Well done Swissuniversities! @snsf.ch et al. once again leading the charge (see previous special issue announcement). Funders and institutes hold the cards. If they don't pay the profiteers, we researchers will just adapt. We don't need Nature. Nature needs us. #SciPub #ResearchIntegrity

Today the Swiss announced they don't have an agreement with Springer Nature -- swissuniversity tried to secure a deal and failed in the face of the extreme rise in publishing fees. When the game is rigged, it's better to stop playing. 🧵 to understand the drain of scientific publishing👇

Breaking news: Switzerland reaches no deal with Springer, asks scientists to consider stop reviewing, as negotiations to stop the crazy increase of APC prices failed. If it looks like a hold-up it's because it is one. Publishers drain scientific publishing for profit. Time to stop playing.

STOP WITH WHATEVER IT IS YOURE DOING AND READ THIS NOW!

After all, why not, since making it hard for foreigners to attend universities is going so well in the UK? Why do nationalists never learn, even when they see their policies backfire live?

Survey experiments have become a popular methodology among social scientists. Has it been effective? In POQ, Rauf et al. study the efficacy of 100 survey experiments. Their results show that a majority of hypotheses were not supported. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

Since AI slop is again all over Scientific Reports, a thread on the economics of grey-zone publishing. Why does slop keep getting published? What does it mean for science? How can we stop this? Background readings: Understand the strain: tinyurl.com/2b6wxx5r Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy

The "Szilard Point." When we talk about The strain and the drain on scientific publishing, it's this. Researchers are working more just to stay afloat, and less on what we actually want them to do: research, discover, innovate. Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820

{ggview} can print plots to Viewer (Rstudio or Positron) with true scaling. Adjust plot settings and see the final proportions immediately. Save the plot once 👌 e.g.: ggplot(...) + ggview::canvas(width = 220, height = 220*2/3, units = "mm", dpi = 300) per @nrennie.bsky.social #datavis #rstats

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...

If you hate statistics like I do, then you'll love my free lectures. Putting science before statistics, 20 lectures from basics of inference & causal modeling to multilevel models & dynamic state space models. It's all free, made with love and sympathy. 🧪 #stats www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

This is the future of scientific discourse. Not secret peer review that, with added lots of money, results in publication for reputation; but open review of preprints, focusing on the science and bringing the conversation forward. The critique is as important as the article. In this case -- more.

A recent study purports to have found that multilingualism protects against accelerated ageing. I've taken a closer look at it, and it doesn't look good. New blog post: "Does multilingualism really protect against accelerated ageing? Some critical comments" janhove.github.io/posts/2025-1...

Doing non-causal inference (and being explicit about it), yet using a causal word as second word in the title. If you pay Nature € 10.690, they will publish this in Nature Ageing. I can tell you what I think of that for free. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

Bluesky has genuinely revived my love for science communication online. After watching the same posts go nowhere on Twitter, seeing them resonate here has been such a good reminder of why I do this. Thanks for being here 🖤

Another AI-fabricated book from Top Quality academic publisher Spring Nature.

"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...

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...

Super! One point you might make even more explicit, which is obvious for you but not always to the students, is that the product of your class is not whatever output the students produce. Nobody cares about it. It will be thrown away. The product is learning.

Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

New paper in the #JARE 📄 🥳 To celebrate 50 years of the Journal of #Agricultural and #Resource #Economics, we contributed our paper "Advancing Agri-Environmental Policy with Behavioral and Experimental Economics: Insights, Innovations, and Future Directions" to the latest special issue. 1/4

We’re addicted to publishing, because the system made it our only currency. Read the post by The Open Fox, and subscribe if you like what you read. #AcademicSky #SciPub #PeerReview #PhDSky #AcademicChatter #OpenScience 🧪

Because they're poor. No money to handle vector graphics. To make manuscript central decent. To pay reviewers. So poor, they have to push editing, reviewing, formatting, figures, and more onto authors. Yet, somehow, they have 30+% profit rates. Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy

I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

New, from me: by embracing unitary executive theory, the Supreme Court is moving towards making all public employees fireable at the will of the President. This will not just hurt government competence, it will aid democratic backsliding. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/at-will-wh...

