Paolo Crosetto

Its because there is no R package for design, sampling and measurement. Make one, problem solved ☺️

What is a SERM? Sorry for the ignorance.

Bike network is planned to be greatly expanded and some sections are in the works here in Gre, but I fear a change of mayor could result in backtracking

I live in Grenoble and the tram seems fine to me -- also i don't see *where* a light metro could fit.

But (as a non-expert) think I agree that Bordeaux and Strasbourg are big enough and could have gone a light-metro route

Montpellier seems fine to me, apart from the sloooow curved sections

Naive question: is it a recognized fact that the modern tram (French style or other) is the best solution for mid-range cities? Or is it somewhat controversial in the discipline?

☺️

Indeed. Unfortunately scientific publishers recently found a way -- through APCs -- to monetize the "other shit".

and here we are, fighting a huge resource drain.

arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820

This is the most worrying part the current system and the #1 issue to be tackled with our remaining brain cells, what can be done to a) reduce shit, b) transform shit into more thoughtful work

You could also try this paper of ours in which we describe with lots of data the state of scientific publishing and in which MDPI is a huge outlier in everything metric

direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

❓ What do people’s own words reveal about their economic decisions?

A new JEL article by Ingar Haaland, Christopher Roth, Stefanie Stantcheva and Johannes Wohlfart shows how open-ended survey responses offer insights that standard surveys often miss.

🔎Read more here: www.nhh.no/en/research-...

PCI Webinar series #13 - Simine Vazire - Recognizing and responding to a replication crisis

In case you have missed Simine Vazire's excellent webinar yesterday, here is the link to watch it online: youtu.be/_vb1CNwC3CM Thanks again @simine.com for staying up so late and thanks to the audience for the great questions!

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma.

It's *scientific publishing*.

We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_...

Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

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/...

Thanks!

Let's bring the paper describing the madness of the current scientific publishing to @altmetric.com 3000 together!

Understand the strain: tinyurl.com/2b6wxx5r
Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy

Is there a link for the figshare AltMetric page?

and: can be merged into the strain main page?

Please?

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; ...

#QuantitativeScienceStudies #MITpress #Y2024 The strain on scientific publishing direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Groups have disproportionately grown in their articles published per year. Publishers enabled this growth by hosting “special issues” with reduced turnaround times.

An obviously AI-generated figure with AI slop and fake text all over it, recently published in Scientific Reports.

Since AI slop is again all over Scientific Reports, a thread on the economics of grey-zone publishing.

Why does slop keep getting published? What does it mean for science? How can we stop this?

Background readings:
Understand the strain: tinyurl.com/2b6wxx5r
Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy

✍🏻 a MUST read for anyone interested/worried about science
#ScientificPublishing 👇🏻

I cannot really say on the comparison between Poos One and SciRep but as far as we could see from publisher level metrics PLOS is by far the best publisher among born-OA ones. Being for-profit accentuates many bad trends.

All info here: tinyurl.com/54zsa9te

Or at thevery least renegotiate the Faustian deal that was made two generations ago, when "we will take care of everything but you give ho your journal" made so much more sense because running a journal was a complex and very costly business.

Funneling is yet another strategy to keep authors in one's own stable. It's like marketing really, once the author is in the shop, don't let it go away without having sold something!

All publishers do it, they create a cascade of journals.

It's one more trick up their sleeve.

Great thread on the Ponzi scheme that is academic publishing. Public funds funnelled into obscene private profits using free labour of (publicly funded) Academics. AI slop contaminating the literature.

I wrote a thread on why this happens and keeps happening. It will not stop by itslef, we've got to stop the drain by changing incentives.

bsky.app/profile/paol...

Here is why it keeps happening, and it will keep happening unless incentives change.

bsky.app/profile/paol...

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

Slop graphics in academic journals Use this form to share graphics (e.g., figures, covers, graphical abstracts) made using generative A.I. that have appeared in academic journals. The plan is to compile these slop graphics in an ope...

🆕 Academic slop reporter!

I'm going to start collecting and compiling A.I. slop graphics that have appeared in academic journals, similar to my collection of academic hoaxes.

If you stumble across any slop in a journal, tell me about it!

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

The fall of a prolific science journal exposes the billion-dollar profits of scientific publishing One of the 15 publications that put out the most studies globally has been expelled from the indexing system for irregularities. Its publisher, Elsevier, has a 38% profit margin that reached $1.5 bill...

Interesting investigation into a dodgy Elsevier journal -- with the additional nugget that the CEO of Elsevier's parent company made more than €15 million in total compensation last year.

english.elpais.com/science-tech...

@hansonmark.bsky.social has a very similar idea to this and floated it around in a thread here some time ago.

It is also one of the potential radical solutions we urge funders to take.

We won't solve all of sicentific publishing in the coming years, but paying less for the same mess seems doable

This is potentially significant. The CNRS are one of the best in the world. Reliance on metrics controlled by private companies is a problem for science. We need the powerful organisatios to take the lead.

Understand the strain: tinyurl.com/2b6wxx5r
Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy