John Towse

Higher education is one of our country's most successful export industries.

And the exports (i.e. international students coming here) make it more affordable for domestic students.

No decently run government would interfere with that, but here we are.

The UK government waves and has entered the chat …

'These group processes are much more in play at night' | BPS Our journalist, Ella Rhodes, meets Mark Levine, Professor of Social Psychology at Lancaster University.

'These group processes are much more in play at night…'

@ellarhodespsych.bsky.social meets Mark Levine, Professor of Social Psychology at Lancaster University.

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

YouTube video by Relativity Bites When professors are brutally honest #shorts

youtube.com/shorts/Bwf70...

Don't forget
People traitor-ing and crying

Terribly disingenuous on their part; their call for more research is wrapped up in the requirement to develop a 90% accurate diagnostic test for severe neurodevelopmental difficulties (thrust 2) and 80% effective prevention of such difficulties (thrust 3).
The link is baked into the whole program

Obituary – Jonathan Smallwood

Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social was a beloved friend and mentor. He was taken from us too soon. His was a beautiful mind who understood the beauty of minds. As ever before, his kind voice guides me and his work will continue. We miss you Jonny. www.cbs.mpg.de/news/obituar...

Totally agree with this distinction here, and the balance shift (thanks, Robert Maxwell)

Having close involvement in both non-commercial journals and Society-journals-with-very-tangible-Society-benefits, I also am aware that this difference is not nearly the easy sell one might expect

... Also some years back supervised a UG student project who ran the same type of study but asking student participants to draw or recognise our University logo. Performance was really poor - even though the logo was (of course) on the consent form that students had signed moments before :-)

Don't panic - Just ask them to draw the Apple logo instead: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/...

We co-authored a new report with CCSA & MHRC on online gambling among young Canadians. The report calls for a coordinated, evidence-based national response. Read it here: tinyurl.com/ms25e6nm
#PublicHealth #GamblingHarm #YouthWellbeing #OnlineGambling

Full statement on blue background: The Office for National Statistics has announced a significant reduction in its statistics portfolio, as part of efforts to strengthen the quality of core economic outputs, such as GDP, prices, and labour market data. We recognise the importance of this recovery plan. High-quality economic statistics are fundamental to public confidence, sound policymaking and the UK’s international reputation. However, before final decisions are taken to stop particular outputs, user consultation will be critical to understanding the impact of proposed changes. Where statistical production shifts between organisations, users must be signposted clearly, so data remains discoverable and accessible. The RSS’s Public Statistics Vision highlights the need for comprehensive, accessible data that supports decisions across the UK. Any contraction in the portfolio must remain temporary. Scaling back statistical outputs risks creating gaps in the evidence base that government, local authorities, researchers and businesses rely on – particularly at a local level. We encourage the UK Stats Authority to produce a transparent list of user needs – a ‘waiting list’ of priorities – so that once issues with core economic statistics are resolved, other essential statistics can be restored in an orderly way. The RSS will continue to engage with the ONS and the wider statistical community to ensure the UK retains a strong, independently produced evidence base.

ONS plans to reduce stats portfolio to focus on core economic data

We understand the need but urge:
🤝user consultation
↗️clear signposting
📜transparent ‘waiting list’ of priorities

Reductions must be temporary to protect UK’s evidence base

🔗Our vision for UK stats rss.org.uk/news-publica...

Questioning the value of this paper -lots to admire. Just trying to understand the arguments esp given your historical contributions

I totally accept -and recognise- this depiction!

But doesn’t that then mean the time drain isn’t some ineluctable outcome of the ever expanding publishing system, but rather a function of the unreasonable job spec that researchers work with?

To be clear I’m not defending the system or

Surely it’s more broadly palatable to charge all car users a pay-per-mile charge, whilst also reducing fuel duty levy to avoid double dipping?

Or are we just preternaturally triggered by multiple review requests, albeit with a contemporary ability to vent more conspicuously via social media?!

Elsewhere (doi.org/10.1017/S001...) you have -exquisitely!- shown that *even in the prehistory of peer review* reviewers fretted over the time drain ("referees worrying that much of their ‘valuable time’ was being ‘practically wasted on such work’" etc) Is the current drain qualitatively different?

🌟 Congratulations to Dr. Helen Nuttall (@lancasteruni.bsky.social) — winner of the Mentorship award at the #WiNUKAwards2025!

Dr. Nuttall conducts hearing research in underserved communities, co-hosting "Drs Confess" podcast. She fosters inclusive mentorship where early-career researchers thrive.

This Oldie #cartoon #redraw is available from Chris Beetles Gallery #lighthouse #bowling #dippenandink #watercolour

There is a lot of fuss today over whether chatbots can replace human participants in social sciences research when the solution is obvious: ask chatbots to simulate the views of social scientists and survey them on attitudes towards chatbots as substitutes for human subjects.

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/...

The same Charles Babbage of "Reflections on the Decline of Science and some of its Causes" (1830)? Arguing "English science as moribund, English scientists as amateur and corrupt, and English scientific culture and reform as lamentably inferior to those of other countries, especially France"

My DMs are open if anyone has more info on this. 100% confidential.

In this paper, 1/2 the authors (inc me) have an orcid link ….because we were told we couldn’t add them for others late in the publication pipeline.
Yes, that’s on us. BUT journal systems could be MUCH better at prompting and encouraging ids across the process.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

OpenAlex just got a whole lot sharper. The Walden rewrite is live: a faster, cleaner, and more complete engine behind a now 190M-work scholarly dataset. Better OA, references, metadata—plus quicker updates and snapshots. Onward. #OpenAlex #Walden #OpenScience

blog.openalex.org/openalex-rew...

The whole of the HMRC Board got me to present to them about the opportunities and risks of AI about 18 months ago and my main messages were be very careful with high stakes decision making and remember the Horizon Post Office scandal which was about governance and accountability…

About the data OpenAlex is more than just a catalog of research publications. We do the work of disambiguating and connecting scholarly works, authors, institutions, sources, and other entities. We then offer the...

This isn’t a direct answer to your question but it looks like OpenAlex - as an open infra for bibliometric curation does go to zenodo for material

help.openalex.org/hc/en-us/art...

BBC really burying the lede there

Maybe @dalmeet.bsky.social (freelance, but written there)?

Can recommend for example, oro.open.ac.uk/90930/1/TAS2...
as an exemplar of thinking about the people -and their psychology- behind the software.
@parseraisin.bsky.social for example has been great in thinking through facets of this