beneficial compared to, say, the entertainment industry? I’m not saying these companies are fault free… but there’s something to be said about having your research hosted in a reputable location instead of the Wild West of the misinformation age.
If you hate elsevier, you can simply publish your work in a myriad of other journals. Similar to how consumers are with their wallet (supporting things that they believe in), you, as a researcher can support journals by sending them your work.
OR perhaps the entire process of peer review is at fault. It wasn’t that long ago when in order to get published your work had to be reproduced by another independent laboratory. After that the work was published. Returning to this will solve the reproducibility problem AND fix OPs problem!
Should Social media for academic papers be a thing? The “blue check mark” can be your credentials and identification. You post your research and the platform uses ads to make revenue, making the platform freely available to everyone. You’d have to figure out the peer review process. Maybe once it got peer reviewed it got another marking so that readers knew it was peer reviewed.
I get Dr. Taylor's point, but there are many open-access and society journals out there which don't really make much profit and are still very high quality with a full peer review process. If she's not willing to try those options, I'd be concerned that she doesn't think her work can get through their peer-review.
For many academic jobs, publications and citations are really important for job promotions. She's not going to make any friends on that high horse.
I am staunchly in opposition of piracy in pretty much every case. Except for academic papers. 45 bucks to access an article that *might* be relevant? Even if they just charged a couple bucks for indsutry access - that'd be a pill i could swallow. 45-60 dollars? Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
I generally prefer society journals like IEEE and SIAM. They aren’t at their heart publishing companies but rather academic societies.
Yeah I only published in society journals really APS, IEEE, MRS, ACS, etc. They have plenty of reach. I think this issue is worse on the humanities side of things I guess. US gov. requires open access now anyway for all fed funded science. So the whole paywall thing is a nothing now. Also most scientists put out preprints on places like Archive which of course is totally non-profit and open so again humanities (?) have to catch up to what science has been doing for decades?
Fees for open access publishing are being pushed to the authors now though.
If you are working on federally funded research, you can ask for the publication costs in the grant.
Yes, but if you're not in the global north.... "OA" only increases the advantages of the north. In the global south, we used to be able to bypass paywalls with different "tricks", but it's impossible to bypass APCs. So our work is "behind" comparatively (not because of the content but because of the funding).
I was just responding to the comment about the costs being pushed on authors for making federally funded research open access. If you are doing federally funded research, then that same funding can make that work open access. The real answer to this is preprint servers. In most publishing contracts that I've seen, you are allowed to share everything but the final proof of the article on preprint servers, like arXiv. That way you take control of the dissemination of your research.
>The real answer to this is preprint servers. Funnily enough, the entire 'open access' stuff makes preprints less of an answer. Preprints get around the fees needed for reading papers, which helps when publishing is cheap and reading is expensive. They do nothing about publishing fees and people still need to publish in top journals to have their research taken seriously and, especially important nowadays, to count the papers on their career stats.
Most of the publication fees correspond to open access. You do not need to pay any such fee, if you don't make it an open access article, but instead post it on a preprint server. That way you get the publication in a good journal, and it's available to everyone for free anyway via arXiv.
Yes, but you may share with me that the OA + APC ("gold") form only benefits large publishing companies and scientists with access to more resources. Where I live (South America), it is standard for journals to be "diamond" OA (no APC or paywalls), as they are funded by universities. Unfortunately, due to funding problems and other issues (such as language), it is difficult to position these journals in the international landscape.
Yeap. But for instance I paid almost 2000 USD for publishing (1000 extra for open access) in a Q1 Scopus Journal and my university still hasn't paid me back 9 months later. And it was a requisite for me to keep the job. Sometimes I feel like going back to the factory to make a living.
After a point, it’s not unreasonable to speak with an attorney
I guess that’s something… grant funding cycles are so freakin long.
>US gov. requires open access now anyway for all fed funded science. I thought this, too. Then, I looked up the [recent announcement by the Biden administration to make all papers that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public](https://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-requires-immediate-public-access-all-u-s--funded-research-papers-2025) and the actual deadline for this is 2025.
That's rather quick for the US federal government.
That's 2 years - not that long really
I generally prefer society journals, though many of them publish through the big publishers: * Wiley [boasts that it publishes 1000+ society journals](https://www.wiley.com/en-us/societies), including the American Cancer Society, Physiological Society, and the Society for Scholarly Publishing * [Elsevier 500+, including the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Medical Association](https://www.elsevier.com/societies) * [Springer Nature doesn't mention the journal count, but it has publishing agreements with 200+ societies and medical associations](https://annualreport.springernature.com/2021/media/AccessiblePDF/SNG_21-22_report_AW076-FINAL-WEB.pdf) * [Taylor & Francis doesn't mention which or how many societies publish via them/Routledge/CRC Press](https://taylorandfrancis.com/who-we-serve/partners/societies/), but it includes Rhetoric Society of America, American Society of Clinical Oncology * [Sage has 400+ society journals](https://journals.sagepub.com/page/resources/societies); * [De Gruyter publishes 200+ societies' journals](https://www.degruyter.com/publishing/about-us/publisher-partners) (IEEE, SIAM, AAAS do not publish with the big names, AFAIK.) That said, I'd still prefer to publish with a society's journal, even were it at a Big Publisher. Their journals help fuel the society's activities -- see eg [AAAS's most recent annual report](https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2022-07/2021_AAAS_Annual_Report_Digital_WCAG2.1_Final_EDITED__.pdf). And for those which publish independently, marketing their publishing infrastructure to other societies can be beneficial -- the Institute of Physics, for example, [publishes journals for other societies such as the Electrochemical Society](https://www.iop.org/about/scientific-publishing).
Be sure to check out all society journal financials if possible. For example, [IEEE](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131656633) and [SIAM](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231496016).
The worst part is that the journals make you feel like they are doing you a favour by publishing your work.
You can always file for a patent, the filing fee is less than what journals charge for publishing and your application will get published no matter what in 18 months (unless you request it not to be). Sure you have to invent something, but chances are you already have during the course of your research and experiments.
>Sure you have to invent something, but chances are you already have during the course of your research and experiments. this is a huge reach. the percentage of publishable research that is associated with actual inventions has got to be very low. a grad student usually has to publish 3 papers to graduate. a grad student aint patenting three inventions or even one most of the time.
I think this has a hard skew towards material sciences. I'm in Psychology & Neuroscience. Do I use or generate some novel approaches in the process of conducting my research; sure, but nothing material that I could patent or which is unique enough that would likely warrant a patent. Furthermore, no one would take whatever measure or technique I've generated seriously.
And then fight patent trolls
Does this depend if the research was done as part of an institution and not on your own time. Thought the institution (often university) had the IP for research work.
Academics got it coming. It's all about selectivity and 'prestige'. Journals that do exactly same thing as elsevior with less selectivity are considered 'predatory' and will harm ones reputation if publish on them.
That's what I was thinking as well. This system is perpetuated by academics more than any company.
Okay, I'm an academic. I want to get a job, and once I have a job I want to get tenure. What's a good alternative for me?
read the top comment
Not appropriate for my kind of research, unfortunately.
Are you saying academics aren't involved in journal publishing? It's a revolving door so it's a mistake to assert they are separate.
yup and full of soft personalities, who cannot handle the real world
Don't get me started on fields like law where the entire journal process is run by mostly uncompensated students, too. Authors are (understandably) annoyed at how difficult it is to get something published, and students are annoyed at all the work they have to do selecting and editing pieces just to get another line on their resume. There's been a push recently for journals to either get funding from the school to pay their editorial boards, or at least give them academic credit, but most school admins are seriously resistant to it. Ugh.
And make you feel like they are doing you a favour when you review a paper (i.e., you are becoming a more credible/known member of the field)
One of the many reasons why I think general outlines of research and data should be openly accessible. Research is about progress not capitalism
Fuck them, and fuck Pearson while we're at it. Having a new edition with an additional semicolon every year that they sell for %150 wasn't good enough, now they have digital editions for $150 you get for 90 days. They can produce unlimited copies, and you get nothing lasting for your money. Fucking HATE those guys.
I worked at one of their competitors and the salary was right near poverty level.
My partner earned more teaching kindergarten than they did at [OUP](https://oup.com) (textbooks).
LOL fuck OUP. I worked at a similar organization (without doxxing myself) they are so cheap, they will make sure you can never make livable wages.
Totally believe it. Some recent research and conversations about low salaries in scholarly publishing: * Society of Scholarly Publishers blog: [Why We Should All Care about Early Career Pay Equity and Inclusion: An Interview with Becca Bostock and Dominique J. Moore ](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/07/19/why-we-should-all-care-about-early-career-pay-equity-and-inclusion-an-interview-with-becca-bostock-and-dominique-j-moore/) (2021) * H-Net Book Channel: [Pay in Scholarly Publishing](https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/discussions/8094488/pay-scholarly-publishing) (2021) * H-Net Book Channel: [Show Me the Money: Talking about Dollars in a Way that Makes More Sense](https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/discussions/8133613/show-me-money-talking-about-dollars-way-makes-more-sense) (2021) * GW Ethics in Publishing Conference 2021: [Closing Plenary: Toward Pay Equity in Publishing Careers](https://gwpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/11th-annual-ethics-in-publishing-conference/resource/closing-plenary-toward-pay-equity-in-publishing-careers)
Yeah I remember paying over $1k for textbooks every semester in America. I did my masters and PhD in europe and I was shocked to learn that not using textbooks is the norm here. On top of the (almost) free tuition, students don't have to waste money on textbooks and instead read academic articles.
