Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel (opens in new tab)

Huge numbers of academics have signed up to the Elsevier boycott, see http://thecostofknowledge.com/

MDPI is gamed by design, I think that while Elsevier is awful, MDPI is even worse with 100s of special issues where you are guaranteed to land publication in journals with quite nice IF (which is inflated by publishing large proportion of reviews and less original research).

I'm certain that the comment you responded to never claimed that it was "isolated to Elsevier" in the first place, nor is it very compelling to speculate about how in the future something even worse might emerge.

Right now Elsevier is by far the biggest offender and also happens to the be the topic of the conversation and the article.

Exactly. Elsevier is a dominant company. Of course it's going to have a huge share of anything that goes into journals. They probably also have a huge share of the Nobel prize winning papers too.

That being said, I'm happy to encourage open access.

Happened in other countries as well, see e.g. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elsevier-boycott-l...

Liking free speech, disliking affirmative action, being critical of those he disagrees but also giving them a chance to respond.

edit: is what he seems to be about based on the linked article

Most scientists want to do good science. They get intrinsic meaning and satisfaction in doing so. But with any large group of people there will be a few bad faith actors that will manipulate any exploit in the system for their own personal benefit. The problem here is that 'the system' of academic appointments, and even more importantly, funding sources, are built around this publishing metric. This forces even the good faith scientists to behave poorly because it was a requisite to even being able to exist as a working researcher.

0. I think your perspective is really detached from the actual scientific enterprise. I think this kind of take exists when there are cultural clashes combined with a strong focus in the media and online with the mistakes and issues in science, not its successes.

Science is actually progressing at an amazing rate in recent years. We are curing diseases and understanding more about life and the universe faster than ever.

Just briefly skim some top journals right now:

Here's an amazing 'universal vaccine' for respiratory viruses in mice https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea1260

here are brand new genome editors in human cells https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz1884

Here's amazing evidence of an ancient lake on Mars https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu8264

Here's a meta-analysis of 62 (!) different studies on GLP1 receptor agonists to figure out whether they can contribute to pancreatitis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/edm2.70113

(covered here https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00552-6)

Here's identification of a new mechanism of resistance in Malaria https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10110-9

Here's curing a genetic disorder using gene editing in mice https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10113-6

Here's a study that has figured out that as CO2 levels rise, there's less nitrogen in forests https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10039-5

and here's personalized mRNA vaccines curing people of breast cancer https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10004-2

Like all of these are just from the past month or two and are pretty astounding advances. And they are just a subset of all of the scientific advances recently. All of them have contributors in academia (and science performed outside of academia would not exist without academia, as it depends upon it for most of the conceptual advances as well of course as for scientist training).

1. Stuff like paper mills and complete fraudsters exist, but for the most part, these things are the exception, not the rule. Your average scientist doesn't even hear or think about these things and the weirdos who cause them, to be honest. Nobody has ever heard of "International Review of Financial Analysis" outside of an extremely niche economics subfield.

2. "Public or perish" is not a cycle, really. While I believe it's not good for people to be constantly working under pressure, the fact that academia is so competitive currently is a healthy sign. It's because we have so many people with extremely impressive resumes and backgrounds, doing extremely impressive work, that makes funding so competitive. And when funding is competitive, it's no wonder that funders prefer to fund people who have produced something and told the world about it ("publish").

3. Fraudsters and hucksters have been in science forever. Go read an account of science in the early 19th century. There are tons and tons of stories of crazy scientists who believed ridiculous things, scientists who kept pushing wrong dogma, and so on. And yet nobody knows about them today, because the evolutionary process of science works: the truths that are empirically verifiable win out, and, given enough time, the failures are selected against.

As for an alternative, how about using the social fabric of researchers and institutes instead? A few centuries of science ran on it before somebody had the great idea to introduce "objective" metrics which made things worse. Reintroducing that today would probably cause a larger spread in the quality of research, which is good: research is kind of a "hit-driven industry" - higher highs are the most important thing. The best researchers will do the best research, probably better without carrot and stick than with.

What you describe is still a problem with the institutions, because it is ultimately the institutions that provide the incentives (in the form of jobs). You're right that they're using bad metrics, but it is the institutions who are making those bad decisions based on the bad metrics.

There are lots of better things, like people making hiring and firing decisions based on their evaluation of the content of papers they have actually read, instead of just a number. If someone is publishing so many papers that a hiring committee can't even read a meaningful fraction of them, that should be a red flag in itself, rather than a green one.

The incentive to disprove bad science ought to be greater.

There's imperfect ways to work with goodhartable metrics. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fuSaKr6t6Zuh6GKaQ/when-is-go... talks about some of them (in the context of when they go bad).

For a thoughtful answer to your question, see:

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-dance-of-the-nake...

They had no reason to stop this until it became publicly embarrassing for them.

"only for private pharma/bio/tech firms to add a thin layer of additional research (or design) on top"

Citation needed.

Go to market cost billions and takes a decade. Doesn't sound like a thin layer. I'm not disputing fundamental research in academia is an essential fuel to keep innovation engines running. But the contributions of biotech is not "thin".

Academic Parma research is mostly billions of dollars, years of effort, a high chance of failure and very specific domain knowledge from the market. If it were so easy to get money this way more people would try

> Another example of how private interests are offloading the risk and costs to taxpayers while privatizing all the rewards.

Another example of government leaders choosing to not spend taxpayer money to pay for the expensive trials to get medicine approved for use.

Another example of voters voting for government leaders that campaign on privatizing the rewards in exchange for the promise of lower taxes.

Pharma is famous for being bad investment unfortunately.

Any taxpayer subsidized industry or subject is a massive magnet for this sort of "complex business that you can't dumb down or eli5 without making it look like a racket because it's fundamentally a racket with responsibility diffused to obfuscate it" stuff because taxpayer money has the most distant of principal agent problem and the government optimizes for "cog in the machine with blinders" employees and silo'd organizations who only care about their own ass so nobody ever takes a step back and says "hey the taxpayer is getting ripped off" until the ripoff is so obvious the taxpayers leann on the politicians.

Who in Industry is making meaningful progress in the field of maths? How about astronomy? Particle Physics? Psychology? Sociology?

I'd wager that I could name basically any field which does not have immediately obvious and proven ways to make money with through research.

This was getting obvious even before the 1970's when university attendance went wild.

>Academia is where B/C-list performers pretend they are A-list.

The ones having top credentials and little more have gotten more & more outnumbered by more capable thinkers every decade, it's been nothing but circling the wagons which ends up creating more of an insular environment for those who love eminence and an exclusive status more than anything else.

Industry doesn’t really care about research that doesn’t advance the portfolio or function essentially as a demonstration of something in their portfolio. Academia is where research actually happens.

I get it, but the post is literally "I don't like this guy, he has fucked up, I'm happy". Elsevier is mentioned mostly to explain from how high the guy has fallen. Not a single line about what is the issue with those papers, what does it say about the field, nor about the policies that are compromised by it. Nor it explains how Elsevier is affected from all of this and what will change.

It is a personal shitpost and I'm not sure what is interesting about it.