Thanks! Small correction: *Danish = Dutch

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

"Even when explicitly prompted for accuracy, most LLMs produced broader generalizations of scientific results than those in the original texts."

Just received a rejection of an article about a field experiment (of a widely used practice) because “null findings are not relevant for practice” 😐

Paradigm Wars Revisited: A Cartography of Graduate Research in the Field of Education (1980–2010) - Sebastian Munoz-Najar Galvez, Raphael Heiberger, Daniel McFarland, 2020 Education entails conflicting perspectives about its subject matter. In the late 1980s, the conflict developed into a war between interpretive and causal paradi...

Strange, the argument that the reviewers make is that their biased actions would create a more balanced field while empirical analyses show that the field is dominated by non-positivistic research journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/...

Een oproep voor PO-onderwijs rond collective teacher efficacy en collective student efficacy. Repost = good karma :)

Super nuttig onderzoeksproject, ik kijk uit naar je bevindingen, gefeliciteerd!

Inclusief onderwijs: moet de echte discussie gaan over het hoe in plaats van waar? Al vijftig jaar draait de discussie over speciaal onderwijs om één grote vraag: waar moeten leerlingen met een beperking les krijgen? Moeten ze fulltime in een gewone klas zitten (volledige inclusi…

Toppost 1 v/h weekend: Inclusief onderwijs: moet de echte discussie gaan over het hoe in plaats van waar? pedrodebruyckere.blog/2025/02/15/i...

I Have Written You A Book On Forensic Metascience Use it to cause trouble

Friends, I have written you a book on forensic metascience.

It is free. You can have it. Happy St. Valentine's Day.

If you wish to give me a gift back, you can use it to cause trouble - the greatest gift of all.

open.substack.com/pub/jamescla...

A social sciences and humanities reading list on AI in education 🧵

Hi:)! For great memes (and good content) I recommend @johnholbein1.bsky.social

I think that it would be good if reviews also included a systematic review of previous reviews on the topic (because single reviews are often incomplete, and because it can otherwise be claimed that things have not been studied before based on a review of only recent lit). What do you think?

Some thoughts after reading the slides: Systematic literature reviews are more clear about their scope, but for readers it is still hard to discern whether this scope is complete.

Dismissive Reviews, Citation Cartels, and the Replication Crisis

richardphelps.net/Dismissive%2...

Thanks for sharing this presentation, it was a real eye-opener to me.. I always do try to provide an impartial overview, but I have been guilty of claiming that whatever I was introducing was understudied or that certain evidence was lacking. Will be more careful about this moving forward!

7 Open Science Practices I Wish I Would Have Learned During My PhD YouTube video by Izaak Dekker

Here are 7 open science practices that I consider extremely useful (apart from being good for science in general). I added links to openly available materials and practical pointers for each practice. #openscience #phd
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwxb...