"By far the most common misconception appearing in the RFI responses is that NIH public access policy has essentially forced researchers into a "pay-to-play" system" Christopher Steven Marcum and Corinna Turbes on some of the misconceptions about the NIH Public Access Policy.

"Relx, which is the 16th largest company in the FTSE 100 index, lost just over £6 billion from its stock market value after Anthropic launched a new AI product that can help automate work for the legal industry." archive.ph/ya78V

All set for New Horizons 💎 #OpenAccess in Nijmegen! Thank you to the organisers for the opportunity to speak on the Strain, Stain, & Drain of scientific publishing. Looking forward to great conversations on moving #ScientificPublishing forward! bit.ly/StrainQSS www.horizondiamond.nl#schedule

OK, day off, but I wanted to share this: codeberg.org/gbilder/inst... "Instead" is an intriguing proposal by the super-smart @gbilder.com to give AI bots a pointer to a prepackaged downloadable static version of a site. Bear with me, as I know this sounds bad at first glance.

📣 Our introduction to structural causal models in science studies is now published: doi.org/10.1162/QSS.... @tklebel.bsky.social and I tried to make our introduction as accessible as possible. We illustrate the theory by three case studies based on a simulated model of Open Science. 🧵(1/6)

New resource: a practical guide to publication and cost monitoring through institutional #OpenAccess repositories. English summary: doi.org/10.59350/rhe... #OpenScience @ibi-hu.bsky.social, @humboldtuni.bsky.social

NOR US! Another three UK universities decline new Elsevier deal www.timeshighereducation.com/news/three-m... - Sheffield, Lancaster and Surrey confirm they are walking away from proposed three-year deal with world’s largest academic publisher. (paywalled sorry)

Thousands of scientists inflate their CVs with self-published studies that cost millions of dollars of public money 1 in 8 'special issues' is filled with articles written by the editor, particularly at the publisher MDPI @manuelansede.bsky.social english.elpais.com/science-tech...

“We have to find significant non-pay budget savings so this was the obvious place to start,” www.timeshighereducation.com/news/three-m...

Given all the news about ICE in the past few weeks, can I kindly remind you all that RELX (owners of Elsevier & LexisNexis) is "mission-critical" to ICE. ICE pays RELX Group and Thomson Reuters millions of dollars for the personal data it needs to fuel its big data policing program […]

@cometadata.bsky.social has been demonstrating it's possible to do big things! Matched over ~400K preprints 1/ ~2 MILLION authors to RORs—now in an openly available dataset. Come learn what we've been up to, what's next, and how to get involved. Next community call next week. Details below.

In Scientific #Publishing, Who Should Foot the Bill? undark.org/2026/01/07/a... (via @undark.org) #scholcomm #libraries @juancommander.scholcommlab.ca @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca

'And according to @eschares.bsky.social, data suggest that APCs bear almost no relation to publishing expenses. “So that tells me that APCs are not set on really what it costs to produce an article there,” he said. “It’s more prestige.”' Undark piece on who should pay for scientific publishing.

🧪 I ran into this in another list. The title and the abstract of this paper is quite provocative. Table 1 with the profits of the 6 major sci publishing companies is something. arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

(Also, icyi, here are the 42 papers citing our non-existent paper which includes a "meta-analysis" - often called the evidence "gold standard" - of "LLM effects" in education 🤮 scholar.google.com.vn/scholar?star...)

OpenAlex intégré au Web of Science, ou la capture du travail des “commoners” | carnetist.hypotheses.org/2572

"Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge". doi.org/10.48550/arX...

Elsevier at its best: they only embrace #openscience when it makes money and does not endanger their assets. Now that Crossref data is CC0 and used by 3rd parties (OpenAlex, Matilda,...), they just keep data in their systems @keanbirch.bsky.social #openresearchinformation @barcelonadori.bsky.social

Intense discussion with The Drain authors today about where to submit Part II.. And somehow @lariviev.bsky.social launched the idea of hockey jerseys?! Thanks for your service, ChatGPT. @danbrockington.bsky.social @hansonmark.bsky.social @stephenpinfield.bsky.social @aileenfyfe.bsky.social

Excited to join @braccolaetitia.social.sciences.re.ap.brid.gy & team at Open Science Monitoring Inititative (OSMI) as steering board member. Looking forward to work w/ Cécile Coulibaly, Moumita Koley, @susannanykyri.bsky.social & @jeroenson.bsky.social open-science-monitoring.org/meet-the-fiv...

Nice way to finish the year with such a quote in @science.org news: "Stefanie Haustein, an information scientist at the University of Ottawa, doesn’t buy publishers’ arguments." Thank you @phiejacobs.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1126/scie...

On the 7th day before break, the OA community gave to us: Landmark research into the state of academic publishing. @hansonmark.bsky.social & team produced two papers: 'The Strain/Drain on Scientific Publishing' demonstrating the challenges we face doi.org/10.1162/qss_... doi.org/10.48550/arX...

We Need to Talk About the Billion-Dollar Industry Holding Science Hostage https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/we-need-to-talk-about-the-billion-dollar-industry-holding-science-hostage/

La ciencia bajo el control de las grandes editoriales Un estudio del ICTA-UAB liderado por @danbrockington.bsky.social revela cómo el sistema de publicación científica prioriza ganancias frente al avance del conocimiento y la integridad académica. digitum-um.blogspot.com/2025/12/la-c...

