An editor from a Springer Nature journal, a company that posted $2.1 billion in revenue in 2022 [1], from an industry with double-digit percent profits (~30% [2]), kindly asked me, an academic in the UK where salaries continue to plummet [3], whether I would be pleased to review a paper for them, for free ... so I kindly asked whether they would consider paying me. It is only logical.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springer_Nature
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
[3] In UK academia, "Pay has fallen significantly in real terms since 2009, as have pension contributions, and redundancies are rife. Short-term contracts and precarious work arrangements are common, especially for younger staff, as universities struggle to balance their books." https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/28/vice-chancellor-salaries-university-bosses-rich/

#ScientificPublishing #academia

Reflecting on eLife's new publication model, 3 years in: "the most important thing we have learnt is that our new approach to publishing works. Authors, reviewers and editors routinely tell us that they have had a more constructive experience with the new approach."

https://elifesciences.org/articles/110392?_hsmi=98220609

Proud to be an eLife editor. eLife's publication model gets the best from everyone:
* from authors, who remain in control and can reply to reviewers without fear and without being overly apologetic or sycophantic;
* from reviewers, who engage constructively in a semi-anonymous way (they aren't anonymous neither to each other nor to the editors, all practicing scientists in their field), knowing that their comments are suggestions, not mandates for authors;
* and from editors, who don't have to deal with any nastiness from any party, everybody being far more relaxed that I've seen in any other journal, concentrating their efforts in the scientific content.

1/3

#eLife #ScientificPublishing

We are in the twitter generation of scientific papers.

Instead of "here are several paragraphs of text explaining the context and framework of our work" I'm reviewing papers that are "I have broken my work up into paragraphs and each paragraph is a subsection with its own heading and contains multiple boldfaced words in case you didn't catch that I was referencing other peoples' work".

I'm not five. I can read long form works without gimmicks.

#GetOffMyLawn #ScientificPublishing

For a paper that was rejected by glamour journals and who labeled it as, quote, "suitable for the campus newsletter", it sure has been widely read and influential. Yet another example that gatekeeping by editors does a disservice to science – in biology, the most prominent example I know is Lynn Margulis' paper on the theory of an endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria and other intracellular organelles.

The commentary:
https://journals.aps.org/over-30-years

The paper:
"Self-similar community structure in a network of human interactions"
R. Guimerà, L. Danon, A. Díaz-Guilera, F. Giralt, and A. Arenas
Phys. Rev. E 68, 065103 (2003)
https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.68.065103

30 years is a reasonable time frame for evaluating the impact of a paper. 2 years, as used in calculating a journal's impact factor, is a joke.

#ScientificPublishing #AcademicPublishing

Peer Community In and Peer Community Journal: A Two-Step Diamond OA Process Giving Research Communities Back Control of Publishing

https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/2026/03/12/peer-community-in-and-peer-community-journal-a-two-step-diamond-oa-process-giving-research-communities-back-control-of-publishing/

#BarbaraClass #DenisBourguet #DiamondOpenAccess #OpenAccess #PeerCommunityIn #ScholarlyPublishing #ScientificCommunication #ScientificPublishing #ThomasGuillemaud

From Preprint to Published: The Secret Life of Scientific Manuscripts

#ScientificPublishing #Preprints

https://blog.gesis.org/from-preprint-to-published-the-secret-life-of-scientific-manuscripts/