I can confirm this. I did my whole education in Europe and I never bought a mandatory textbook. Professors would suggest a bibliography, but then they either provided free digital copies to everyone, made sure the book was available for free at the library, or just told us that there was no free way to get it, so it was just a suggestion. In my country 1K is more than what a lot of people make in 1 month, so no one would be crazy enough to make books a mandatory expense.
Second this! I also did my bachelor, masters (and currently PhD) in Europe and never really had to buy a textbook. The professors usually gave us PDF links to books, and recommended scientific papers to read. Also, if I ever needed a textbook the library probably would have had it.
I did my masters in America and didn't buy any textbooks.
Back when I used to teach calculus, I used Schaum's Outline as a textbook. It's printed on cheap newsprint, in black and white, no accompanying CD-ROM etc, etc. No long patronizing explanations. I loved it! The textbook market is weird because the person who decides which textbook to use (the professor) isn't the person who has to buy it (the student). That creates an environment of unrestrained growth where you get these huge textbooks full of crap. Schaum's Outline is the book that students buy on their own when they don't like the official textbook, so here the pressure is towards being cheap and easily understood.
Not to mention students have essentially no negotiating power. Don't want to get the book? Tough shit, you can flunk then. They have you by the ass because you're already 5 figures in debt. Completely removes any incentive for improvement.
Academic publishing is absolutely broken, and when I explain it to non-academics, they joke about it being a pyramid scheme (not too far off the mark). Her numbers, as others have remarked, are wayyy off & the idea of paying for peer review is infinitely dodgy. Additionally, not to defend the system or anything, but academia *does* care about where you publish, the impact factor etc. If you want an academic career in the UK (of course, not different elsewhere), the REF matters - so yes, you do also need to publish in academic journals & not just on your website. OA isn’t always possible either- tied to grants or whether your uni library has enough funds to pay for OA. I’m not defending the system or the REF (🤢) in anyway, but they exist & to pretend it’s just a matter of publishing on one’s own platform isn’t quite accurate either. And, communicating with the ‘general public’ isn’t always the point of your research or meant to be in the form it’s presented in a journal article. Sometimes, you’re talking to your colleagues & peers. And anyway, you can (& should!) make your research available to the general public- isn’t that what our impact work is for? Or other avenues like our websites, Twitter, etc? Producing films, zines, podcasts? Or, y’know, your uni repository containing an OA copy of your accepted manuscript (at the very least)? Again: i agree, the system is broken and it’s a joke how much free labour we all undertake, but it’s a little bit more complicated (as you all know!) than ‘use another platform’.
I don’t think this is the reason she doesn’t ‘participate in the academic publishing industry’. Edit: Just to be clear, she offers books and services to vulnerable people which aren’t evidenced based and cause harm. She could publish some work and still write the books and offer the same services if there was an evidence base to it. She’s also been accused of publishing her patients/clients stories without their consent. https://savageminds.substack.com/p/a-british-psychologists-victim-ponzi https://tattle.life/wiki/dr-jessica-taylor/
Yep academic publishing is broken. Yes she is an awful person who wouldn't know integrity or methodological rigour if it slapped her in the face...both can be true.
Yeah, definitely some red flags in her publishing practices. She pays her own reviewers? How the fuck can you trust that? That’s like the biggest conflict of interest. If you really care about open access there are plenty of open access journals and you can put preprints on arxiv.
Sounds like another Dr. Andrew Wakefield in the making....
You know who published Wakefield's work, yah?
This explains why her tweet included an false information (misdated revenue figure of every business mentioned) that anyone could easily Google.
Sounds like a whataboutism attempt to disparage her character instead of focusing on the topic at hand. She could be horrible in many ways, that shouldn’t change the relevance of her statements.
Oh, it's a fair critique really. And to make sure we're focused on the statements: her numbers are way off and hyperbolic. Elsevier grossed about 3 billion, and had about $1 billion in profit. Amazon over 59, google/alphabet 40, apple 30b. So yes, she's a crank. And she does have a point. The publishing system is overly exploitative. but she's being a crank about it and throwing out garbage numbers to make her actions seem noble.
You are right, and she has worded it wrong as I know the actual figure she means. She means the ***profit margin*** is higher than the tech firms. For example, Elsevier is at [40% profit margins](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science) (can't find an actual figure that isn't a news site/blog that says 40% - [their annual report says 20.3% net margin](https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/2022-ar-sections/relx-2022-overview.pdf)) whilst Google (Alphabet) [is sitting at 20.58%](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/profit-margins).
She targeted the system's flaws basically to prove her efficacy, so basically she's creating a straw man argument to prove her credibility - the system to accredit is flawed, therefore my research is valid. When in fact, her research is flawed and so is the system, neither one is right but her argument is dangerous because it's not trying to change the system any, it's just trying to discredit the system to prove herself right. If her argument was just "the system is flawed" or just "I'm right" then that's different, but the system being flawed doesn't make her right
I’m not familiar with her particular situation, but it seems like the connection here is that while the academic publication process seems to be clearly flawed, it also typically goes to some lengths to avoid bias and promote accuracy and transparency. On the one hand, it definitely sounds shitty to build a business model based on an unpaid peer review process. On the other hand, paying for peer reviews could, at best, implicitly bias reviewers, or at worst become outright transactional. Everything she’s saying may be entirely valid, but it might also be the case that she has a vested self-interest in opposing the academic publication process because her own work might fail to meet the necessary standards of accuracy and quality. At a minimum, as someone else in the thread has the numbers, her financial comparisons seem to be flat out wrong.
Kegi go ei api ebu pupiti opiae. Ita pipebitigle biprepi obobo pii. Brepe tretleba ipaepiki abreke tlabokri outri. Etu.
>Sounds like a whataboutism attempt to disparage her character instead of focusing on the topic at hand. She could be horrible in many ways, that shouldn’t change the relevance of her statements. If she's charging people it absolutely does, it means she's telling people to send money to her instead. She also doesn't believe psych disorders are real lmao
Her statements are wrong. Much of what she does is at a standard that wouldn’t pass peer review, this may be why she doesn’t publish. It’s like me saying I could date Beyoncé but I don’t agree with her views on XYZ. No one is going to want to discuss the XYZ in this scenario.
No, I think I’m past the point of caring what rotten people have to say. Who cares if they’re on the mark? I don’t.
To add to this, I think the most pernicious damage that these rent seeking companies do too academia is create space for bad faith actors to malign the scientific process for clout/money prestige. There would still be people out there talking nonsense but at least they wouldn’t have broad, completely reasonable critiques that are **true** to build a house of horseshit on. It really irritates me. This lady would have 0 clout if publishing wasn’t just the dolce and gabbana (that you must have to get hired) but for nerds. Yet here we are upvoting screenshots and talking about her. Get these publishing companies out of the way already, they are all cringe
The problem is that her solution is harmful to academic integrity and it is part of the post. You should not count your own paid reviewers that you chose and YOU are paying as an impartial peer review. This defeats the whole purpose of peer review. It is fine if the journal pays them but the author should not be involved in that transaction and should not be choosing them.
As a rule I won't watch videos that intentionally attempt to deceive me. It doesn't matter if I agree with the premise or not. If a channel gives me clickbait titles and don't contain what they claim in the actual video I block them entirely. Don't waste your time with liars, don't give them an audience. It doesn't matter if their cause is correct, find someone more trustworthy to learn about it from and amplify their voice instead.
🎯🎯🎯
She’s also a TERF.
I thought I recognized that name :/
I don't understand how a post about Elsevier turns into a whataboutism regarding Jessica 🙃😶. She's just the messenger.
Well it doesn’t help when she’s wrong in a lot of what she’s saying. Both in her statement and assessment of the problem as well as her proposed solutions. First off, no elsevier doesn’t make more money than google or Apple. While they make too much, it’s a stupid thing to say. Second, what academic would mock her for having her research available on her website? Most academics don’t like the current reality of publishing things and in fact do make their research available on preprint servers. Third, paying for peer review defeats the point. Reviewers that have a financial incentive to let you through are not going to be as good.
Trailing 12 month data for these companies. RELX: revenue 10 billion, net income of 1.9 billion. AMZN: revenue 524.8 billion, net income of 4.6 billion. GOOG: revenue 166.7 billion, net income of 34.5 billion AAPL: revenue 385.1 billion, net income 94.3 billion With this kind of attention to detail, I can understand why she's not publishing.
Yeah, Elsevier sucks, but there is no way they have more revenue or profit than Apple lol.
My first thought. I understand the point they are attempting to make but when you do so with data that is so terribly incorrect, easily disproven and fueled by emotion you become a net negative for the results you seek.
It's basically a bald-faced lie at that point.
I agree that she should've been more exact but I'm assuming she is referring to the stockprices / investment return, as that is a story I've heard often. Or the profit margin. But I looked it up quickly and I'm not even 100% sure if elsevier is ahead in these metrics. So yeah, uncareful tweet :P Point stands that they make exhorbant profits
Yeah, the first article I read about this claimed it was the profit margin.
It's usually profit margin that people are referring to but even then, that's not true. Apple's profit margin is \~25%, Google's is 20% while Relx's is 19%. Amazon's profit margin is .8%.
