@jgrubalcaba.bsky.social
Macroecologist and modeller - now at UCM https://jrubalcaba.github.io/
Let's make @ecosistemas-aeet.bsky.social a fair and well-used journal!
15.11.2025 09:15 — 👍 27 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 0
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/...
Biological performance across the tree of life collapses onto the Universal Thermal Performance Curve (UTPC). Shown are approx. 30,000 performance measurements derived from seven kingdoms, 39 phyla, and 2,710 experiments. Performance is represented by diverse rates including metabolism, individual growth, foraging intensity, voluntary activity, and population growth (see SI Appendix for data grouped by phylum and performance metric). Data are presented on both axes relative to the parameters (Topt, Tc and Pfmax ) estimated by fitting the UTPC equation to each of the 2,710 experiments; the UTPC is overlaid as a yellow line and fits the rescaled data extremely well. Data are colored by the relative density of neighboring points showing very high density of points close to the line and relatively few datapoints further from the line.
Data collapse, and models converge, onto a Universal Thermal Performance Curve (UTPC), which only requires optimal and critical temperatures as parameters. Top panels show empirical data on thermal performance encompassing (A) specific growth rate of proteobacteria (), (B) biochemical rates of photosynthesis in plants (), (C) running speeds of lizards (), and (D) population growth in insects (). Lower panels (E–H) showcase the rescaled data from the processes exposed on top, along with their corresponding alignment to the Universal Thermal Performance Curve (UTPC) equation. Datasets are from Kontopoulos et al. (21) for proteobacteria and from Rezende and Bozinovic (6) for other groups. The upper panels of the raw data show substantial variation in the shape and location of the thermal performance curves. The lower row shows that rescaling the data using the simple model results in the data conforming to a single underlying curve with very little variation from the model.
And our paper is out! One curve to rule them all: a simple universal thermal performance curve for ectotherms that explains at least 2700 datasets across 39 phyla and myriad measures of performance. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
23.10.2025 10:01 — 👍 16 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0Why we aren’t lizards: the evolution of endothermy through optimizing life history
Summary & Analysis by Kaleigh Remick of “The Evolution of Homeothermic Endothermy via Life History Optimization” by Rubalcaba
www.amnat.org/an/newpapers...
Five 3-year Postdoc positions open at @ebdonana.bsky.social. I am happy to sponsor and mentor good candidates working in my field, but note that these are quite independent positions aimed at helping stabilize new researchers in the system. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4nqkq...
18.08.2025 15:27 — 👍 32 🔁 34 💬 0 📌 2
Science deserves better than profit-driven publishing. Change starts from within the community — here’s how we can reclaim it: peeer.net/2025/08/18/r... #BetterPublishing
19.08.2025 12:29 — 👍 7 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0
Lo que ocurre en USA no es un suicidio de la Ciencia, es un asesinato.
En un mundo sumido en múltiples crisis, necesitamos más que nunca que se hagan políticas desde el conocimiento, respaldadas por Ciencia básica, y no desde la ignorancia. Y no sólo en USA...
elpais.com/opinion/2025...
Why do endotherms spend so much energy? Juan G. Rubalcaba describes a theoretical model that shows that species followed one of two possible evolutionary patches: live fast while spending a lot, or live slowly and keep your costs low. Read now!
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
🎓 ¡Quedan plazas libres!
📊 Gestión y visualización de datos con R: Convirtiendo datos en historias
📍 Modalidad online | 🕒 Plazas limitadas
¿Quieres aprender a transformar datos en narrativas visuales impactantes usando R?
🔗 Inscripciones: www.aeet.org/events/2025/...
These two strategies likely produced bifurcations and abrupt evolutuionary transitions to endothermy. I speculate that declining temperatures n the mid Triassic triggered endothermy in early mammal and avian lineages
23.06.2025 08:57 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
When the costs and benefits of high body temperatures are combined, two strategies emerge: 1) save energy and be an ecotherm OR 2) spend as much as you need as an endotherm
23.06.2025 08:57 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0I used a theoretical, energy-balance model to explore how and why an energetically expensive trait such as endothermy evolved multiple times among both plants and animals
23.06.2025 08:57 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Excited and honored to have my first solo paper out in Am Nat!! @asn-amnat.bsky.social doi.org/10.1086/736225
23.06.2025 08:57 — 👍 19 🔁 6 💬 3 📌 0Postdoc call in Mechanistic Biodiversity Modelling (up to 6 ya) at my lab @unibonn.bsky.social. We focus on modelling terrestrial plant communities, island biogeography, range dynamics, eco-evolutionary feedbacks, diversity gradients, tropical forests, vascular epiphytes. Pls rt! shorturl.at/CL1ny
29.05.2025 08:09 — 👍 34 🔁 36 💬 0 📌 2
Author-Paid PublicationFees Corrupt Science and Should Be Abandoned Thomas J. H Morgan & Paul E. Smaldino
As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...
09.05.2025 17:26 — 👍 397 🔁 134 💬 9 📌 18
Fully funded PhD in Plant Ecophysiology at UBC in Vancouver 🍁! Possible topics include leaf physiology, thermal ecology, microclimates, scaling, tree physiology, forest ecology & more. Start Jan/May/Sept 2026. michaletzlab.org
Please share!
#PlantEcoPhys #Ecology #Botany #PhDposition #GradSchool
📢 Título de experto en Aplicaciones bioinformáticas en biodiversidad, ecología y evolución
📅 26 mayo - 4 julio | ⏰ 15:00 - 20:00
📍 Facultad de Biología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
💰 300€
🎯 Metodología 100% práctica con proyectos y tutorización experta
📌 Inscríbete ya! ucm.es/formacion-pe...
Next week (!!) we are presenting our workshop "integrating mechanisms into species distribution models" - don't miss it! Online 2-4 April www.biogeography.org/news/news/wo... @gfandos.bsky.social @biogeography.bsky.social
24.03.2025 16:40 — 👍 13 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 1
Dato mata relato
#lobovivo
#loboprotegido
Se ha filtrado el borrador de ley de universidades que está preparando la CAM. Si se aprueba, será la muerte de la universidad pública madrileña. Es escandaloso. No exagero. Se vienen tiempos oscuros como no espabilemos. Explico algunos puntos críticos. Va hilo. 👇
14.03.2025 20:49 — 👍 2199 🔁 2068 💬 73 📌 226Real breakthroughs come from long-term investment in public research and then exploited by big tech companies
04.03.2025 13:24 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Screenshot of text from a Nature Ecology & Evolution Editorial entitled "Deep cuts"
In our latest Editorial we discuss the continuing damage being done to US science, and its impact on researchers and the environment 👇
Deep cuts: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Join us this Wednesday for our monthly Funk lecture, presented by Dr. Sidney F. Gouveia! To register, please visit our website: www.biogeography.org/news/news/ne...
24.02.2025 20:16 — 👍 16 🔁 10 💬 0 📌 0
Interested in mechanistic & hybrid species distribution models? Don't miss our workshop! Online - 2-4 April @gfandos.bsky.social
REGISTER: www.biogeography.org/news/news/wo...
