Naomi S. Wells

Congrats Jackie! So well deserved. I can’t wait to see what you do over the next few years!

What consulting companies is Auckland Uni working with and how much are the companies being paid? - a Official Information Act request to University of Auckland Could you please provide a list of contracts the University entered into, in 2024 and 2025, with external consulting firms; the topic of the work undertaken (e.g., strategic planning); and the total c...

Auckland Uni has responded to my OIA request re consultancy spending in 2024-2025

$600k to PWC and $500k to Nous Group for "strategic design, organisational change, transformation
services" etc

This is roughly what our whole faculty of science spent on internally funded postdocs in the same years

But did NZ consider the cost of transporting all those pixels all the way there?

Still time to apply to work on #symbioses #mosses #cyanobacteria! Join us in #Copenhagen! @voltcenter.bsky.social

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/...

this is a nightmare and i love it

Small stream with clear water green macrophytes growing in it. The stream run through a tussock grassland with mountains on either side.

Pretty nice day for exploring field sites in Arthur’s Pass National Park 👩‍🔬This summer we’re kicking off some new work using a braided river spring complex to figure out how (if?) invasive plants affect stream energy

a century of glaciers melting 🧪🌐

Global Climate Models Need the Nitrogen Cycle—All of It - Eos Nitrogen plays important roles in areas including climate change, human health, and agriculture. A researcher argues that climate models would benefit from more fully incorporating its influence.

A greater focus on the nitrogen cycle could improve climate modeling, suggests new research.

We are organising a session on #Nitrogen biogeochemistry - links to other elements and biodiversity at #BIOGEOMON 2026 in Umeå! Join us! @benhoulton.bsky.social

Surely though there’s a worthwhile point to be made about the environmental cost of ‘foods’ relative to their nutritional value? Depressingly wasteful that precious land, fertilises, water, GHGs go into products that don’t actually help feed humanity, just designed to meet (& create) cravings

So true re the immeasurable role that department administrators play in our student experience (both directly and indirectly) - and so sadly apparently universal that our corporate unis don’t seem to think twice about axing the people in these roles as expendable / optimisable / digitalisable 😕

Screenshot from sigma Aldrich website, listing 15N labelled potassium nitrate. And also listing ‘15N labelled potassium nitrite’ as its synonym.

🤔 not super inspiring really. Usually I like my chemically suppliers to be able to differentiate between chemical compounds. Now I’m doubting myself. Has nitrite really just been a synonym for nitrate all along, missing oxygen be damned????

Nominate an Impactful Dataset You are invited to nominate a dataset to be included in a commentary about the impact of Earth, space, and environmental data using the dimensions of people, planet, and prosperity. Selected submitter...

⭐️Nominate an Impactful Dataset

@agu.org invites you to nominate an impactful dataset!

📊Submissions will be considered for inclusion in an upcoming featured commentary published in AGU Advances.

Submit nominations by 20 October.

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

@agubiogeosciences.bsky.social

Noted 🤣

One submission said leaders’ salaries could not be “justified by the quality of executive decision-making, nor by the scope of executive duties. The core business of a university – teaching and research – is co-ordinated virtually entirely by ordinary non-executive staff”.

Report on Australian Higher Education finds:

🔹️ Council members have no lived experience of universities

🔹️ Council members have COIs with consultancy firms

🔹️ Council meetings are closed affairs that lack transparency

🔹️ Leaders' exorbitant salaries could not be justified

Yeah me too! And then a colleague was like ‘you should come to BIOGEOMON’ and I looked at the programme and it looks potentially great so now I don’t know what to do…

About BIOGEOMON 2026 | slu.se

www.slu.se/en/about-slu...

Science conferences next year: should I go to ASLO-SIL aquatic sciences in Montreal or BIOGEOMON in Umea??

Timing for the latter is much better with my teaching calendar, so really the question is: BIOGEOMON - as great as I imagine it to be? (I’ve never been to one)

Yeah my students use it for things like coding, clarifying new concepts, generating templates for a new writing types (eg recs). All sounds fine, but also nothing that I as an old person manage w existing tools in the same amt of time. Hard to see much ‘revolution’, just Web 2.0 (3.0)?

Two-panel illustration showing sparse trees in a Cretaceous landscape (bottom) and densely forested Paleocene landscape.

With the extinction of dinosaurs, dense, closed-canopy forests could proliferate, leading to shifts in fluvial structure and accumulation of organics. This represented a profound change in the landscape, illustrated here by the incomparable Julius Csotonyi.

Graphic with journal statistics.

Today we celebrate the 20th anniversary AGU’s JGR: Biogeosciences!🎉

For two decades, the journal has published original research, methods, and data articles on the biogeosciences of the Earth system.

🔗 Learn how to submit: buff.ly/RcwG5Ty

#AGUPubs @jgrbiogeo.bsky.social

Join our COMPASS-FME project! U-Toledo seeks a postdoctoral research associate to study methane cycling in coastal ecosystems under different flooding regimes careers.utoledo.edu/en-us/job/49...

So the funding for this new PRO - is this for hiring ppl, infrastructure, carrying out research, or all three? Ie, is this skewing the funding system even more (making new teams to vie for even less research $), or ‘just’ cutting contestable research $ to redistribute ppl & resources & signage?

The mesh-swathed object we’re contemplating in the pic is a fire pit we excavated & repurposed as an anchor / POM-excluder for our pumps, which were pummelled by waves and tonnes of storm-mobilised wrack all night long.

Some of the most physically challenging field work I’ve ever done. Worth it?

Two scientists wearing waterproof outdoor gear standing on the shore holding a large metal object. The sea behind them has small choppy waves and the beach is covered in green seaweed wrack.

New work out in GRL: greenhouse gas emissions across human-modified land-to-ocean aquatic continuums. We show how storms shift aquatic emission magnitude & pattern. This arose from (completely unplanned!) estuary sampling during a winter storm.

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Today was spent exploring new potential alpine river study sites with Helen, Angus, & Saskia. Back and brimming with so many exciting ideas 🤗👩‍🔬

(Now just to figure out how to make these ideas happen…)

Special Collection Call for Papers! Changing biogeochemical cycles along the land-to-ocean aquatic continuum Now open for submissions in Earth's Future, Geophysical Research Letters, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, JAMES, JGR: Biogeosciences, or JGR: Oceans.

📢Call for Papers!📢

A new #AGUPubs special collection seeks submissions that advance our understanding of human-altered nutrient and carbon cycles along the land-to-ocean continuum.

🔗 Learn how to submit: buff.ly/ZgVTHsm

#AOGS2025 #Geoscience #SDGs #Nutrients #Biogeochemistry

The Māori values that make good sense in science The Indigenous beliefs underpinning soil chemist Amanda Black's approach could deliver a more inclusive research culture, she says. The Indigenous beliefs underpinning soil chemist Amanda Black's approach could deliver a more inclusive research culture, she says.

Recognised as a changemaker, our Director, Professor Amanda Black opens a brand-new series from the Nature podcast team — and how science, Indigenous knowledge, and leadership can shape the future of our ecosystems.

🎧 Listen now: zurl.co/aV3mu