Jeroen Bosman2 weeks ago an Australian researcher published (https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-04061-w) a commitment to half his paper production (ironically in Nature, the flagship journal of a publisher that thrives on volume, metrics and publication addiction, but OK, this is where relevant audience is ;-). I do like his commitment, but still he's doing not doing himself justice and the real motivation is unclear. The reasoning is a bit to straightforward. Let's unpack. 1/n
2/n There are many outcries that there are way too many scholarly articles. People quote rising article numbers in PubMed (as if science consists only of biomedicine, but OK, that's not the issue here). In my view it;'s not about absolute numbers but about quality and sustainability. Having double the current number of articles is great, as there are many question and issues that deserve to be studied more. 2/n
3/n For findability and keeping up it there is no big difference between 10 or 20 million articles per year. It would actually be nice if there are 10 articles exactly on my topic/question instead of 2 and then 50 others where it's treated only in passing, from a perspective not valid for me or in a context not relevant to me. As long as we have good indexing and full text search sheer numbers are not an issue.
Esther de Groot@jeroenbosman I agree. Not easily achieved though.