This Lawsuit Could Change Science

[@goodspellr1057]

What has always bothered me is that taxes fund all of the work (the research grants as well as the salaries of the researchers and the reviewers of public universities), and yet the results of the research end up behind a paywall erected by someone who pays for nothing. It's hard to understand what costs the publishing companies even have any more. There are no printing costs; the articles are now digital. They aren't paying the authors or the reviewers. In most cases, the editors don't even do formatting and typesetting; that is also pushed to the unpaid author.

[@SurfinScientist]

Well, they have to fund the huge salaries of their CEOs. And don't forget the share holders.

[@doctorhabilthcjesus4610]

Most well paid people are not getting paid for doing excellent work, they are paid so they can afford to drive a car, to live in the urban sprawl of the suburbs and to fly around for fun. People are mainly paid for burning lots of fuel for no particular reason.

[@AD-zo5vp]

​@@danschofield5068 I think you misunderstood the use of the word "public". If the "public hand" has paid for the knowledge creation, that knowledge should be "publicly" available. Even if only a minor part of "the public" reads it, those researchers, they shouldn't have to pay for it. I know many people who read Hamlet without really understanding it. Doesn't mean we ban that book from public libraries 😉

[@UncleKennysPlace]

@@doctorhabilthcjesus4610 What a very, very strange post.

[@neilbucknell9564]

But a lot of publicly funded work is now done on the basis that it has to be free to view on publication, which means the publisher has to make page charges for publishing. Contrary to what many think, there's a lot of work and investment of resources in organising portals for drafts, facilitating editing and refereeing (even if the reviewers are not paid), page setting and maintaining the publications' portals, arranging for subscriptions to be collected and administered, promoting the publications and so on.

[@stischer47]

Unfortunately, having been a reviewer, it's amazing how much crap actually gets published. The scandals at Harvard are symptomatic.

[@MisterK9739]

100% agree

[@erikmaronde2244]

Well the rejected "crap" is just sent to the next Journal. One or the other will publish it. Some without further review. Frustrating. 😩

[@VolkerWendt-vq8pi]

​@@erikmaronde2244true that

[@lukasm5254]

There was a joke in our institute: Phys. Rev. B is growing faster than the speed of light. But that does not contradict special relativity because no information was conveyed

[@MisterK9739]

@@lukasm5254 that´s amazing, I have to steal that

[@Michaelneiss]

Dear Sabine! First, not all researchers happen to have the privilege of holding a job with full-time pay, while they are doing peer review for others. Second, there used to be a plenitude of non-commercial journals in my field of research (archaeology) which did most of their job based on grants and other non-profit schemes, but the publishing mafia turned any attempt to publish oneself in this kind of journals into a career killer by inventing a ranking system between journals that clearly prioritizes commercial publications.

[@BSAT10]

When Elsevier took over the Lancet the whole culture of the publication changed

[@joebotting5379]

Ditto - I'm also mostly independent (palaeontology). Another point is that we also generally don't have access to academic funding sources, and therefore can't get grants to cover publication costs. Many journals are now charging an Article Processing Charge (especially if they publish open access, of course) that runs into several thousand pounds. Being independent means that I can publish where I like, but on the other hand, it means if I want the work to reach a wide public audience, it needs to be a high-impact journal that does press releases. I have one under review at the moment where I had to ask for a waiver of the APC before they would consider it... And yes, I do a lot more reviews per year than papers, and nobody pays for it. I also work as a handling editor. Nobody pays for that, either.

[@JackNicholson-e8n]

Why are some of the ancient greece and hellenic archeologic sites from greece not fully restored or proper excavated. Some are half in the ground.

[@kitefan1]

@@JackNicholson-e8n Probably because no one wants to pay for it. A few years back new excavations were shut down in favor of conservation in Pompeii and Herculaneum because the exposed stuff was starting to degrade. I'm not sure if they are digging again. Possibly, because "new finds" generate publicity, and tourists, where a nice roof does not. Not an archeologist just an older person. In the immortal words of a lot of people since 1974 "follow the money". Or Cassius via Cicero: "Cui bono"

[@andreasslateffPersonalChannel]

@@joebotting5379 From a purely economic perspective, doing unpaid and unbenefited work for others is just one thing: Silly. It's just a highly abusive system.

[@michaellorton8099]

American physician-attorney here. Sabine makes reasonable points here but she does not (and we cannot expect her to) understand American antitrust law. This is an action under Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act which makes it a crime to form a “contract, combination, or conspiracy in restraint of trade”. A civil suit on that basis may be pursued under the Clayton Antitrust Act, as in this instance. A “contract, combination, or conspiracy” has is a phrase of art and has been very broadly interpreted because those conspiring to restrain trade are often very clever and advised by lawyers very good at hiding their actions. Under American law a conspiracy has four very broadly interpreted elements (all of which can be proved by circumstantial evidence): 1) two or more “persons” (which includes natural people and corporate entities); 2) acting in concert; 3) in furtherance; of 4) an illegal end or legal end by illegal means. “Restraint of trade” has been similarly broadly interpreted. The primary thing Sabine fails to understand is that transgression of Section 1 is a “per se” violation of the U.S. criminal code. Whether one agrees with the policy or not, U.S. antitrust law firmly establishes that for conviction of a “per se” crime, the Government (or civil plaintiff as in this case) need merely prove that the co-conspirators acted in concert to further a restraint of trade. The defendants ARE NOT ALLOWED TO OFFER ANY AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSES JUSTIFYING THEIR ACTIONS-of the type Sabine offers in this video. Congress clearly established policy that perverting the capitalist market system was criminal no matter how many alleged benefits the “contract, combination, or conspiracy” produced-thus defendants were prevented from offering them. This policy arose from the paradoxically problematic double jeopardy protection in U.S. law. The early robber barons were vicious and clever. Once they were found “not guilty” of a scheme, they would tweak it ever so slightly to secure all the lucre for themselves with none of the proffered benefits to the public. Given that the scheme had been immunized by double jeopardy from further prosecution by the “not guilty” verdict, the Government was then powerless to stop it. Thus the seeming harshness of the “per se” doctrine. As illogical as it may seem to a scientific mind, the civil complaint in this case presents a reasonably strong legal argument (under current case law) in support of a U.S. Sherman Act per se Section 1 violation. Finally, again kudos to Sabine for her courage and intellectual breadth in exploring topics far removed from physics. I learn a lot from her.

[@GeneGirard007]

I'm shocked! You don't consult with one of your peers when you have a quick legal question? You seek the advice of a physicist? I can't recall doing that even once when I was a practicing litigator.

[@knp01]

​@@GeneGirard007not consulting with a physicist is clearly a reason why you practice no more 😂

[@henrytuttle]

I think Sabine was foolishly using logic and common sense and applying them to the law. Clearly, the law has NOTHING to do with logic or beneficial outcomes.

[@arddel]

Thank you for the excellent summary. There are many times monopolist activities could be justified by its benefit to society. For example, before it's breakup in 1982 , AT&T provided highly reliable and universally available telephone service. Many argued that it's scale as a monopoly allowed AT&T to finance technological innovation and research ( i.e. Bell Labs). I worked at Bell Labs back then and am sympathetic to the argument. But I still believe it was for the best. For a "free" market to work, it must free free from all manipulation.

[@tedoud4738]

Bingo! Law, especially US law, is a patchwork of contradiction and counterproductive in many cases. It's a reflection of lawmakers trying to get elected by catering to voters, not some unwavering system of any sort of logic, unless one includes the vagaries of human nature.

[@Dr_Wrong]

Science Mafia : “That’s a nice Paper you got there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it..”

[@DataIsBeautifulOfficial]

Imagine solving quantum gravity and then paying to read about it!

[@aniksamiurrahman6365]

What Sabine suggested as solution will just reinforce it.

[@osmosisjones4912]

It's finally completed: kzbin.info/www/bejne/iJOrdJeOm89mbsU

[@M-dv1yj]

Imagine solving quantum gravity and not knowing how to publish and not wanting to pay a fee to share it 🙃🫠

[@drbuckley1]

If you are "reading" it, then somebody had to bear the costs of bringing it to your attention.

[@ShonMardani]

The problem is not the scientists or publishers, none of those papers have any validity or value, if they did, they would be kept secret and the scientist would be dead [usually by suiecid, accident or fake cancer]. We are in a hole full of blony and fake which we have many names for, like blackhole, wormholes, time-space, entanglement, multiverse.. galileo, newton, einstein...

[@SurfinScientist]

Unmentioned is that scientific publishers' profit margins are huge and increasing. Think 30% and more. That exceeds profit margins of for example Google.

[@Hochstenbach]

The profit margins are even higher and closer to 40% for some of the big names. One of the highest in any legal industry.

[@andreasslateffPersonalChannel]

Scientific publisher's profit margins are huge and increasing, because they discovered that there's indeed free lunch for them!

[@value8035]

Sabine?! Reply to this!!!! How can she blind to the elephant in the room?

[@LibrawLou]

As the big journals become #TooHuge, like any other institution they become over-complex & highly-entropIc & rapidly trend toward ungovernable pathology. That means the self-evident natural law of energy & thermodynamics takes over, resulting in greed and the use & vulnerability of fear. Many smaller edu's & org's (not the #TooHuge ones) are truly nonprofit and have become far more beneficial to sustainable society than ANY #TooHuge institution! FightOn, Lucinda & Followers! May #AntiTrustJustice finally return & prevail in a Forward-Looking HarrisWalz world of sanity!

[@gorilladisco9108]

It's a rule of thumb in commerce. If you sell something in volume, you put thin margin on it. If you sell something in units, you put fat margin in it. Think about grocers. Their profit margin are mostly 1-5%. But a piano shop have to put their profit margin at 50-100%, or they will out of business soon. The publisher's margin is big simply because the stuff they sell are minuscule in number when compared to Google. They publish around a dozen or so each month, while Google ads volume can top that within miliseconds. The problem is not that the publisher's profit margin is big (it has to be big or they will be bankrupt in no time). The problem is they somehow managed to sell something that they get for free. That's called cheating.

[@drbej]

Taxpayers perspective from the UE country. We are already funding infrastructure, salaries and grants that are used to make science and write articles. But at the end I need to pay again some crazy money to have access to the results. Why we (as a society) need to pay extra for the thing that we already funded? At the same time academic publishers are making billions (yes, billions) in revenue with profit margins around 40% (yes, 40%).

[@MihcaelTube]

UE?

[@Stdvwr]

(yes, UE)

[@drbej]

@@MihcaelTube EU of course :)

[@Coolcmsc]

You need to quote your source for the profit margin (those $billions). I’m not challenging the veracity, not agreeing you are correct. I just don’t know. You allege you do. so, a source please.

[@MihcaelTube]

@@drbej I thought so, but wasn't sure, thanks. in my native language and English it's EU. In French I saw UE, too.

[@ToradLP]

I mean, there is another fix - move the journals out of the publisher industries hands and have them be done by the academic community itself.

[@therealjezzyc6209]

Academics are already overworked as it is, I don't think they have time to manage a journal by themselves and also get their projects done to keep getting more funding.

[@pcnj50a]

@@therealjezzyc6209 For about 1/4 the cost of a DEI manager, my university could hires someone to maintain a website of our research.

[@ankushds7018]

​@@therealjezzyc6209I think you're underestimating the academic community's capacity to maintain a simple database where all work is volunteer work. And also overestimating the work it actually takes. Scientists handle these databases collectively all the time -- a great example is the maintenance of R software packages usually by biologists. All of this work is volunteer work with no leadership. People are motivated to provide stable service as that provides them to prestige. It's not just a handful of people maintaining this, it's a whole community. Science once took place in this way, but it's just that Elsevier capitalised on the lack of "efficiency" in spreading the science to enough places which can only be done with a shit ton of money. Back then all journals were collectively maintained -- they weren't the best at broadcasting it because there wasn't the internet, but surely it's easier now. And it fixes many other problems in science, it slows it down so papers published aren't overwhelming, and the reputation of a journal can be accurately associated with its peer reviewing abilities instead of simply monopolising the market.

[@laurencecox2657]

We should go back to journals being owned and published by scientific societies, which is how they started. Publishing is part of the process of doing science, just as much as presenting your work at conferences. There is no reason that stops scientific societies employing publishing staff.

[@ogniann2450]

Yes. And it would make some sense for a University or scientific society to ask its staff/members to contribute their time doing peer review. It does NOT make sense for a for-profit company to demand free labour and keep all the profits for itself! OR we can drop this farce and colossal waste of time called "peer review" and leave it to journal editors (and authors) to take responsibility for publishing an article or not.

[@arawilson]

For profit journals are a racket. They don't pay for research, articles (some charge authors), often not much for editors or editorial staff, or reviewers. They charge universities an insane inflated amount to access the products of labor universities have published. University presses are non-profit at least -- support their journals and books.

[@gianluca.pastorelli]

Yes, but university journals have very low impact factors. And you need to increase your damn h-index to keep your job

[@arawilson]

@@gianluca.pastorelli Thank god my field doesn't work this way, it's such a distortion of creating knowledge. (Also there are some university journals with those high impact factors.)

[@gorilladisco9108]

The journals are non profit by admission while they are actually for profit. They should declare themselves honestly as a for profit entity, and everything will be sorted out in the process.

[@infini_ryu9461]

That's because they can. Just like universities are inflated with tax money, so too are the journals. There is so much useless nonsense in universities and useless journals, and the tax payer has to foot the bill for all of it. Then we're told the tax payer has to foot even more of the bill for student loans because their degrees suck. Education is a complete clusterf*.

[@arawilson]

@@gorilladisco9108 There are private, for profit journals run by corporations, and there are journals that are published by non-profits, like universities or NGOs / nonprofits.

[@tonywagner4836]

The basic business model is that the journals want free content, free labor, exclusivity, and then sell their product for a profit. One obvious solution is for there to be a non-profit journal publlsher that operates on a cost basis.

[@ciro_costa]

Exactly. Almost as if essential human activity shouldn't be for profit. Be it medicine, transportation, housing or science.

[@PavloPravdiukov]

@@tonywagner4836 cool idea! Can you start this trend?

[@osmosisjones4912]

It's finally completed: kzbin.info/www/bejne/iJOrdJeOm89mbsU

[@JasonAWilliams-IS]

@@ciro_costa this is crazy. nobody would have a profit motive for doing work.

[@brothermine2292]

>Fetch049 : How is it crazy? Salaries or wages paid by non-profits provide incentive. Non-profits are allowed to earn income to pay their employees.

[@Kohlenstoffkarbid]

Im interested in many science topics and i really dislike to have to pay 19 $ for a two page PDF from 1967. When i want to know all about a certain mineral, it's composition on it's localities and it's properties i would have to pay often more than 100 $ for 3-5 PDFs which are hidden behind a paywall. And im doing it for my own curiosity. Of course i don't pay a dime for that. I gladly spend lots of money for books but not for greedy publishers which don't pay the actual writers. I can hardly imagine, how much real scientists would have to spend to just find out if they got something new or not. Science is expensive but in most cases the scientists will never see a dime. The publishers are driven by pure greed.

[@zemm9003]

Yes.

[@AnthonyJMendoza-f7i]

Actually, the Universities pay for access, so the scientists don't pay anything. Of course, the Universities are paid for by government money and the government generally paid for the research so the government is having to pay twice for the research. Basically, the publishing companies are robbing the government. It is corruption.

[@kitefan1]

You got me curious. A paper copy would have cost you about 1 or 2 USD in 1967. (Based on the fact that they cost me $5 in 1980 without a coupon and the prices of about everything had doubled by then). 1usd 1967 would now cost 9.43 usd today.

[@juliamccoey7496]

Email the authors, ask for a copy of the manuscript. They can give you one.

[@derda1304]

research why elsevier and the like hate "sci-hub" so much

[@chrishall5283]

From my days as an associate editor at an Elsevier journal, I can say that they do keep track of how many reviews people agree to do and how many they refuse. How editors use that information is a personal decision.

[@randfee]

I know, I keep wondering why one would track this metric? Payback by not letting them publish or at least giving them a harder time? I've seen it time and time again, certain publishers/journals consist of a seemingly almost closed circle that favors work from within their circle. Laughable at best. regards, a physicist who has refused to review any publication in paywalled publishers for 10 years now, either get compensated for the work or have it be free (paid by taxpayer), it can't be both.

[@patrickstephens7795]

The only thing that it's worth using that info for, and the reason that they track it, is to decide whether it's worth inviting someone to review something. If someone turns down every review invitation they get, or worse often accepts invitations and either turns them in super late or actually bails on them, you don't want to waste time with them. No AE in their right mind is going to use that to make a decision on whether to accept something, or whether to send it out for review. It has no bearing whatsoever on the quality of the work being considered. That's just not how review works. Current AE here.

[@chrishall5283]

@@patrickstephens7795 Agreed at the AE level. But at the Chief Editor level? AEs only see the paper if it's accepted for review.

[@chrisl6546]

Other publishers use peer review to offer credits for researchers who may have limited resources to cover publication charges. The credits don't help them get their papers accepted, but do encourage them to publish with the journals they're reviewing for and maybe make it easier for researchers with less funding available.

[@zray2937]

@@chrisl6546 It's like a not-cumulative 10% discount on a 2500-dollar charge for publishing in open access. That's more like a joke than anything else.

[@malcolmscott4595]

Your comment's on profitability are just wrong. 1. Elsevier (RELX Group): Elsevier is by far the most profitable academic publisher, with a profit margin close to 40%. In 2022, Elsevier had revenue of $3.7 billion, with an operating income of approximately $1.37 billion. 2. Springer Nature: While exact profit figures for Springer Nature are less readily available, its annual revenue is around $1.86 billion. Academic publishing has high margins, and Springer Nature likely operates with an estimated margin between 30% and 35%, in line with industry standards for large academic publishers. 3. Wiley: John Wiley & Sons reported revenues of about $2.08 billion. Estimated to operate within a 20-25% profit margin. 4. Taylor & Francis (Informa PLC): Taylor & Francis generated around $500 million in 2022. Its parent company, Informa, reported a profit margin of approximately 34%. 5. Sage Publishing: While Sage’s revenue approximately $375, profit margins around 30%. Profit margins are notably high, ranging from 25% to 40%, which is exceptional compared to many other industries.

[@PhillipStewartYYZ]

Even though you used ChatGPT, and did not edit the spacing, I still gave you a like for the good info.

[@leyasep5919]

it's not an industry but a racket then 😛

[@wcf3x]

Are these figures for just the scientific journal publication part of these businesses or for the companies as a whole? Note that almost all of these companies not only publish scientific journals but also many other books (in particular textbooks) as well as having some other associated businesses. For example RELX (parent of Elsevier touts itself as "a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers" and have 36,000 employees in 180 countries. I doubt that more than a couple of hundred of these are involved in publishing scientific journals.

[@danielschoch9604]

Sorry, but Sabine loves capitalism a bit too much for a scientist paid partially through public funds. She doesn't want to see the appropriating nature of capitalism, of which the upper figures are a spelling example. What could be more appropriating than stealing intellectual properties financed by the state (i.e., the society) and reselling it for profit? If you do this with property of the capitalists (intellectual or material), you go to prison. What is paid for by society, belongs to society. If publishing between paper book covers is too expensive, let us just get rid of it. There is still enough opportunity for ranking papers on "preprint" servers. One could think of votes, excellency "Best paper" awards by peers, and good old citation indices; and maybe some special folders can be called "Physical Review" or "Annalen der Physik 1905". And, of course, lots and lots of comments should be attached, follow up revisions responding to critique - just a lively academic ecosystem instead of an unproductive monopoly dead end.

[@l.w.paradis2108]

No evidence she read the complaint. Maybe she read someone's account of what it says.

[@kellylucyglostott918]

One question I came away with is, why does it cost so much to publish journals? I can understand that, decades ago, it would have taken time and cost to type set the articles, create the graph(ic)s, print hard copies, and ship them - and then bind the year's worth. But, now that everything from submission to formatting to distribution can be done by computer or online, I have to imagine that it's much less expensive now that it used to be. I haven't had a university affiliation for 15 years, but I would dearly love to be able to keep up to date with my favorite science topics. But, I can't afford to.

[@brianwelch1579]

Right, and when you pay, you aren't paying for the science OR the authoring. You're paying some suit net profit.

[@glynnec2008]

Sabine's point is that you are now paying for journals that didn't exist 15 years ago. They are so specialized and hyper-focused that they are uneconomical unless they are "bundled" with more popular journals that enjoy a broad readership. So the question is: What is the benefit of having those obscure hyper-focused journals?

[@chrisl6546]

@@glynnec2008 the value of hyperfocused journals is to the people who publish in them because they have to have a certain publication and/or citation count in order to get a job/tenure/promotion/grant/contract, etc.

[@toxicore1190]

@@chrisl6546but noone reads those journals, so there is that with the citations

[@mskiptr]

Why do we need to publish research in journals? Basically every single university has a website and hosting PDFs is really not that expensive. Why not publish everything online and be done with this mess? (Ye, ye, I know that's not how you get funding.)

[@ichigo_nyanko]

They do only publish online, they just charge the price of actually publishing stuff.

[@davidgibson1900]

That could work but we'd need some way of advancing the work of unheard-of scholars, because if there's no journal vetting the research everyone will just read work by those who are already accomplished.

[@BKNeifert]

@@davidgibson1900 It'd just sit for years like my work does. And then the publishers decide, "Hey, we don't like this guy. Let's not bother to publish him, but scalp his work and mess it up, and publish our own stuff."

[@glynnec2008]

Technical Reports, PhD dissertations and Master's theses are often available on a university's website, and are generally of very high quality.

[@thomasrebotier1741]

Universities rely on external peer-reviewed publishing to evaluate researchers and professors. That's the main criterion in advancing your career, the second being probably your ability to get grants. (It all gets hand-in-hand, more grants = more projects/students = more papers). If publishing was done internally the entire evaluation process would bite its tail. It's just not possible to dispense with *some sort* of peer review.

[@billygamer3941]

Finally! This whole academic publication scam needs to stop. We, the tax payer, support many researchers (including the grad students and post-docs) and, yet, we cannot access the published papers without paying.

[@averagedays971]

a complete joke

[@drbuckley1]

Publishers are not philanthropists.

[@agricolaurbanus6209]

​@@drbuckley1So?

[@ichigo_nyanko]

@@drbuckley1 of course they're not... you need to actually do something to be a philanthropist. The publishers do literally nothing. They don't write the articles, they pretty much never edit them, they don't review them, hell most publishers don't even publish these days.

[@drbuckley1]

​@@ichigo_nyanko I think publishing takes a lot of work, and I speak as a former chief editor for a quarterly journal. Anyway, always remember what Charles Bornson said, "Never quarrel with a man who buys ink by the barrel."

[@eitherrideordie]

I get where your coming from. But the key for me is i think people are just fed up with these companies having all the power, all the negotiation, and making bank off all the hardwork of researchers for essentially a platform. Not saying i have a solution, but currently things are out of balance and needs to change.

[@carlm7764]

Things are out of balance for sure , great way of putting it

[@letao12]

How is this different from say, KZbin? KZbin has all the power, all the negotiation, and is making bank off the hard work that content creators have done, for free. All it offers is a platform. And yet here we are, on KZbin.

[@johnnemeth6913]

​@@letao12KZbin pays content creators, at least sometimes (people can choose not to have ads, i.e. Lock Picking Lawyer, or be demonitized for a variety of reasons).

[@whataboutthis10]

@@letao12 KZbin should pay tax locally for every ad played in any country

[@dullyvampir83]

@@letao12 This is also a major problem at a certain size these enterprises should be treated as a public platform, where the users and especially the creators have a say in how things are run.

[@CheapButNotEasy]

Creating an agreement among private entities to raise prices, reduce compensation or reduce competition is precisely what antitrust is intended to address. The remedy is independent from the finding, and forcing the publishers to pay a market rate for peer review without the threat of a publication quid pro quo is a perfectly reasonable way to respond.

[@webderek]

Raising their costs doesn’t help us. Forcing them to lower their prices would be more helpful.

[@VladimirE.-is2ee]

@@webderek raising their costs would help us because of where those costs would go - to the people actually doing the work. For instance, it would mean you could potentially set up as a professional peer reviewer, rather than it being a job that gets done as an afterthought.

[@R-ok3cl]

"Write a paper about it and submit it to 20 journals" is a very scientific way of telling someone "I don't want to hear your opinion"

[@scene2much]

I hate that when I go searching for information and it frequently lands on an abstract page for a paper in some journal that I cannot access that information. Not a scholar. Not subsidized by an institution So much of progress and even so many in the ranks are professionals and scholars begin with people casting them out according to their interests and passions. These journals present the firewall against the curiosity of the young eager That's a bad thing

[@thrall1342]

That is indeed a hindrance. A rising trend seems to be Open Publishing though, some research grants (from EU I think ?) explicitly force the published work to be openly available. That costs money, sure, but you still have competition to provide it for the least amount of money at a certain quality.

[@juliamccoey7496]

Email the authors and ask for a copy of the manuscript. They can email you one.

[@anthonysei]

Effectively a paywall. that does not seem to fit the scientific principle of sharing your work.

[@ElizabethGreene]

@@thrall1342 As an author, it quadruples my cost to "publish" if I want to make an article open access. e.g. Instead of writing a $1000 check to the "publisher", I have to write a $4,000 check. It's ludicrous.

[@thrall1342]

@@ElizabethGreene It‘s only ludicrous if it doesn’t represent the costs. Maintaining availability and the personnel and systems required costs money. It is also a monetization of reputation and reach, which is completely understandable.

[@barryinsabah]

Not to forget that you pay for open access, nature journals charge, many thousands of US dollars. For scientists such as myself struggle as I don't get paid a salary.

[@Max-cj8vm]

$13,000

[@kingofspades1776]

There is no way scientists are doing anywhere near as much peer review as they're doing publishing. Literally everybody else is telling me there is a crisis where good sounding nonsense is getting published, actually influencing society's behavior in some cases, but nobody has enough incentive to attempt to reproduce the experiments because it doesn't make your career or gain any prestige to do so. But the few times any large effort is made to reproduce the results of various papers, the people doing it come back and say if what they found is representative, there is a mass of junk papers leading everybody astray. There needs to be financial incentive to prune scientific literature, so we know what's good and what's bad. I don't know how we get it, but we need it.

[@TheDigger76]

I agree with you that there is too much junk science, but peer review and replication studies are two very different things. We as reviewers are never asked to do the research again or reproduce the results, we are asked to check for inconsistencies, relevance, soundness, etc. In some cases, we get the data and can play with it to check some of the analyses, but thats an exception. Replication comes further down in the scientific process.

[@PavloPravdiukov]

@kingofspades1776 peer review does not include reproduction of paper's results. This requires separate research and, in some cases, experiments.

[@kingofspades1776]

@@TheDigger76 Understood. I think my point still stands though. Enough isn't being done to prune scientific literature, and if Sabine's previous videos are anything to go by, the quality of peer review is often low enough to let junk through that could be caught just by looking at it. If it's just busy work people probably won't pay attention and just give out check marks so they can move on with other things. Science is a tool to make life better and our system is running poorly, which is leading to stagnation.

[@darkwingscooter9637]

​@@TheDigger76 Unfortunately, academia has done almost nothing to disabuse the public of the notion that peer review is functionally equivalent to replication. People ask "was that result peer reviewed?" and reject it if it wasn't. They will accept peer reviewed results that don't replicate, and reject replicable results that can't pass peer review for conflicting with established dogma.

[@magicpigfpv6989]

Wait to publish until 3 independent researchers verify.

[@smftrsddvjiou6443]

We don't need commercial publishers. That's the reason they work against open access publishers.

[@jamestickle3070]

With the rise of ‘hoax’ papers that essentially mock the entire process it is clear that many peer reviewed articles are just rubber stamped. If the journals had to pay for the reviewer’s time they could assert some higher standards and quality control so they got their money’s worth.

[@johnsawdonify]

Yes, I peer reviewed a paper that seemed just awful to me, poorly written, poorly argued, evidence presented not supporting the conclusions etc etc. Was shocked when I saw the other peer reviewers thought is was ok....

[@stewiesaidthat]

Who peer reviewed Newton's gravitational attraction nonsense. Galileo demonstrated a century earlier that mass does not attract mass and look at the mess 'science' is today. Telling lies about how the Earth's moon has more 'gravitational pull' than the earth itself. How a planet .1% the size of the sun can induce a wobble on the sun's rotation from 100s of millions of miles away. Doesn't force decrease with distance or something. Who do we get to sue for the lie that is gravity? Then there is Einstein’s Relativity nonsense. Who peer reviewed that? Einstein-> nothing can go faster than light. That makes motion absolute. Not relative. Einstein-> light travels in its own frame of reference. That makes motion absolute to the frame of reference. Your 'time-dilation' is strictly limited to the photon's frame. Force decreases with distance. The photon has a greater distance to travel and thus exerts less force on the clock. So who do we get to sue for Einstein’s Relativity nonsense? Hafele-Keating? Who bothered to peer review that nonsense? Motion is absolute to the frame of reference. The observer is not on the same frame of reference as the photon. Different forces are acting on the observer. No biologist would sign off on that garbage. Where are the biometrics. The amount of energy each clock used? If you are going to peer review something, then you should be held accountable for it.

[@HagenvonEitzen]

Then again, if I get 10$ per peer review, I'd be certain that I should not invest more than an hour - and rubber stamp. If I get 100$ per peer review, I'd see an opportunity to get rich quick - by rubber stamping And you better not suggest that - even for 10000$ for the peer review - I would even try to reproduce those experimental results about Higgs bosons ...

[@denisdaly1708]

many papers get sent to non specialist journals with non experts in that area doing the review. The journal matters.

[@stewiesaidthat]

@@denisdaly1708 'physicists' are not experts in any field. 1) they don't understand electronics. As the length of wire increases, tge voltage at the end decreases. That's the reason for clocks in motion to be running slower. Clocks don't measure time. They measure motion expressed in units of time. Just like rulers measure length expressed in inches. 2) Biology processes. The force that accelerates the hands of the clock are not the same forces that accelerates plant growth. The force that accelerates embryo development isn't even the same force that accelerates the hatchling once it's out of the shell. The cells of your body aren't energized by am electrical current emanating from a battery at a constant rate. The Hafele-Keating experiments results are totally bogus. They weren't peer reviewed by an electronics expert. By a biologist since there is a biological entity in the frame. It was peer reviewed by ignorant mathematicians who don't understand how to read an equation. F=ma. Force comes from Acceleration of the mass. Not the mass itself. So it's a=F. Acceleration equals Force. Not mass = force, which has never been quantified. E=mc is read as Acceleration defines mass. Not mass = Acceleration. Mass is just a form of energy and Energy is created through the Acceleration process. Everything comes from Acceleration. That's the mathematical nonsense Nicholas Tesla was referring to. Mass is not the actionable force. Acceleration is. But 'physicists' won't use Acceleration as the actionable force because you can't quantity Acceleration. It just exists. Like an infinite universe. You can't quantity infinity.

[@lamarozzo]

Sabine you make it sound like most journals are not profitable, while in reality the profit margins of major publishers are huge (Elsevier had a 37% margin in 2017, higher than Apple, Google and Amazon). You also said that the salary of scientists covers their editorial work, but that's not true (there's no such thing in a scientist's contract). The truth is that the private sector is profiting from work done by scientists by reselling them their own work. I'm surprised you seem to think that it's all well and good.

[@xmurisfurderx]

This woman has rather small minded naive ideas on how the world works

[@SurfinScientist]

Spot on. I can't help to think that she is being influenced by those publishers in some way. It would be good if she would clarify any conflicts of interest.

[@SultanLaxeby]

I'm sorry, but you make it sound like you're purposely misunderstanding her. She said most journals WOULD not be profitable without subsidies or package deals. And she also didn't impy that editoral and referee work is explicitly part of a scientist's contract. Rather, it is understood to be a part of a scientific working routine, just like reading your emails or going to conferences is. And I also didn't get the impression that she thinks everything's well and good - just that some purported "solutions" aren't solutions at all.

[@rolfaalto]

Actually, many proper academic scientists do in fact have paid time for supporting 'community scholarship' or similar, for me it's in my contract and I'd say at least 5% of my time. Then again, I'm European, so they are reasonable about that sort of thing over here.

[@karlscher5170]

She seems to be a neoliberal ideologe (common among spectrum people) without knowing anything about economics

[@pfrauman]

I believe this is not your best video. Journals are making profit on the back of universities hence public money. Therefore there can be more scrutiny in their management. More specifically about peer reviewing: this is the biggest challenge nowadays due to AI. We need better reviewers otherwise journals will soon be filled with fake articles. And to improve the quality of peer review is probably linked with paying the reviewers. Just basic logic. So all in all I don’t believe it is a bad thing.

[@MarkusRessel]

Paying me to review a paper will not stop me from using an AI to review it for me if not using an AI will make more money than using one. Determining the outcome of this question is difficult given the complexity of the current AI tech as well as public opinion and education on the topic of AI, but personally I am not convinced that using an AI would not be the most profitable solution - as much as I hate myself for thinking that.

[@dhombios]

I think that part of the publishing fees should be used for replicating the experiment. That would reduce the amount of fake articles published

[@mlw5665]

​What might stop you is the fact that AI has some thinking tells and paraphrase mirroring issues that make it highly flawed in performing reviews that are not merely searches of a kind. AI summaries are notoriously flawed. But yes, if I'm being exploited at every turn by forces that profit from and then gladly and loudly misrepresent my work, I expect to be compensated by those pirates, especially so that I may survive to do more and my work may survive to be discovered by people who actually give a crap at some point in history.​@@MarkusRessel

[@denofpigs2575]

​@@MarkusRessel The solution isn't then to have every single person peer reviewing every single paper. Just make publishing completely open and free to do, no review necessary. Then some things that get voted on by the community at large get peer reviewed. Simple.

[@Volkbrecht]

Honestly, cleaning up the publication market doesn't sound like such a bad thing. It would force the fields that generally publish "write only" papers to look for a bit of relevance, or make them go the hard way and produce the whole journal through volunteer work. With the writing and peer reviewing already happening pro bono, I don't think putting together some online journal from the finished works is such a big deal.

[@dennissmithson]

So the video claims that peer reviewers should not be paid since they are already paid to review by their salaries. Good point. But then the universities that pay their salaries should be paid by the publisher for their faculty's peer review services, since in this view it is the universities that are providing the peer reviewing services (currently for free).

[@dcxplant]

If the labor is free, the product should be free. Earning a profit on free labor is the issue imo. What good is the research paper if it is bought and paid for? Plenty of think tanks employ academics to write papers to support a predetermined idea/outcome their employer is seeking to prove. If university academics are to be paid for their papers, where is the objectivity?? How valid would the work product be??

[@drbuckley1]

Who the hell is paying for all that paper? The stuff costs $100/ton.

[@johnnemeth6913]

The labour isn't free. University research is very much "bought and paid for". Governments have just as much bias as the private market, if not more (the private market is limited by what sells, whereas government isn't).

[@Jono98806]

@@johnnemeth6913 Yes, but the point is that the academic publishers are not paying for it, yet they still make a profit off of it.

[@rory1336]

@@drbuckley1we already have the ability to print journals on demand. If people want to buy and disseminate paper books of online things, the tech and manufacturing pipeline is already there. It would likely be cheaper than current paper journals anyway.

[@drbuckley1]

@@rory1336 Somebody has to administer that site. It is a tedious thing to do.

[@lanszoominternet]

Although it is not part of the legal filing, there is Catch 22 in this for faculty. Professional advancement in academia is generally linked to the publication of research papers. Yet not all universities have their own publishing houses to ensure that faculty have a venue to publish in. Thus if faculty want to advance they have to sign on to the peer review process. This indirectly ties faculty income to doing unpaid work for both the university and the publisher. Maybe the solution is for publishing houses to hire and pay retired faculty to do the reviewing.

[@whataboutthis10]

Active researchers have to perform reviews ofc. Publishers should reward quality reviewers financially

[@Phi1618033]

Journals are really a relic of a time when the only way academics could get their research out to others in their fields is by having dedictated, published journals that were released at fixed periods, such as monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, etc. And printing physical copies has always been expensive. But now everything can be released digitally, immediately, with little expense. And not only that, everything can be easily searched and organized. So having field-specific journals that publish at fixed intervals has become unnecessary. All we really need is one source of digitally available academic papers, available for free to anyone and everyone. And it can be edited and maintained by the very same academic community that provides the research. Funding for overhead can be provided by a variety of sources, such as public funding or private donations. Think of it like the Wikipedia of research papers, but instead of everyone being able to post to it, only qualified academics can post and edit (while anyone can read). Researchers submit their research, then other researchers in the field review it and decide what stays, what goes and what needs editing. It's pretty much that simple.

[@frgv4060]

I am sure the system will be perverted to a degree one way or another but, probably a great improvement. From an outsider point of view I’ll like to see it being a reality but, somehow, I have the suspicion that the backbone of science is very reluctant to any advancement hehe.

[@howtoappearincompletely9739]

Isn't that the model of _Citizendium_ ?

[@whataboutthis10]

Scientists thrive on established forms of recognition, it's their whole schtick They don't care about transparency towards public. They like their special clubs, makes them feel cool. They demand appraisal by the public, yet mostly don't want to lose time with people. They glorify the work of science, have so since forever, and can't relate to people that don't participate in their faith. Bunch of close-minded individuals mostly. It seems paradoxical because they are supposed to discover 'something new', but since all they do is incremental steps, creativity is not at all crucial

[@AndrewEddie]

Phil, are you saying that science isn't keeping up with the times :) It sounds like the entire scientific method of peer review is kind of broken and not keeping up with cultural, legal and technological shifts. Reddit could possibly make a few suggestions on how to improve it, lols.

[@Phi1618033]

@@frgv4060 Anything created by humans can be corrupted, more often than not, by money.

[@elijahmitchell-hopmeier182]

Peer review is helpful, and I’m glad that people in the comments are helping review her content for free. Good thing the profits of the video go directly to Sabine the author instead of being funneled through an antiquated journal that takes all the money for her hard work and then puts it behind a paywall to keep it from the public despite being funded by money from the public.

[@l.w.paradis2108]

Beautiful. Best comment. 😂❤

[@kurtmueller2089]

As a passionate science-publisher hater, I like that you did not cheer at the lawsuit but showed its flaws. I fear that this less than well put together lawsuit will end up being a boon to the publishers, unfortunately. But one point of confustion: If indeed most journals are not profitable, how come science publishers have gross profit margins comparable to luxury brands? The money has to come from somewhere

[@l.w.paradis2108]

Did you read the complaint?

[@densonsmith2]

Just because research is happening at a public university does not necessarily mean it is being financed by taxes. I think the main question is "what do the publishers do to earn money in todays world?" Journals started up without them and we don't need them to print things on paper anymore. Publishing is near enough to free on the web that the editor could just pay it out of their pocket as part of the price they pay to be an editor.

[@SabineHossenfelder]

It takes people and hardware (or cloud space) to maintain a database. It also takes people to manage the entire publishing process, from finding peer reviewers to making publishing decisions to getting the thing indexed online etc. And that doesn't even touch on the question of what you do with actual data, or how you make it searchable and indexable. Someone has to do all that. There have been many people who had the idea of "hey let's just set up an online journal at basically no cost" and they came to find out that, well, it actually takes a lot of work and that takes money and quite some of these journals just withered away or were taken up by commercial publishers. The brief summary is that a lot of the criticism from academics on scientific publishers comes from them not knowing what publishers do in the first place.

[@MrDubyadee1]

Maybe not taxes, but taxes and tuition and fees that supply the universities budget plus grant money the vast majority comes from government sources. The private sector doesn't support much university research as they are only interested in research that can advance their business interests.

[@tarstarkusz]

BULLSHIT. The entire thing is tax funded bottom to top. 90 plus percent of these "studies" should never have been done in the first place. We need to move science back into the private sector. Before about the mid 60s, nearly all useful science was done in the private sector.

[@tarstarkusz]

BULLSHIT. The entire thing is state funded bottom to top. 90 plus percent of this published nonsense should never have been done in the first place. We need to move science back into the private sector. Before about the mid 60s, nearly all useful science was done in the private sector.

[@eriktempelman2097]

​@@SabineHossenfelderall fair points. But the current system is totally out of balance. Especially for universities from poor countries ...

[@parrotraiser6541]

Isn't the problem that journals contribute to the noise of "journeyman science", the proliferation of papers that really contribute nothing to human knowledge. They just add boxtops to the authors' tenure applications? There are too many schools that provide make-work positions for people who could be more useful working in reality.

[@stoferb876]

One would think the universities taking care of the whole scientific publishing themselves would be the way to go. That would be some real work for all these people to do.

[@goodfortunetoyou]

Most of the reality jobs provide make-work positions too, so I doubt the assertion that there would be practically significant increases in usefulness.

[@whataboutthis10]

Bro thinks today's capitalism is about intrinsically useful work Also scientists are not interested in 'self-publishing' by every university or something. They want that _old-publisher's prestiiige_

[@Mens_Rights]

@@whataboutthis10 Where would you get that, idea, "Bro"?

[@ciro_costa]

We should be on the side of researchers. Never the publishers.

[@osmosisjones4912]

You know reliable data and credible sources often contradicts. From climate to chemistry and especially economics.

[@GunmadMadman]

So they can?

[@notanemoprog]

No. You should be on the side of rationality, wherever it is found

[@JasonAWilliams-IS]

how about the side of truth?

[@ShonMardani]

The problem is not the scientists or publishers, none of those papers have any validity or value, if they did, they would be kept secret and the scientist would be dead [usually by suiecid, accident or fake cancer]. We are in a hole full of blony and fake which we have many names for, like blackhole, wormholes, time-space, entanglement, multiverse.. galileo, newton, einstein...

[@ericpmoss]

Any paper that comes from any public funding should be published in a non-profit site also funded by the public.

[@AllTheFasteners]

To do peer review properly is hugely time consuming (it can take days) - I've done it twice and decided it wasn't worth my time. I suspect the current model is definitely on its last legs...

[@SultanLaxeby]

Let's just hope then that the reviewers assigned to your papers don't decide it's not worth their time either.

[@AllTheFasteners]

@@SultanLaxeby I left academia a long time ago, for the real world. The system is broken on so many levels.

[@donnewmeyer3133]

That’s only fair, as it takes much more time to do the authors’ work of research and submission.

[@ZXLMaster]

An agreement, also known as a contract, requires the willing consent of all parties involved. Enforcing compliance on individuals who have not willingly agreed to the terms of a contract is considered a criminal offense. ❤❤

[@stargazer7644]

Actually, that would be a civil offense in almost all cases, not a criminal one. It is not illegal to break a contract. But it gives you grounds to sue me.

[@the-trusteeship]

Thank you again for your advocacy! The clarity of one of your presentations triggered a spiritual awakening in me (on Bra-ket, or Dirac notation on dimensions in Quantum mechanics).

[@analogbunny]

If you get a government grant, you've already been paid to generate research for the public interest. If governments barred researchers from publishing in for-profit journals, that would fix things right quick.

[@whataboutthis10]

Also journals can easily be taxed beyond 90% They get all their input for free thanks to the public

[@thrall1342]

Easier fix ... create a non-profit journal, or a government-funded journal that works better than the for-profit journals, driving them out of business because you are both better and cheaper. If you can't do that, it is a good indicator, that the journals actually do something that might be worth the money. Just saying.

[@nicolaspassarelli4869]

I am currently unemployed but just asked to peer-review a paper from Optica. I want to get an explanation about which part of my salary is paying for this part of my job! It seems that I need to do community service for a community that kicked me out for not having enough papers in Optica.

[@knp01]

And now, if you refuse to review, you'll get marked for noncooperation making publishing in Optica even harder. But dues need to be paid, right?

[@michaelwright2986]

The real problem is that academic work doesn't really count for career purposes unless it is published by a peer-reviewed journal (or publisher, in the case of monographs). So what the journals contribute is a kind of certification that the work counts, that can be understood by university administrators. If it were just a case of communicating the results of research, then you could just stick it on the web (as in fact happens, I believe, in the sciences). So the journals are leeching squillions out of the tertiary institutions by commercialising a large part of the HR function. Looks like a pretty distorted market to me.

[@davidgreenwitch]

Still I find it annoying they charge so much money for just providing a link to the papers basically.

[@sk197876]

First of all thank you for your great work. I am an academic myself and I think we do not need publishers at all. A scientific journal is made of scientists. They are the editors, the reviewers, and content providers. What I hear from time to time is that publishers ensure accessibility and suatainibility. Maybe that is true but we could achieve it without publishers. Why university libraries couldn't do that. They archive copies of works done at their institution anyway. Sabine talked also about books - but who reads printed books? and if you need one you could order a print in some local company (it would be cheaper than the costs of subscriptions). I think publishers are useless.

[@id3alpolitik]

I suppose they'll just have to make do with advertising money and so double down on selling their readers (the product) to their advertisers (their customers). That should go well - just look at news media and social media. 🤦 That said, the current system is untenable, and it really isn't fair that taxpayers who funded much of this research should have to pay for it again to read it. (We're already charged exorbitantly for drugs that started out with NIH funding.) So perhaps a compromise where every public institution gets free access - for example, every library, big and small, across the US for US taxpayer-funded studies.

[@ichigo_nyanko]

they can do that, most publishers don't even publish things anymore. There are no readers. It's all online only, pay per article.

[@id3alpolitik]

@@ichigo_nyanko I sci-hub them to spite them. 😉

[@WobblycogsUk]

I've long wondered why countries don't set up "journals" as a public service, it could be part of the national library system. In the days before the internet journals were important, it was hard to get your paper in front of lots of people. The internet made journals redundant other than being the ones who manage peer review. Letting a commercial entity manage peer review seems like a bad idea though, it was simply a necessity in the past.

[@cherubin7th]

Some universities did, but everyone wants to publish in the big name journals.

[@whataboutthis10]

Prestige takes time and effort to grow. And scientists are about that *established recognition*

[@WobblycogsUk]

@@cherubin7th I don't think universities are large enough, it needs to be at the country level at least.

[@irenerosenberg3609]

The root of the problem is the culture of publication in many professions. Career advancement requires publication, which requires journals, which require peer-reviewers, who review others' work in hopes of getting their own work reviewed. Basically, a system of circular reciprocity. The only purpose of the super-specialized journals is to publish papers nobody would pay for, or even read, but that the authors NEED to get published. The social sciences are a joke! I follow several publication news websites, and the article titles are laughable: "Poor people found to have less money" "Driving slower causes road trips to take more time" "Larger families consume more food"

[@goodfortunetoyou]

I think it's clear that people don't like publishers. Why not do free/open-access journals instead? If the problem is prestige or other superficial indicators of quality, I would think the institution or scientist's name might be a decent proxy.

[@seijirou302]

Why was the Article Publishing Charge that can cost upwards of $12,000 not brought up?

[@lexer_]

Hot topic, I think publishers have misaligned incentives with the interest of scientists and science in general. Having university-run publishers and magazins doesn't incentivise skimming as much private profits off the subsidies in the same malicious and exploitative ways. At least if they are properly set up and regulated. The way things currently work there is no way you can improve the system because you are working against competitive capitalist market forces. Removing scientific publication from this system will of course lead to inherent overheads and inefficiencies but I think that is better than misaligned exploitation of scientists. Also it would make it possible for people that are not employed by universities but still worked on a significant contribution to science to publish the work if it is of high enough quality and get paid for their work like a contractor.

[@Thomas-gk42]

Sounds reasonable, thanks

[@donm5354]

BAMBOO SCIENCE is a highly underrated area of SCIENCE !

[@lipsterman1]

Did someone figure a way to remove invasive bamboo without killing my oak tree? How much do I have to pay?

[@fburton8]

I'm bamboozled by the whole topic.

[@whataboutthis10]

Oh wait it's not just the underrated area of BAMBOOs? Interesting

[@stevehead365]

Read by most pandas.

[@andrayellowpenguin]

Haha, all i wanna say is "FINALLY"!!! 😅 The system needs to be reviewed but I'm not sure of the solution. I've never felt it was ok to pay so much for the journals but on the other hand keeping the info free would be very difficult unless the government subsidises it or something. And since now basically the only way to get funded is to publish... It's a vicious cycle

[@moffattF]

They should go virtual. Would save enormously. Not all authors are academics. Industrial scientists also publish their work often outside of their day job.

[@UtahSustainGardening]

I have an been and editor and publisher, if these companies are losing money with the prices they charge for the journals they publish it is because of incompetence. With most of the labor being done for free, you just need a few editors and the price of printing and/or the data storage.

[@l.w.paradis2108]

Read the complaint and see what the profit margins are.

[@Thomas-gk42]

Bamboo-science sounds interesting, perhaps I´ll write a paper about it🌱 Seriously, who even decides which paper is peer reviewed by whom, and what happens, if a scientific publication doesn´t find a peer reviewer at all?

[@SabineHossenfelder]

Happened to a friend of mine that the journal couldn't find a reviewer. They rejected the paper. Normally the way it works is that publishers have a database of potential reviewers sorted by keywords. If you sign up with them, they ask you to specify your expertise. They also usually look at the references. Then they'll invite reviewers, and if one declines, they'll go to the next etc. Some people take a long time to decline or they no longer check their email at all. This is why it can take months to even find a reviewer. The more niche the topic, the longer it may take.

[@Thomas-gk42]

@@SabineHossenfelderThanks for your explanation.😊

[@Shermos]

This system puts an incredible amount of stress on academics who have to meet publication requirements as part of their employment contract. My wife for example doesn't have time to wait months for one journal to reject her, only to go through it all over again with another. I'm not commenting on the merits of this particular lawsuit, but it's my opinion that academia is fundamentally broken. ​@@SabineHossenfelder

[@shaunshelly3314]

Exactly right. A recent paper of mine took 18 months from submission to publication. Because it was relevant, it got a lot of press, mainly because it was published by a credible journal, with good reviewers, which is even more important in the time of AI. On the other hand, ..... (I'll just say I have 5 fingers).​@@SabineHossenfelder

[@shaunshelly3314]

Reference for the last line of my comment above: Townsend, S. (1982). The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾. Methuen Publishing.

[@christeanaz]

As a bamboo scientist i feel personally attacked! Plastinated bamboo fillers are the future of building construction. When you have stronger building material thats eco-friendly, youll rue thr day you mocked us!!!!

[@waveofmist]

Reviewers of Sabine's bucket list have long been mystified by the cryptic entry "Piss off the bamboo people." What is a bamboo person, and what did they do to provoke her ire? Today, half of the mystery is solved.

[@blehblahov7398]

hmmmm that actually sounds pretty cool!! Now I want to learn more about bamboos

[@tomholroyd7519]

@@unnamed47 why are you here, deep in the comment section of a website you don't like

[@snarkyeconomist2141]

But do you really need your own Journal? If you're truly competitive as a building material you can publish in a more general building materials journal.

[@OL9245]

Elsevier will soon lauch the International Journal of Bamboo Humor. Sabine will be the Editor in Chief. Stay tuned.

[@SuperMario-jx8zp]

Why dont universities just publish the documents in digital form for free???

[@BederikStorm]

Well, they do it. Many universities have their own Journals. It's just the quality is not so high

[@FengXingFengXing]

Problem is copyright monopoly, and monopoly is too long. Require CC BY, CC SA BY, CC0 or limit copyright monopoly 5 year maximum.

[@real-timelabel-freeimaging4653]

At 2:50 i have to smile slightly...REALLY???... normally the chiefs put the paper on your desk and tell you "review it over the weekend". Since when is the weekend paid??

[@Anankin12]

As far as I know here researchers are not paid hourly, but a given amount each month regardless of how much work they do. Also they don't have working hours. This makes sense to me since some periods are more work intensive while some others are less so (i.e. if you need to wait for something to get made/shipped to make an experiment they will have less to do, if you have limited time access to a facility they will work insane shifts, if you have to catch an event that doesn't care about the workeek, etc). So technically either no day is a paid day, or every day is a paid day. Which is why you could expect a professor of mine to replaying to an email within minutes even if you wrote it at 3 AM on a Saturday evening. Which is also the reason I don't really think I'll go into research

[@real-timelabel-freeimaging4653]

@@Anankin12 Right and wrong.,.. you got the monthly pay, but for a assumed working time of 40 h a week. Quite often this is written into the contract. But several Professors are like "he if you like to stay in contract you better have 10 h a week extra for free, else I take another one". Which is by the way not really legal, but they think the pressure makes good scientists...but wrong, that makes you more faker, as the real scientist, does it by him/herself as they like the project. So once my chief said to me on a thursday at 1 PM when I go home "you leave so early" and I could apply...yes, worked already 45 hours this week, but if you think that is too much, I come back on Monday afternoon... then he quickly came by and appologized... I think it should be honored, that many Prof. are still only "great" as they have hard working scientist behind... and as in the video, we do so many other things in addition quite often in our free time....

[@TheLincolnrailsplitt]

So, review it or else?

[@real-timelabel-freeimaging4653]

@@TheLincolnrailsplitt basically you get some trouble in terms of not getting money for experiments or ideas etc... shouldn't be so, but is.

[@zeroonetime]

All comes down to 010 ~ in-verse and numbers. Creation in Action ~ Q M ~ Time Machine timing-uni-Verse.

[@frederickmueller7916]

And everyone just downloads the papers on scihub. Something needs to change anyways. Knowledge shouldnt be paywalled and especially not when the taxpayer finances the research.

[@SurfinScientist]

Yep. That web site seems to have no problem to pay for its server, even though all monetary contributions are voluntary.

[@Cazu_Orddu_Medea]

The only problem is that Scihub doesn't contain everything. I run into issues with finding articles published after 2019, and even before that their archive is limited. Still, I love Elbakyan and her work with all of my heart. What would we do without her and her team?

[@RobertJWaid]

Regardless of the lawsuit, the whole ecosystem is in jeopardy. Journals are following magazines and newspapers which aren’t paying contributors and consumers who don’t want to pay publishers. Everything can’t be free. The business model that works today is digital publishing behind a small paywall which allows for targeted advertising.

[@mlw5665]

Right now, most scholars in America are paid appallingly lowly and live lives where their jobs are daily threatened by their employers and legislators and, in fact, corporate forces, all of whom conspire to denigrate education as a whole and educators as a defined group. A lot of those people and their allies are raking in loads of money based on the work of said scholars. One can't help but wonder why you are interest lies in protecting that system, Sabine.

[@EvanEdwards]

I suspect this is a Chesterton's lamp-post: people want a change, they understand they need to tear down the current system, and they all agree that current journals have problems. The problem is that while a consensus might be found that current journal system has problems, there is likely no consensus on the details of a replacement system. Finding consensus (and funding, etc) on a new system prior to tearing down the old system is important. But mistaking the consensus for tearing down the old system as having agreement needed to build the replacement is a seductive mistake to fall into.

[@schmitzbeats6102]

I never understood why you can't simply self publish on the world wide web (rumor has it it was invented at CERN, by a scientist, in order to improve scientific exchange...Tim Berners-Lee)

[@whataboutthis10]

Scientists don't care about free-floating papers. They are mostly close-minded and require social approval first before rationally inspecting the content

[@JM-cv7nv]

@@whataboutthis1099% of online content is worthless slop, with Terabytes uploaded every day. There isn’t enough time to read everything and determine its value, which is null almost always. That is why we have peer reviewed journals. Their structure should change, but they are necessary.

[@nelsonclub7722]

Imagine being called as a juror on this case

[@JP-lz3vk]

So, according to Sabine, an academic is paid by a university to provide free review and editorial services to for-profit publishers in return for those publishers reviewing the academic's own papers. What a scam.

[@BradleyLayton]

Among other things

[@Azzinoth224]

I have many times encoutered scientific articles that were not alternatively uploaded to free preprint servers. They were paywalled for me. Why? If what you say is true and the universities indirectly sponsor the publishers, then we should just make that official. Pay the journals directly from taxes and make the articles free for everyone.

[@mirandahotspring4019]

Sabine, only you could find a publication as useful to humanity as "Advances in Bamboo Science". Well done, I've ordered a subscription immediately! Keep up the great work!

[@TheOneAndOnlyOuuo]

Ok... hear me out: Create a publicly funded publisher with all the constraints and commitments of a public entity. All the profits then go to fund research, peer review, journals and publishing.

[@Anonymous-df8it]

That seems like a great idea! If knowledge must be free, all costs should be paid for by taxes, especially since most of them are in publicly funded research

[@braidybecket8946]

Sounds like blackmail - review for free or we will block your work.

[@arnoldkotlyarevsky383]

This is why the solution is to publicly fund all science and stop trying to use capitalism for things it wasnt designed to solve. Bamboo science is probably really important to the tens of millions of people who benefit from growing and using bamboo for food, for furniture, for structural support, for clothing, for handicrafts, etc. just because the journal is not profitable doesn't mean it has no purpose.

[@doggo6517]

Publicly funded research is incentivized to gobble up as much tax money as possible, and never snitch on itself with respect to quality or reproducibility. As long as the taxpayer is held hostage, there is no reason to spend their money efficiently.

[@notanemoprog]

Then those who need it should fund it. You could start a GiveSendGo

[@ichigo_nyanko]

@@doggo6517 It takes so much money because people refuse to pay for negative results... which means the scientists must gobble money until they can say they were right. If the public accepted "It didn't work" as a reasonable conclusion from scientists, and didn't take away their jobs when they say that, it wouldn't really be a problem.

[@arnoldkotlyarevsky383]

@@doggo6517 People love to gesture at govt waste as if paying scientists inefficiently is some kind of tragedy. You seem to think that govt scientists live like kings. I assure you, they do not. I would much rather the US become the global center of scientific development rather than sink trillions into maintaining our position as the global military hegemon. I urge you to look at the federal budget and see how much money actually goes towards scientific research and then separate it out based on how much goes towards the pharmaceutical industry or weapons/aerospace engineering. I think you would be surprised at how little actually goes towards everything else.

[@FangPaw]

Something not mentioned is page charges. It's become common practice for journals in biomedicine to charge the authors to publish. These page charges can be quite substantial, and not all grant-awarding bodies allow these costs to be claimed or factored into applications (I speak of the situation in the UK).

[@blauemadeleine]

Another brilliant and concise analysis! Thank you ❤

[@pedrowoolson4273]

ROTFL, peers in Canada are earning 6 figures mostly in government money. Talk to me about unpaid interns and I'll back your play all day long. Total BS practice propagated by people who think "I paid my dues". I can tell you without any reservation that the dues that I paid were cheaper than the dues kids pay today. There is way too much higher education (which comes with debt) involved in every job when on the job training used to be the norm

[@meteor2012able]

I am a social_behavioral scientist with 8 years of university teaching experience. Since leaving academia, I maintain research interests ... mostly focused on human violence issues. Many journal articles I am "obliged" to read ( because of titles) turn out to contribute nothing really of substance. To me, some seem written due to "publish or perish" pressures, or just to " mini-step" some research issues. Yes, the whole area of academic publishing needs serious examination by serious scientists and scholars. Thanks for shining much need light on this important topic.❤❤❤

[@aquahoodjd]

Thank God - please END THE PUBLIH OR PERISH PARADIGM - AWARD PEOPLE FOR PUBLISHING NEGATIVE RESULTS - YOU SHOULD APPROACH ALL RESEARCH WITH THE SELF AWARENESS OF BEING RIGHT OR WRONG. YOU ARE DOING A PUBLIC GOOD BY TELLING OTHERE NOT TO GO THAT ROAD! WE WILL SAVE MONEY. RESTORE PUBLIC FAITH IN SCIENCE!!!!!!