A great first day of conference in Mendoza, discussing many aspects relevant to the drain of scientific publishing

Panel en el workshop CECIC en la UNCuyo sobre the drain of scholarly publishing con @juancommander.scholcommlab.ca @lariviev.bsky.social @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca y la anfitriona Fernanda Beigel. Un lujazo 🌟

Excited to discuss dilemmas of #openscience and research assessment reforms in Argentina the next couple of days. Thank you to hostess extraordinaire Fernanda Beigel for bringing us together in Mendoza 🇦🇷

Girls ages 16 years or younger who received HPV vaccines were 80% less likely than their unvaccinated counterparts to develop cervical cancer. Evidence from 23 studies showed that HPV vaccination lowered the incidence of high-grade cervical precancers. 🧪 www.cochrane.org/about-us/new...

Scientific Reports has a ⬆️ Impact Inflation: a very high IF given their citation network (self-citing, citation cartels, etc). They'll even typeset & publish AI slop for a fee! Strain: bit.ly/StrainQSS Strain explorer β: pagoba.shinyapps.io/strain_explo... #SciPub #ResearchIntegrity #AcademicSky

Publikations- und Kostenmonitoring: Handlungsfeld für institutionelle Open-Access-Repositorien. Pro OAR DE Handreichung. https://zenodo.org/records/17357984

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

Yay, our first podcast citation @danbrockington.bsky.social @paolocrosetto.bsky.social et al. They discuss The Drain starting at minute 33:20 in the context of a protein science journal published by Wiley and also mention @elife.bsky.social. It's introduced as "almost an economics paper" :D

Listening to @samuelmoore.org while prepping my son’s advent calendar #lego #openaccess

🗓️ On Dec 3, the Institute for Science, Society and Policy will host the latest in its series of action dialogues addressing grand challenges at the science, society and policy interface. Don't miss the State of Science, Technology, and Innovation in Canada 2025 12 p.m. - 1:15 p.m. EST

The tiny academic thrill of being asked a question by a student and being able to say: "Hang on, my colleagues actually wrote a paper about this…” doi.org/10.1002/asi.... @lucyces.bsky.social @diegokoz.bsky.social @lariviev.bsky.social et al. #ScholCommLab

Thanks to the LSE blog for the highlight! The one constant of all publishing reform efforts has been ludicrous publisher profit margins. We specifically highlight a need for funders to act. Find out more Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: bit.ly/StrainQSS Oligopoly: bit.ly/OligSciPub

🎈 Time flies! Exactly one year ago today @rorinstitute.bsky.social and @aimosinc.bsky.social launched MetaROR, a platform to publish metaresearch through the publish-review-curate approach. Over the course of the year, we published 28 articles reviewed by 59 different reviewers. [1/3]

Money, Time, Trust, Control – How commercial publishers drain science @danbrockington.bsky.social @aileenfyfe.bsky.social @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca for @lseimpactblog.bsky.social

We summarized the Drain paper in an LSE Impact blog post this week. Please share in your networks, ideally with those we are calling to action: research funders and university leadership blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci... #AcademicSky #AcademicPublishing #OpenAccess #ScholComm

CARL's Fall Member Meeting is off to a strong start!💡 Members met in Montebello for strategic committee meetings & discussions on Intellectual Freedom & Open Science. Thanks to keynote Randy Boyagoda & panelists @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca @lariviev.bsky.social David Tweddell & Kathleen Shearer.

La Réunion d'automne de l’ABRC démarre en force avec des présentations et riches discussions sur la liberté intellectuelle et la science ouverte.💡 Merci à notre conférencier principal Randy Boyagoda, ainsi que @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca, @lariviev.bsky.social, David Tweddell et Kathleen Shearer.

The collective profits are staggering, actually overwhelming. So, let's resist: "The good news is that if the drain has a particular history and geography, it means that it is not inevitable. It can be resisted." @danbrockington.bsky.social @aileenfyfe.bsky.social @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca

It's been a fun week, but 3 presentations plus 3h of teaching in 5 days is definitely my limit. Thank you for those who came and engaged at the panels at the The Royal Society of Canada on Saturday and at @carl-abrc.bsky.social in Montebello today. (1/n)

💥New: Money, Time, Trust, Control – How commercial publishers drain science ✍️ @danbrockington.bsky.social @aileenfyfe.bsky.social @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca #AcademicSky #ScholComm #AcademicPublishing

A paper critiquing post-publication peer review has numerous made-up references, including a @nature.com article falsely attributed to our Ivan Oransky. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The solutions of the past 3 decades have failed to change the incentives of #PublishOrPerish. As a result, researcher funding, time, control, and trust has been lost. The ONE CONSTANT in the wake of the serial crisis, #PlanS and #OpenAccess reform has been publish profit margins. 2/n

The numbers in here are huge, ~$2.5bn in profits (~35% profit margin) to 4 major academic publishing houses. How much lost research expenditure does that equate to?? Windfall tax, anyone?

This is now canon.

"Rather than democratizing scientific publishing, Open Access has helped commercial publishers generate more profits (publishers found ways to shift paywalls from readers to authors). More stringent reforms are required to tackle misaligned drivers of scientific publishing." Fernanda Beigel et al.