But to be clear: reaping what they sow means "have absolute profits that dwarf what they had 10-15 years ago because of the scale of publishing growth, only enabled by AI."

I might instead say AI already has, as publishers like Springer whose megajournals were targeted by slop for their lax standards, are reaping what they sow.

There's also a move of e.g. Chinese science to publish in home-grown journals. The profiteering isn't gone, it's just sloshing around.

So, like... "In 2015 the absolute profits of X were $100,000,000. In 2024, they were $1,500,000,000. But in 2025 they were half the value of 2024 - in part because the systemic undermining of scientific integrity by the publisher's lax floodgates practice led to mass retractions & reputation loss."

Here they are (Zygothrica sp) going at it to defend their mushroom kingdom.

El Refugio, Intag, Ecuador

How important do you feel discovery research and ‘basic’ science is for understanding disease? Well, I have a little bit of a biased view on the topic, since I'm a basic scientist myself. The lab has made more and more discoveries with very strong therapeutic implications, and often people ask me why we are not pursuing these further ourselves. Part of it is that I think about this very much as an ecosystem. People have different skills – I have colleagues who are very good at the application side of things and I have other colleagues, including people in my lab, who are very good at the basic science. There are a lot of very smart people at every stage in the ecosystem and, sometimes, we have to acknowledge that we can't all be experts in every step. A lot of basic science discoveries will end up having profound implications in the clinic – if you don't have the full imagination about how to get it there, that's okay, because you're still a very important piece of the jigsaw puzzle and other people can help. If the basic science discoveries didn't exist, then it's quite possible that the well would run dry. We cannot simply rely on the idea that the therapies currently in clinical trials are going to be enough because we already know that – for diseases, such as cancer, and with rapidly evolving viruses – there needs to be a constant influx of new ideas to stay ahead of the arms race. I'd also make a plug for the fact that, ultimately, we are all interested in human disease, but disease research in humans is not ethical or possible. This is why creating and studying model organisms in a high-throughput, low-investment context is incredibly important. We cannot just say ‘okay, we're going to stop work on anything that is not related to human research’, because – actually – it's all relevant to humans.

Do you think basic science is particularly threatened by cuts to funding? Science itself is quite uncertain. We do experiments wondering if they will even work. It's discovery, and you don't know where it's going to lead. It could lead to a billion-dollar company, something like mRNA vaccines or CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, or it could simply be something that interests you. Sometimes it might appear esoteric from the outside, but there are very smart people dedicated to this work. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that most of this work is paid for by taxpayers, but funding uncertainty creates a very unstable foundation. If the foundations are weak, people are going to get much more conservative about the science that they're doing and worry that ‘blue-skies research’ is not worth pursuing because it won't get funded. And that would be a mistake because all innovation in science really originates from blue-skies, basic research. The second thing that uncertainty does is send a message to our young trainees – who are our future – that this is not a career option that will provide professional and personal stability. I worry that this kind of uncertainty will mean we lose an entire generation of people, and that would be a loss we might not be able to overcome.

I was interviewed by @katiepickup.bsky.social recently for @dmmjournal.bsky.social. This has a little bit of my background, a little bit on science and mentoring, and a little bit (ok, more than a little bit) on funding in science.

Check it out at: journals.biologists.com/dmm/article/...

1/ BRAKER4 hatched!
The Earth BioGenome Project is on track to sequence ~1.5M eukaryotic species. Every one needs a structural annotation. No Perl monolith was going to survive that. So we rewrote BRAKER from the ground up. github.com/Gaius-August...

This is just Eigenfactor / Scimago Journal Rank, but with fewer journals informing the network...?

When it's your time to present in lab meeting and you don't have new results to show

Ah, Peptides. Where to Begin? Ah, Peptides. Where to Begin?

Buckle up
'So let’s finally talk about peptides. And I don’t mean peptides as chemists and biologists understand them (short chains of amino acids) I mean “Peptides!”, the hot new wonder drugs that you can order by mail. Oh man.'
www.science.org/content/blog...

Tagging #Drosophila

Who does not want an AMAZING 3D printed fly????

This Drosophila was printed for me today as a prop for a talk at the @rigb.org

It caused a minor commotion on the tube on my way home. And I LOVE IT

- @bittelmethis.bsky.social 🤓🪰🤘

One of the wildest things I learned about planarian flatworms: you can isolate their pharynx (throat) and it will autonomously engage in feeding behavior.
www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Springer Nature Discovers MDPI – The Strain on Scientific Publishing Home page for the paper ‘The Strain on Scientific Publishing’ by Mark A Hanson, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto and Pablo Gomez Barreiro

These "discover something" journals from Springer Nature are here to steal your research money, as those from MDPI and Frontiers (and many others). ⚒️ 🧪

Learn more here: the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...

