Jessica C. Huss

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/...

Venn diagram of major strategies used to cope with heat stress with examples of species expected to specialize in heat tolerance/acclimation (yellow circles), heat avoidance through drought-deciduousness (green circles), and heat avoidance through homeothermic leaf cooling (blue circles).

High #temperature acclimation of #photosystem II in land plants

#TansleyReview by @bposch.bsky.social et al.

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

@hultinelab.bsky.social #PlantScience #photosynthesis

I agree 😅 no frogs in the lab yet…

Startups Are Racing to Make Water Out of Thin Air Materials that are bigger on the inside than the outside provide a futuristic solution to supply water to an increasingly arid planet.

One of today's winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is UC Berkeley professor Omar Yaghi. Last year I wrote about Yaghi and Atoco, the startup he founded to commercialize his scientific breakthrough with a device that extracts water from air using just sunlight.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

This project was only possible due to funding from @fwf-at.bsky.social. Thank you very much!

Great work together with Finn Box, Martin Grömmer, Sebastian Antreich, Qun Zhang, Tofayel Ovee, Jean-Francois Louf, Juerg Schoenenberger, David G. Williams, @bokubionami.bsky.social, @mingchaoliu.bsky.social, @hultinelab.bsky.social

One day in the lab, we accidentally discovered that the spines of a cactus 🌵 straighten when exposed to fog. I was intrigued and so were my collaborators. How does this work and what can be gained from it? Here are some of the answers in our new preprint:
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

I absolutely love your art 😻

Halfway to I2K is BACK, friends of all kinds! Last year, 650 people attended 30+ TOTALLY FREE image analysis workshops of all kinds, across many timezones.

If you make image analysis software and want to teach it, workshop submissions are open now! We'd love to have your tool highlighted.

Full Professorship (W3) for Physics of the Oceans - Potsdam-Mittelmark, Brandenburg (DE) job with Universität Potsdam | 12844582 Founded in 1991, the University of Potsdam has firmly established itself in the scientific landscape and has become an outstanding economic factor ...

Here‘s a rare and excellent career opportunity for outstanding physical oceanographers at the Potsdam Institute (PIK) and the University of Potsdam, in beautiful surroundings just outside Berlin. Tell qualified friends or colleagues! 🌊
www.nature.com/naturecareer...

The use of a highly simplified environment may incur consid- erable collateral damage for all of plant biology; with the current status quo for in- door cultivation, especially of small ephemeral plants such as A. thaliana, similar artificial conditions are replicated

around the world, and there is a substan- tial risk that the phenotypes in this envi- ronment become confused with the base- line of what is ‘‘normal’’ for these plants.

What a statement... (see screenshots)

Great article by @derekseveri.bsky.social et al. on the importance of including "real world" conditions in #PlantScience work, to ensure that one is actually studying plant biology and not just plant behavior in a lab environment.

www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

Plant evolution: from origins to diversification on land The evolution of plants – photosynthetic eukaryotes resulting from the endosymbiosis of a cyanobacterium and a non-photosynthetic host cell – transformed the earth system by reducing the amount of CO…

Registration for the EMBO workshop ‘Plant evolution: from origins to diversification on land’ closes on 25th August. Don’t miss it! More details can be found here: meetings.embo.org/event/25-pla... 🌱 😀

🚨Don’t miss out! Last weeks left to register for the Plant Computational Biology Workshop 2025, sponsored by @cambup-lifesci.cambridge.org 🌱
📆Deadline 31 July - www.slcu.cam.ac.uk/computationa...
#ComputationalBiology #PlantSci

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

This is a great article by @joachimgoedhart.bsky.social on @dev-journal.bsky.social about color choice in #DataViz, thenode.biologists.com/data-visuali..., also check out his super useful #DataViz tools at huygens.science.uva.nl 🧪🧬💻

Major US climate website likely to be shut down after almost all staff fired Exclusive: Climate.gov, which supports public education on climate science, will soon no longer publish new content

Climate.gov, a major US government website supporting public education on climate science, will likely shut down after almost all of its staff were fired. What would be worse is if the website were co-opted to publish climate denial content.

People who can’t handle criticism are unfit to lead.

Weak leaders fear dissent as a threat to their power. They silence their critics to shield their egos.

Strong leaders welcome dissent as an opportunity for growth. They silence their egos to learn from their critics.

SPS - Summer School 2025 on Advanced Plant Imaging – API : From super-resolution to fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy 🔬🌱 in Versailles 👑🇨🇵

For enthusiastic PhD students or young postdoctoral researchers !

Only one week left to apply 👇
eng-saclay-plant-sciences.hub.inrae.fr/teaching-and...

German anger at its best 😂

Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research ‘Paper mills’ are contaminating the world’s scholarly output with fake papers that hinder research. Lifesaving biomedical fields are especially hard hit.

Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research

fraudsters have infiltrated the academic publishing industry

Frederik Joelving, Cyril Labbé,
Guillaume Cabanac

theconversation.com/fake-papers-...

American science and medicine has been thrown into chaos and uncertainty over the past week. Here are some stories to get up to speed. 1/12

Plant-Herbivore Interaction GRC Sun 9 Feb - Fri 14 [EST]: The Plant-Herbivore Interaction GRC is a premier, international scientific conference focused on advancing the frontiers of science through the presentation of cutting-edge…

📅New #PlantSciEvents Event Added: Plant-Herbivore Interaction GRC🌱

👉https://eventform.plantae.org/plantae.calendar/detail/1363/1739077200000

#PlantScience

Elon Musk takes aim at Wikipedia The billionaire has become one of the most prominent supporters of President-elect Donald Trump.

If you've never donated to Wikipedia, now's the time. Elon Musk is attacking it because it's one of the only sources of honest, curated information that he can't control.
www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-ta...

Probably a slice through a root to see the various layers.

New collection: "Diffusion barriers in plants" nature.com/collections/...

Biogenesis of diffusion barriers like Casparian strip, suberin lamellae or root exodermis. Primarily focused on root diffusion barriers, but homologous structures were recently discovered in trichomes.

Effective, efficient, and fair peer reviewing 2023 Effective, efficient, and fair peer reviewing Ben Bond-Lamberty Based on a presentation at the AGU Early Career Scientist Workshop, 2019 1

Scientists are expected to do peer reviewing but no one tells you HOW. After talking with several folks about this today at #AGU24 , it seems a good time to link to this presentation I made several years ago -- feel free to use/share! docs.google.com/presentation...

A collage of four pairs of holly leaves, each from a single plant. The leaves are dark green and glossy with a prominent midline vein of pale green or yellow. Each pair juxtaposes a leaf that has spines along its edge against a leaf with perfectly smooth edges. Credit: Carlos M. Herrera & Pilar Bazaga 2013 https://academic.oup.com/botlinnean/article-abstract/171/3/441/2416188?redirectedFrom=fulltext

We're used to seeing holly leaves depicted as exclusively spiny, but most wild holly plants have spiny and smooth leaves

Common holly (I. aquifolium) *changes its gene expression* to produce spines in response to damage by herbivores. Each pair here is from the same plant

📷 Herrera & Bazaga 2013

Join us in the second UK Plant Biomechanic conference at Leeds. Organised together with the Institute of Physics. Registration closes on Jan 12th!

Very cool, but try to avoid red-green combinations (colour blindness).

In the past years, I've found using comic-inspired color palettes super helpful when creating figures for my papers. Just came across this one and I’m definitely using it next!

💡Any comic recommendations with cool color palettes?🌈
#AcademicSky @academic-chatter.bsky.social @thephdplace.bsky.social

Ångström-resolution fluorescence microscopy - Nature The authors introduce a single-molecule DNA-barcoding method, resolution enhancement by sequential imaging, that improves the resolution of fluorescence microscopy down to the Ångström scale using off...

ÅNGSTRÖM-RESOLUTION FLUORESCENCE MICROSCOPY.

Can we do structural biology with an optical microscope? Yes!

Check out how we resolved *single bases of DNA* and much more using fluorescence microscopy, out on 24.05.2023 in Nature! @natureportfolio.bsky.social

[re-post from Twitter]