It’s like music. There’s a lot of value in the back catalogue.

The labor is in the peer review and they pay nothing. Then they setup a system where peer reviewers get “credits” not one cares about.

Fucking wooden nickels.

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.

IHMO: All science should be freely accessible, free as in freedom and price.

Taxpayers pay $13B/yr worldwide to the private publishing industry, for content they cannot read.

Everyone makes mistakes

Except psychopaths who know their claim is garbage but lie through their teeth to get it published. That’s not a mistake, that’s corruption.

It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

Racket.

Maxwell insisted on grand titles – “International Journal of” was a favourite prefix. Peter Ashby, a former vice president at Pergamon, described this to me as a “PR trick”, but it also reflected a deep understanding of how science, and society’s attitude to science, had changed. Collaborating and getting your work seen on the international stage was becoming a new form of prestige for researchers, and in many cases Maxwell had the market cornered before anyone else realised it existed.

If you explain to any outsider that what we call science is a game of collecting and showing off units of prestige, they will be flabbergasted. Maxwell catered to the most superficial and vain aspects of the human psyche, and traded in a measure of righteousness. This is genius, I will grant him that, but opposite to the objectives of science. He made the worst possible metric about which to measure everything, and created a global system of narcissistic organizations selling their souls to publish to these journals.

And scientists are the least probable to rebel against this status quo. If anything, it will make them appear as big-time asses who are full of themselves. They are bound to project more legitimacy onto the system, similar to doomsday cultists.

Aspesi was not the first person to incorrectly predict the end of the scientific publishing boom, and he is unlikely to be the last. It is hard to believe that what is essentially a for-profit oligopoly functioning within an otherwise heavily regulated, government-funded enterprise can avoid extinction in the long run. But publishing has been deeply enmeshed in the science profession for decades. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals.

It is the departments’ choice to cancel subscriptions anytime and start publishing on their own terms. They are equally to blame when they esteem reputation above all, and measure reputation by publishing to these journals. Let’s not pretend that big-shot universities are simply taken hostage by a handful corrupt billionaires. They’re in on it.

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!

A journal about the science of blackjack and hookers?

Isn’t that A’s Archive?

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)

sorry, not the first time I saw you saying that.

The readers are taxpayers, they are paying whether they like it for not. The solution is to post articles on preprint servers, like Arxiv or BioRxiv, which are open and free to read.

I refuse to pay open access fees and use BioRxiv for all my publications.

Peer review is often done by other PhD candidates for free.