Hundreds of experts asked from academia and outside. (Spoiler: Sustainability wins) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I mean, journal size has little to do with quality. The outsourcing of editorial work to any and all willing guest editors at mega journals is precisely how you get low quality work accepted for publication. bsky.app/profile/paol...

📣 Our friends at the #ScholCommLab have published a preprint, "The Drain of #ScientificPublishing", and are calling for #research communities, funders, governments, and #universities to "re-communalise publishing to serve #science not the market" doi.org/10.48550/arX... #ScholComm #AcademicSky

🔽

Indeed. Unfortunately scientific publishers recently found a way -- through APCs -- to monetize the "other shit". and here we are, fighting a huge resource drain. arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820

This is the most worrying part the current system and the #1 issue to be tackled with our remaining brain cells, what can be done to a) reduce shit, b) transform shit into more thoughtful work

❓ What do people’s own words reveal about their economic decisions? A new JEL article by Ingar Haaland, Christopher Roth, Stefanie Stantcheva and Johannes Wohlfart shows how open-ended survey responses offer insights that standard surveys often miss. 🔎Read more here: www.nhh.no/en/research-...

In case you have missed Simine Vazire's excellent webinar yesterday, here is the link to watch it online: youtu.be/_vb1CNwC3CM Thanks again @simine.com for staying up so late and thanks to the audience for the great questions!

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Let's bring the paper describing the madness of the current scientific publishing to @altmetric.com 3000 together! Understand the strain: tinyurl.com/2b6wxx5r Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy

#QuantitativeScienceStudies #MITpress #Y2024 The strain on scientific publishing direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Groups have disproportionately grown in their articles published per year. Publishers enabled this growth by hosting “special issues” with reduced turnaround times.

✍🏻 a MUST read for anyone interested/worried about science #ScientificPublishing 👇🏻

Great thread on the Ponzi scheme that is academic publishing. Public funds funnelled into obscene private profits using free labour of (publicly funded) Academics. AI slop contaminating the literature.

I wrote a thread on why this happens and keeps happening. It will not stop by itslef, we've got to stop the drain by changing incentives. bsky.app/profile/paol...

Auckland Uni has responded to my OIA request re consultancy spending in 2024-2025 $600k to PWC and $500k to Nous Group for "strategic design, organisational change, transformation services" etc This is roughly what our whole faculty of science spent on internally funded postdocs in the same years

🆕 Academic slop reporter! I'm going to start collecting and compiling A.I. slop graphics that have appeared in academic journals, similar to my collection of academic hoaxes. If you stumble across any slop in a journal, tell me about it! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Interesting investigation into a dodgy Elsevier journal -- with the additional nugget that the CEO of Elsevier's parent company made more than €15 million in total compensation last year. english.elpais.com/science-tech...

This is potentially significant. The CNRS are one of the best in the world. Reliance on metrics controlled by private companies is a problem for science. We need the powerful organisatios to take the lead. Understand the strain: tinyurl.com/2b6wxx5r Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy

This is the sort of action we urge funders and scientific governing bodies to take: change incentives, shift financial flows away from big publishers and fund open alternatives instead. Well done CNRS, let us keep up action to stop the drain of scientific publishing!

I know of few people who get the economics of scientific publishing better than @paolocrosetto.bsky.social This thread on the incentives that are driving bad publishing practice is golden. For the darkly funny side of this see: the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...

Since AI slop is again all over Scientific Reports, a thread on the economics of grey-zone publishing. Why does slop keep getting published? What does it mean for science? How can we stop this? Background readings: Understand the strain: tinyurl.com/2b6wxx5r Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy

OMG - it’s like the old days of Hindawi AI gobbledegook sandwiches www.nature.com/articles/s41...