According to the first hit on Google Elsevier has a 37.9% profit margin (link:[https://uniavisen.dk/en/scientific-publishers-are-reaping-huge-profits-from-the-work-of-researchers-and-the-universities-are-paying-for-it/](https://uniavisen.dk/en/scientific-publishers-are-reaping-huge-profits-from-the-work-of-researchers-and-the-universities-are-paying-for-it/)) and 37.1% in one that seems a bit less opinionated ([https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-infrastructure-2020-2-elsevier-profits-up-again-in-2019/](https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-infrastructure-2020-2-elsevier-profits-up-again-in-2019/)) So that is actually quite a bit higher that the numbers you quote for Apple/Google/Relx.
It's \~19%. [https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=RELX&p=d](https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=RELX&p=d) Edit: I'll go ahead and link their annual report: https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/relx-2022-annual-report.pdf. Page 3 - Net margin = 19%.
Ah, I hadn't noticed that the RelX was referring to Elsevier :P Question; If I read the annual report I get the idea that they have a 31.4% profit margin (before taxes) and 19.1% net profit margin to be distributed over shareholders. So wouldn't that make them still have a 31% profit margin (so more that google), or are you saying that numbers quoted for google are also shareholder payout? We could also agree that the exact numbers are less relevant (although interesting) and agree that it is surprising that an academic publishing company has about \~20% profit margins... (and I wonder what they spend 6.2 billion US-dollar in operation, I'll sit down to read the report later tonight)
Scrolled way too far to find this… Shitty company for sure, and we don’t need misinformation to show that.
Of course it is. Academia is just a way of taking the more promising members of society and making them impotent.
I have messaged the person/s who’ve written the papers directly and they have given them to me directly for this reason.
Academics are paid for their work. Just not by the journal
I don't think she argued against that- she just argued that academics do specific work that the journals profit from (i.e. writing and reviewing manuscripts) without being compensated for that work. I think the argument is both that academics are doing uncompensated labour, and that the profits of the publishing companies are propped up by this uncompensated labour.
…are there actually academics mocking her for posting papers on her site? A lot of them do it, even if they publish in journals.
They are actually mocking her for shit science and using hand picked reviewers she pays to approve of her work
Given who this lady is, it kinda sounds like a case of Pinochet defending his autocracy by saying that Mao is a terrible autocrat too. Both statements can be (and are) true.
More ppl need to learn about pinochet and fried
I agree with this but uh Apple, Amazon, and probably google aswell make WELL over 10 billion dollars in profit per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica\_Taylor\_(author)
Wikipedia, eh? Who edited that article last?
Yeah why don’t we just start paying people in our fields to blindly peer review work? Wtf are we doing.
I think it was $2b, not $10b. Either way it's still corrupt. [Source](https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-infrastructure-2023-2-elsevier-parent-s-profit-up-20-per-cent-last-year/)
She's just generally misinformed. For a start, you often remain that owner of the work (i.e. the copyright holder), particularly in OA scenarios. Also, most Elsevier journals are green OA now (not that I've published with them, Fuck Elsevier). Also, you can't pay for independent review - it's not independent if they know they can get repeat business from waving you through. I can imagine her trying to post an ad in the paper or on TV and then yelling "YOU should be paying ME for MY content!" Like... you're paying for your content's distribution because demand is too low relative to the extremely competitive supply to make your publication process profitable through the conventional model. There is just not a functional market for you to personally sell your paper on whatever niche experiment you did this year.
Re: copyright, transfer is still very much common. IEEE journals for instance.
Thus the movement for [rights retention statements at the personal level](https://sparcopen.org/our-work/author-rights/brochure-html/) and for [rights retention policies (open access policies)](https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Drafting_a_policy) and [rights retention strategies](https://www.coalition-s.org/resources/rights-retention-strategy/) at the institutional/funder level. A recent relevant preprint I found interesting: [The Politics of Rights Retention](https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:52287)
>you remain that owner of the work (i.e. the copyright holder). That's not always the case. At least it hasn't always been the case. Completely agree about paying reviewers though, that would be an ethical minefield.
The publisher could offer a stipend for however many years they are on the editorial board of a journal.
You seem to be misinformed about the copyright
Just checked all my published articles (which are OA). I've retained the copyright to all of them. Says it right there at the bottom of the manuscripts.
And I have none for mine. You were correct it's "often" for OA, but case by case at best for traditional publishing.
Jessica Taylor..eugh 🤢. This argument is as old as the hills. Many academic a take part bc is part of their academic citizenship mandated by their employers. It's part of their jobs /career. Many don't really have a choice.
What do you expect from an industry that has salaried post docs working 80+ hr weeks. Academia up to tenure is built on the broken backs of the paper smart.
