I am slowly getting disillusioned about scientific publishing and rigor. I just got a note from google scholar that one of my articles has been cited. Looking it up, they made our "these reasons were named regularly in these categories" into "these categories enable these reasons".
This is utter bullshit!
Great news in this context for scientists at #Dutch universities: the Dutch National Science organization (NWO) joins Open Research Europe (ORE) - what does it mean? With NWO joining ORE, the platform will be available as a publication channel -free of costs for open access publishing - for researchers affiliated with a Dutch research organisation, regardless of whether they have an NWO grant or not!
#scientificpublishing @leslore @leslore #Netherlands #Science
I want to bring to your attention that there is an interesting new development to counter the often exploitative model of Elsevier and others for scientific publishing:
Open Research Europe (ORE).
The platform uses a publish-review-curate model, intended to ensure scientific rigour and transparency. Articles published on the platform are subject to open peer review, with the peer review reports made public. There are no author fees.
Spread the word!
Now I got a response:
"Thanks for sharing your perspective on the review process. I'm not in a position to determine such policies so I will seek other reviewers."
In other words, they are seeking to find another academic who won't object to being exploited for their profitable business that, clearly, depends on the free labour of experts.
Bibliometrics, as a discipline, is as hard as it gets, since it's trying to measure, or even, predict, an outcome that perhaps only years or decades can validate.
Among the statistical models used, complex as they may be, I find missing the details of how the enchilada is made. As in, when we publish a paper, we are often told by the editor, "you are 5 pages over your 5 page limit", and, "you are 100 citations over your 50 citation limit". So we rewrite the manuscripts (hence preprints are often better, at least in the honesty and clarity of the citations) to compress both the text and the references, favouring reviews or simply skipping those that may be considered common knowledge or which "merely" confirm prior claims. Now try to model that. I hope there's focus on preprints for more proper studies of attribution and discovery chains.
Have we crossed the point yet where "productivity" is seen as a bad word, with negative connotations?
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/
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
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.
Lumiukko
Benedikt Haug
Albert Cardona
Marc Somssich
Robotistry has moved