Nicolas Galtier

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/...

So Nature-Springer, which absorbs several billion dollars in research funding each year, provides us with an API that attributes all citations to the first article in the volume.

Well done Springer Nature, at least I know where not to submit my next paper.

no surprise (see figure 4)
ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

which journal and publisher ?

About - Bionyeri Bionyeri is a start-up R&D laboratory developing natural products to aid pain relief in a range of human health conditions.

Instead the guy created a company selling "natural products"
bionyeri.com/about/

I’m looking at a specific paper mill in India. So far, I have detected 339 papers, 105 of which were published in 2025. Only the biggest publishers are being targeted. Only two papers have been retracted.
This is the dashboard of a paper mill.
lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/36...
#papermills

That's one of the major hypothesis for the explaining the strong, negative relationship between dN/dS and expression so I find this research super important

cool!
and very Lynch-compatible

I really had no idea about this. Thanks a lot!

Regarding coding seq mutations: have people considered a potential second-order fitness cost due to mutated proteins being around and interacting with undesired molecules?

Actually a number of committees now downgrade CVs including MDPI papers - I mean, not showing them is better

Here adaptation comes from killing the activity of a protein right?

I find this motto slippery. It should all be about good science, and teaching ERC otherwise seems no good for our future.

Archive link: archive.ph/xUITn

It's refreshing to hear about researchers putting in the effort to not pay APCs. You can still publish where you want by retaining your rights to do so -- lots of US universities already have rights retention policies enabling this. oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Univ...

Making Your Research Free May Cost You Under a new requirement that NIH-funded research be freely, immediately available, some journals are forcing researchers to pay to publish.

"Things don’t have to be this way, open-science experts say: These fees are imposed entirely by publishers. The most prominent examples are Springer Nature and Elsevier, for-profit enterprises that generate billions in revenue."

www.chronicle.com/article/maki...

It’s finally out!

Our work addressing the origins of reptiles is published in PCJ! peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10....

We use novel info gleaned from the scan data of dozens of stem reptiles to substantially revise our understanding of early reptile evolution #paleontology #herpetology

Thanks! I need to read this carefully as it seems closely related to my recent
peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10....

Hear even more about genome duplication in fishes, and how gene expression allows us to study gene evolvability, come to my talk at 14:15 in room S51-07 #ESEB2025

Chromatin Landscape Is Associated With Sex-Biased Expression and Drosophila-Like Dosage Compensation of the Z Chromosome in Artemia franciscana Abstract. The males and females of the brine shrimp Artemia franciscana are highly dimorphic, and this dimorphism is associated with substantial sex-biased

Beatriz Vicoso: Artemia brine shrimp have complete dosage compensation of their Z chromosome. She proposes that they're using a system similar to MSL for Drosophila X. Cool contrast to e.g. birds, whose ZW are doing something different entirely. academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

#eseb2025

Relaxed Purifying Selection is Associated with an Accumulation of Transposable Elements in Flies Abstract. Although the mechanisms driving genome size evolution are not yet fully understood, one potentially important factor is the dynamics of the accum

Genetic drift and TEs!
academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

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; ...

Hi @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social

Any particular reason for having your annual conference sponsored by a predatory publisher?

direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
www.predatoryjournals.org/news/list-of...
ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

I think paying for peer review is like using more pesticides when yields decline - you know, facing reality.

Come join us with this new post-doctoral position in the Quanta project: emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U... (2 years in Bordeaux)

If you love artifacts (especially bones), notches, microscopes, and exploring the big question of the origin of quantification systems in human lineage, this is for you!

Frontiers' Research Integrity team uncovers peer review manipulation network Frontiers Research Integrity Auditing team has uncovered a network of authors and editors who conducted peer review with undisclosed conflicts of interest and w

Fox finds raccoons in henhouse.

www.frontiersin.org/news/2025/07...

Now discovering @joannamasel.bsky.social‬ 's 2-yrs old comments.

Joanna is asking a great question: is linked selection equivalent to reduced Ne?

However, not sure how this relates to the interpretation of alpha, which seems core to her argument.

Joanna?

dafnee.isem-evolution.fr

Rising editorial resignations underscore disputes over academic independence Mass resignations of managing editors and entire editorial boards from scholarly journals aren’t new, but the frequency has picked up in recent years. Since 2023, editors of over 25 journals have r…

Another addition to the growing list of mass editorial resignations: editors of a math journal resign and launch a diamond open-access journal ‘free from pressure or influence’. Check out our latest post at peeer.net/2025/07/31/r....
#BetterPublishing

[and let me mention that OUP was kind enough to grant us a generous waiver due to lack of specific funding for this project]

Here I told the story about this project, which originated 15 years ago at an SMBE meeting.

bsky.app/profile/nico...

Happy to see this published in one of my favourite society journals!