[@innuendo70]

With the availability of self publishing platforms, why dont universities just move to use Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Play books and maybe IngramSparc ebook and POD services and do the whole journal thing themselves in some kind of inter-university coopetations? Its 2024, if everyone and their cousin including colege drop outs can write a novel and get a team together of editors, beta readers, ilustrators and cover artists to publish it using ebook playforms and POD services, surely universities with batalions of P.hds should be able to do the same with journals. Or am I missing something?

[@Thomas-gk42]

You don´t, I think

[@maymkn]

Yes, you are missing something- a brain!

[@sblevine1]

michaellorton8099 said it so well I gave it a thumbs up, but I hope that Sabine will read his key sentence so I'm going to repeat it "Sabine makes reasonable points here but she does not (and we cannot expect her to) understand American antitrust law. " To which I would add that this happens the more she strays from her areas of expertise.

[@alienzote13]

Thank you for sharing this and your perspective. Please, keep doing it, you don't imagine how big is your impact in current researchers, and novel minds in social media, an more important, your message reach all the communities. Cheers!

[@Thomas-gk42]

💯

[@christianlapp8306]

The essential question hasn't been addressed: Why do we need publishers at all anymore? What is their role in science, which is best served when outsourced to private, for-profit companies? Can't we establish a system that isn't only free but actually serves science and the scientists better? I believe we easily could!

[@voltaire3001]

Apollo got us to the Moon. Privatized = Boeing

[@b0mazor]

Advancements in Bamboo Science was actually a killer read

[@Zurpanik]

I don't fully understand what the issue is here at large, but it seems that there is a great deal of misunderstanding in general (not just from myself ha). Would it be possible to make a larger video about this and perhaps cover actual causes and solutions? Eventually, the money thing will only be for luxury goods and staples will be guaranteed. I think we've got to make sure science is always guaranteed and free, and maybe we need to adjust the system to really take care of people in the first place. Anyway thanks for the information!

[@jb_makesgames2264]

Great Video - there is definitely a dark underbelly of academic publishing that few people really understand. As a finance practitioner I can honestly say that 90% of academic financial papers are worthless in addressing the real issues in finance. Most papers are just a bunch a mathematical proofs whose results can't be replicated and which lack any coherent conclusion.

[@jeffneuhaus8475]

I read somewhere (not sure if it's true because I haven't tried it yet) that you can email the author of a paper directly and they will generally be happy to email you a copy for free. They're legally allowed to do that and are usually happy to share their hard work.

[@SurfinScientist]

That is partly true. Some authors don't reply to such requests.

[@SmallGuyonTop]

3:26 Not true. Based on history it would create new jobs to keep the system working. The glass is half full. German pessimism vs American "can do it" optimism.

[@hugegamer5988]

Remember the time a court ruled pi was actually not 3.14… but a whole number? Apparently it was a rational ruling.

[@dennisbrown5313]

lol; nice pun there. And yes, for an April fools joke, a legislative body did do that in a State - and made sure it was valid only for a single day.

[@stoferb876]

They didn't want an irrational number..... ;). Okey I'll show myself out...

[@iliaponomarev1624]

Well, I'd say it was a wholesome ruling. Maybe we can even call it natural, considering pi is surely a positive thing. Calling it rational is a bit of an understatement.

[@severeon]

I am really uncomfortable with peer reviews including the exchange of money... Donations... Maybe, but I they kinda need to separate the donor from the recipient to prevent the appearance of bribery... Idk Is there a make-a-wish for scientists that I can help fund?

[@jrhoadley]

Actually Bamboo Science sounds interesting, although I'm curious how much unique research is generated regularly.

[@Thomas-gk42]

Yep fascinating plant, from the biology to the use as energy or construction material🙂😉

[@oudviola]

Interesting discussion and comments. The problem of page charges wasn't mentioned in the original video, though it is in some comments. It costs over $1000 to get a paper published in many or most journals, way more if there are color figures. We academic scientists pay that from our research grants, which are typically publically funded. Even online only journals like PLoS have page charges, and while they do have costs as many here have noted, they don't have physical printing costs. Absurdly, because we pay page charges, it actually says on the printed pages that our research articles are 'advertisements'!

[@donnewmeyer3133]

One of the big problems is that if you can only submit manuscripts to one journal at a time, the whole process can take months or even years. And then if Nature, for example, rejects your paper only after the revision (after spending months acquiring new data) you have to start all over again with a different journal. There should be a process where you submit to a clearinghouse and then publishers have to bid on your manuscript.

[@AmoreFS]

only reject it after a revision: well they could reject it instantly? or what is the alternative beside accepting it after a review? you can let anybody review your stuff. you may have a hard time finding people to do so if you have no renomee yet, especially with the flood of no merit papers generated by language models recently. and luckily groups that participate in and made deception their main or sole source of genereting income are still having hard times to gain the reputation and trust of some of that established magazines. so what they do to compensate is trying to create those false aequivalances undermining trust in institutions.

[@donnewmeyer3133]

@@AmoreFS Usually the reviewers and editors accept the revised manuscript, but they might require further data or they might just say that the revision does not meet the standards for publication in this esteemed journal. Then the authors have to submit to a different journal.

[@helicalactual]

I will actually look into writing a paper about it lol

[@carlbrenninkmeijer8925]

I like the Copernicus "open access"

[@carlbrenninkmeijer8925]

Things have changed since Elsevier started a long time ago!

[@janbensi4065]

Yes, but at the same time it is well known that these publishers have absurd profits. A change of the publishing system is necessary for sure. Right now, we are funding huge private profits and revenues with state money. Hence, this money is not used effectively for science but for private capital accumulation. Exemplarily, peer review is work done by scientists in the interst of publishers as a service for publishers. It is true that scientists are (sometimes) payed for this work through their job but as this job is payed for by state money, the publishers should have to compensate for the time spent - maybe not to the scientists but to the funders of research project and overhead research infrastructure.

[@REXOB9]

In American astronomy, the leading journals are published by the American Astronomical Society, the main US professional astronomy organization. The Society contracts the actual publication to an outside publisher, but maintains editorial control. This has worked well in astronomy.

[@ARi-ht7su]

I love your videos on Physics. But you should not comment on law as Jordan Peterson should not comment on good nutrition. Stick with your expertise.

[@Thomas-gk42]

...and another boring "big fan but..stick to physics.." --blabla commenter. Don´t you guys have some refreshing new nonsense in the pipeline?

[@ARi-ht7su]

@@Thomas-gk42 Too bad you are bored. But my comment wasn't aimed at entertaining you either. I am not binging the comments but good to hear others share my view. Though, I assume it won't make Sabine make more physics content, given that this other stuff seems to create a fair amount of views with lower effort.

[@Thomas-gk42]

@@ARi-ht7suSorry for my rudeness, but one can really read this stuff in every of her comment sections. Someone always is complaining. Fact is, that it´s her channel and she decides what she likes to talk about. She´s a very smart and foxy communicator, and her channel is not an echo chamber, that makes her unique. She has the ability to bring very different people together here, for a fruitful thinking and debating. I personally don´t need someone who constantly parrots my opinion. And of course, every second vid is still about physics, isn´t it?

[@ARi-ht7su]

@@Thomas-gk42 No problem. Since she has an open comment section, I assume she is interested in comments from her audience and, well, here is one. Since you also don't need people parroting your opinion, maybe once you will appreciate the "stick to physics"-comments yourself ;) Maybe it is also the new format with daily short clips not just the broader range of topics but I feel like the quality an relevance is declining. More of a good thing is not necessarily better. The times when I was looking forward to seeing the new video at the weekend are gone :( But I assume the new concept is more profitable

[@Thomas-gk42]

@@ARi-ht7su Yes, money is important for all of us, right? Of course she creates more views with five vids a week than two, and she needs that, since she has no payed job in academia anymore, but her team to pay. I personally like these short videos though I was sceptical at the begining too. They are very compact and include often more content in eight minutes as another communicator in a boring hour, though she even finds time for some jokes. But that´s just my opinion, cheers

[@Jonathan_T]

I think it's a good thing because at least people will talk about the fact that there is not enough money on research, the fact that mainstream media ignore journal notations, the fact that studies are not officially free after publication, etc etc. Talking about research in a public debate cannot harm and maybe will awake some consciousness