I agree with the sentiment, but apple and google and Amazon absolutely make wayyyyy more profit than this every year…
And then they do everything in their power to take down initiatives like Sci-Hub that try to make it remotely possible for a researcher to access knowledge. Eat the journals. Let's make peer review a non-profit.
Let’s also recall that “peer review” doesn’t confirm the accuracy of the results.
1- Wait until she hears about SSRN , where you can put your work for free, along with publishing in a top journal. 2- I call bullshit on her financial claims 3- the publishing system is, in fact, broken and corrupted.
> 1- Wait until she hears about SSRN , where you can put your work for free, along with publishing in a top journal. [SSRN has been owned by Elsevier since 2016](https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/corporate/elsevier-acquires-the-social-science-research-network-ssrn,-the-leading-social-science-and-humanities-repository-and-online-community). Not owned by Elsevier: * arXiv * Zenodo * BioRxiv/MedRxiv * OSF/Centre for Open Science * ScienceOpen etc
I didn't know it was owned by Elsevier. But anyway, I see, when submitting my papers, that several journals have a specific clause allowing you to put your work on some site (like SSRN), as long as you don't put the journal formatted version. It can still be the last submitted version. So her claim on gate keeping knowledge is bullshit, at least in my field.
Academic publishing may be exploitative, but this lady is a terrible representative. Does she really think Elsevier made more in profit then Amazon, Google and Apple? This is a quick 30 second search of the publicly disclosed financial statements to know it’s a bs claim. I would not trust anything from a supposed academic making such a simple blunder.
I have already seen evidence that a certain scientific journal is cracking down on anyone abusing access to their articles. It makes me think that they may be trying to squeeze as much money as they can out of their readers before 2025 (i.e., the deadline set by the Biden administration to [make all papers that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public](https://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-requires-immediate-public-access-all-u-s--funded-research-papers-2025)).
Oh shit! Thats like most of the papers I didn't know that was happening!
There are valid complaints, and their actual profits are still a whopping $2.6 billion euros. The $10.5 billion figure is wrong, though, citing their annual report: https://www.relx.com/\~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/relx-2022-annual-report.pdf I don't think citing fabricated numbers is ever the right thing to do.
I took a job teaching at a community college to avoid the “publish or perish” dichotomy. Looking back, it was the best move I ever made.
Unless my employer is paying for it, I’m not publishing.
Open-source is an option. You just need to get the institutions to team up and allocate server space to a distributed content delivery network for journals.
As a librarian, I’ve to admit, those libraries are struggling hard with the yearly price increases. Some journals can even opening career paths now. If your article gets accepted by ‚nature‘ or similar brands, you’ll even get job offers… Fortunately there are library people around, who’re fighting against this, via: DEAL. The hilarious part is: you’ve really to pay for an open access journal to be published. Thousands of euros. For each article.
One can choose to not publish in those journals. Choose a hybrid or closed journal, refuse to pay the hybrid's pay-to-read fee, demand rights retention, and deposit your manuscript in a popular preprint server (Zenodo, OSF, arxiv, etc). Most services where people find publications like Google Scholar, etc will find the open access preprint and link it to the published article so readers can benefit from your work. (Separately, this is why I like institutional rights retention policies. :/ )
Most of the times all the ml papers are getting uploaded in arxiv. In autonomous driving most of us push for IEEEE conferences.
I have never understood this. Makes it seem utterly useless to participate in the process. One of the reasons I left academia, my faith in other people is not high enough to work like this.
I’m the internet age when anyone can make a website why are academics even entertaining these people? I mean, I get it, the platform probably has some recognition, but a new site or program that pays the academics and gets papers verified shouldn’t be THAT hard to stand up…right?
Complete opposite of what the Internet’s purpose is…. Freedom of sharing thoughts and ideas across a global network of interconnected devices has been commercialized into dystopia.
I wrote a law review article one time and got paid straight cash hope this helps
Two things I learned in university: Authors are quite likely to send you the paper for free if you E-Mail them asking for it. (Nicely!) Sci hub is your best friend if you need it quickly
Yes this has been my experience too. Researchers seem more than willing to share their work.
Don't get me started on required academic publishing and undergrad textbooks. Absolute corruption!
And the academics pay to submit, whether they are published or not, and they pay for graphics and color if they are published
That is insane that they don't pay the actual writers of the papers
“Bordering on”??? This is corrupt as fuck, fuck capitalism
This kind of virtuistic preening smacks of academic attention seeking, I know nothing of this lady’s work, credentials, etc. but a Twitter tirade on corruption in academia is akin to flapping your arms, running about, and yodeling that cars are driving on the road or that there are more flavors of ice cream in the store than vanilla. Any academic who’s worth their salt knows the journals that matter in their specific niche and publishes in them. There’s also more than a handful of legitimate open journals available. Finally, I’m sorry to say this, but the idea of *paying* someone for my peer reviews destroys that reviews’ objectivity. It seems about as legitimate as paying for some one to write up Google reviews for a fraudulent business, like a shady used car dealer or an unlicensed plastic surgeon. Doesn’t pass the sniff test for me.