2/2

Received a review request for a journal I wasn't aware of. Manuscript title and abstract were fanciful.

An opportunity to "discover" 😆 that Springer Nature copied MDPI with a bunch of (semi)predatory journals named "discover something".

Be sure not to review or publish in these journals. ⚒️ 🧪

1/2

2025. "Springer Nature Discovers MDPI" the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...

Screen shot of section 1.1 of the report "vision for a new publication culture"

The governing body for 14 Dutch universities (UNL) has published a "Vision on Publication Culture" that is so inspiring and forward thinking. Worth a read for those trying to changes publishing and research assessment practices.

Take a read:

www.universiteitenvannederland.nl/files/public...

I know I'm in the minority among editors, but I don't have a problem w/words like "Remarkably", "Surprisingly", etc, *when used appropriately*

Sometimes, everything points to something, & you've set your experiments in a certain way, only to find something else. And I think it's fine to convey that

Congratulations to the legendary scientist Judith Kimble!!!

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

#womeninSTEM #celegans

Really really hoping the Artemis II Crew posts one short message

"That's No Moon" and then goes silent for a few hours as a prank.

IMO in response to stuff like this, we the research community can carve out the exceptions in the cleanup. It's more important to stop the drain ASAP. As you note, many will still be able to publish in PLOS. PLOS is also toying with their model atm, so we'll see what the future brings!

The strain on scientific publishing Abstract. Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. The total number of articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science has grown exponentially in recent years; ...

I waffle on this. A strength of the subscription model is it encourages publishers to only publish works that people will actually want to read. Combined with green OA (like uni repositories, preprints), we can accomplish both goals of combatting the strain on publishing & green OA simultaneously.

Agreed. But I'll praise any and all funders that raise awareness of the scam that is double-dipping on gold OA and also subscriptions.

It's a step towards funding preprint servers. That's a good thing. That said, I can imagine in an IP-heavy field like cancer, preprints are less universal.

Excellent move by Cancer Research UK to cease funding Gold OA if it's just going to contribute to hybrid journal growth. Green OA exists in numerous forms for free.

When funders throw their weight around, researchers will follow their lead. Well done @cancerresearchuk.org !

I guess fuel efficiency of vehicles nowadays explains a lot of this trend?

Phage receptor prediction from genome sequencing alone. Bacterial receptor (blue) interacting with phage proteins (purple) is shown here

📣Huge preprint 🔔
Today we share something our group has been working toward for a long time, led by @lucasmoriniere.bsky.social We asked can we predict which receptor a phage targets from its genome sequence alone? For most phages, we couldn’t. So Lucas set out to do something I had only dreamed of.

How diverse is bacterial immunity ?

We report in @science.org how language models allowed us to predict 2.4M antiphage proteins spanning >23K novel potential systems.
👏 @emordret.bsky.social, @alexhv.bsky.social & al doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Explore them here defensefinder.mdmlab.fr/wiki/refseq_...

But then commercial incentives also lead to a cheapening of publishing work through automation, offloading work to academics and increasing editorial staff workloads. So the question is about what kind of organisational setup is best for what kind of publishing, rather than how much it "costs".

‘Why is publishing so expensive? For many of us who work in scientific publishing, the title of this Editorial is a question we hear all the time when we're out talking to academics. And it's a perfectly reasonable one. After all, re...

I sympathise with the fact that publishing costs more than many researchers think, but I always find these articles unhelpful because they're trying to justify a specific kind of publishing that only makes sense in a commercial setting. Things are different if you recoup costs through other means.

█████ fires █████ as █████ for failing to ██████████ XXXXXX, D.C. – In a post on Truth Social, U.S. President XXXXXXX announced that he would be removing XXXXXXXXXXX as head of the XXXXXXXXXXXX after she failed to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

█████ fires █████ as █████ for failing to ██████████

Photo of a bombed-out facility

US-Israeli bombing destroys the Pasteur Institute

“Established in 1920, the institute is the first and oldest public health center in Iran—where staffers pioneered vaccine development and research on the prevention of infectious diseases.”

www.cnn.com/2026/04/02/w...