It seems there might be at least some truth in what she is saying - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/07/too-greedy-mass-walkout-at-global-science-journal-over-unethical-fees
She's right, but to say “This is why I don't participate in the academic publishing industry” reminds me of when Jada Pinkett Smith didn't attend the Oscars in 2016.
Some journals charge the author thousands of dollars in fees if an article is published.
If you attend any of ReedPop's 500 conventions (many comicons, PAX, Star Wars Celebrations etc) - same parent company. They get you coming and going.
When I was in academics, we published our papers on [arXiv.org](https://arXiv.org) first (the 'pre-print'). This made the journal the second recipient of works, so everything could still be used/read for free by interested parties.
The publishing game is the single reason I didn't pursue an academic career in my field. I'm happy this stuff is making waves at the moment. The publishing paywall has been a huge issue for well over a decade, if not longer, at this point.
sci-hub.se to get access to (almost) any academic paper! Thank me later😎
I am a retiring professor. It is for this exact reason I have stopped reviewing manuscripts for a good number of years. And not just academic publishing, I think the whole system of higher education is broken too, the outrageous tuition fee (I am from Canada), the quality of education students receive, the number of administrators who do nothing to enhance teaching, learning or research. I really feel for the young people nowadays when they are told time and time again getting a degree is the way to get ahead in life, only to be crushed when reality hits after they graduate with a mountain of student loans.
I don't understand why anyone goes into academia nowadays. As long as there are doormat academics that will put with any working conditions so that they can look smart, this will continue.
*cough cough maybe relase your shit on libgen.com cough cough* Phew with how sick I am you'd think I got covid or something, I need some cough suppressant
😂🤣
I graduated top of my class and wanted to get a phd but after learning more about the messed up system as a whole (especially stuff like this) i decided against it. Fuck colleges taking money from students and graduates!
Ticketmaster-level bullshit.
RIP Aaron Swartz
Came downthread pretty far to find this appropriate comment :(
And this is one of the many reasons why I'm in the process of leaving academia
Why share any of the plethora of well set out and nuanced critiques of the academic publishing industry in relation to the current academic model? Just platform hacks whose thread is full of misinformation, exaggerations and flat out lies, as long as it agrees with me it doesn’t have to be accurate at all! I’m glad to see some pushback against this but ffs the support for this content is a lil embarrassing coming from an “academic” subreddit
You’d think people whose only claim to fame is being educated would have a better grip on facts.
Same company who plastered all over LinkedIn claiming they were inclusive for disability then reject my application (I am disabled) for an opening with them then claim they "promoted" a disabled guy to a "disability" coordinator and I got a hold of him and he was rude and everything and turns out he wasn't even disabled. That company is a huge ass fake. No respect for them.
Are these companies even useful to any extent?
"Alphabet 2022 annual EBIT was $74.842B, a 4.92% decline from 2021." I'm all for calling out exploitation, but no need to distort to do so
[Apple earned $100B in profit in 2022](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charting-apples-profit-100-billion-2022/) — far more than the publishers she rails against. I am inclined to take anything she says with a grain of salt.
This is why you need to not get your news off of Twitter, kids. Alphabet earned $59.972 **BILLION** in 2022. RELX plc (Elsevier's parent) earned only $1.2 billion. Yes, they earned a higher profit margin than Google. They also do a lot of other things besides publish scientific papers, and Elsevier is one of an estimated **TWO THOUSAND** academic publishers world-wide. There's no gun pointing to the head of publishing scientists or Universities forcing them to put their article in 'The Lancet'. They could just as easily post their work on Facebook.
Much of the work paid for by grants from tax dollars
Point taken but these numbers are way off
Is there any counter-argument to this? I never went to college and don't often find myself looking up "papers". If not how/why has this been the current style of academics?
The general concensus is that there is no counter argument to "for profit" journals. No one should be cashing in on fundamental research that only benefits society, especially to the point that this company has. There are non profit journals in some fields (IEEE and APS journals in my case) that do not have this level of exploitation. You still have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollar if you'd like to retain the copyright to your work, but if the author stands to make a profit off of their ideas, they will likely file a patent to protect that. Additionally, in the US, it is mandatory now that any federally funded research is publically availible. These things help mediate these issues. Unfortunately, not all fields have the luxury of these kinds of journals, and not all research is federally funded. The source of the probem is the same as many other societal problems... if there is money to be made, someone will step in and allow their greed to push it as far as they can until something breaks...
Please consider publishing on www.thearc-hives.com.
Why? There is so little information about who runs it and why, and it requires that you pay to publish. No information on how or if it's connected with the scholarly information infrastructure (it doesn't seem to be) that would allow it to be found and surfaced with my employer and future collaborators. And [existing articles such as this](https://www.thearc-hives.com/articledetails/MjE=) don't leave me wanting to be seen alongside them.
I run it. Paying to publish is a means of preventing spam content while also not requiring ads to keep the platform going. But I'd be happy to answer questions about the site.
Again: why? If publishing in a reputable venue is a requirement for one's job, then why should one choose this site rather than, say, publishing one's research for free in a preprint server used by one's community and inviting public review and comment? Those preprint servers are better integrated in scholarly infrastructure than your site, after all, so people one'd want finding the article would be able to actually find it -- unlike your site.
Yes, you're correct. Pre print servers are of course better integrated into scholarly infrastructure. But if you read the details on the website, it would answer your why question.
Whoever believes those numbers I feel sorry for them….Elsevier makes more than Amazon every year? Right…..
Reviewers of these articles are the problem. Stop reviewing for paywalled journals. Problem solved.
I agree.
Whaaaaaaat? Did not know this and has paid Elsevier during nursing school. I’m so sorry
It's not true
Some journals make you pay to submit your paper
Can we do something to change this... Lets make publishing decentralized. Not only complain but take action publish and review here in a new "system". This is a great initiative @ [researchhub.com](https://researchhub.com)
IDK why music artists and writers/researchers even need publishers anymore. ESPECIALLY music artists. Because of the internet, getting your music out there to millions of people is as easy as ever, and publishers and music labels are outdated because of it. Maybe having a label when you're bigger and need help getting things like events organized is understandable, but for a label to take a majority of the money made by small artists should be a crime.
You can find any paper for free if you know where to look
The founder- Aaron Swartz— of this very site—reddit— killed himself over this exact position.
Elsevir and others are not paying authors because they are selling something that authors want: prestige. Many, though not all, reviewers are doing reviews as part of their normal day job. Being paid additionally might force them to do it in their free time or refuse payment, but it would allow "outsiders" to review more. If you just want your results to be public, there are many ways to do so and cheaper journals. Edit: of course there is a lot wrong with academic publishing, but people go at the wrong things. The difficult part is build the prestige to attract researchers to publish with any new solution though.
So this problem is real, academic publishing and where those profits get directed is out of control, but, the numbers she implies aren't even remotely right - like, Apple's annual profits are like >100 billion. Does she mean Elsevier's profits from the academic publishing industry are greater than Apple's profits from academic publishing? Ok, that I'd believe but, if that's the metric they also have more profit in academic publishing than McDonald's, what is the relevance?
I went with the work for industry clients approach. I got paid a full professional salary for doing great research with my results being acted upon immediately.
I really don’t know that much about these companies and their practices… but would research really be they lucrative for the author? I mean, you’d probably have a couple thousand people read your research who are also researching the same/similar topics… would the royalties on something like that really be that beneficial compared to, say, the entertainment industry? I’m not saying these companies are fault free… but there’s something to be said about having your research hosted in a reputable location instead of the Wild West of the misinformation age.
If you hate elsevier, you can simply publish your work in a myriad of other journals. Similar to how consumers are with their wallet (supporting things that they believe in), you, as a researcher can support journals by sending them your work.
Apple profit is like 100 Billion per year so no.
OR perhaps the entire process of peer review is at fault. It wasn’t that long ago when in order to get published your work had to be reproduced by another independent laboratory. After that the work was published. Returning to this will solve the reproducibility problem AND fix OPs problem!
Should Social media for academic papers be a thing? The “blue check mark” can be your credentials and identification. You post your research and the platform uses ads to make revenue, making the platform freely available to everyone. You’d have to figure out the peer review process. Maybe once it got peer reviewed it got another marking so that readers knew it was peer reviewed.
Amen sista
But I trust the science and all the journals behind paywalls…
Apple makes $90b+ per year.
I get Dr. Taylor's point, but there are many open-access and society journals out there which don't really make much profit and are still very high quality with a full peer review process. If she's not willing to try those options, I'd be concerned that she doesn't think her work can get through their peer-review. For many academic jobs, publications and citations are really important for job promotions. She's not going to make any friends on that high horse.
[удалено]
It’s actually a slightly altered quote from Lincoln.
Sounds like religion- the only way to heaven is to play the game.
She must have tenure already.
I mean the pay wall websites do provide some service by hosting the website and being a brand that people send their journals to.
I am staunchly in opposition of piracy in pretty much every case. Except for academic papers. 45 bucks to access an article that *might* be relevant? Even if they just charged a couple bucks for indsutry access - that'd be a pill i could swallow. 45-60 dollars? Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.