The world is "sane" when the lucid are treated as beacons and the fools are treated as the unfortunate that must stay away from the engines. Insane when the fools are empowered and the bright have to flee for shelter.
> Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
You know what is even worse? A lot of what is paid come from public grants and not-for-profit grants. Reviewers are not paid. Editors are mostly other researchers. Authors are required to put the paper in ready-to-process.format. Thus public money funelled into journal pockets.
There is almost zero reasons why the governments or NIH-like institutions don't have their paper repository.
Downvoting this comment doesn’t make it less true.
Most everyone and everything has been captured by the ultimate cynicism of Capitalism: if I don’t do it someone else will, so might as well put the money in my pocket right??
I agree with @kingleopod — this system is designed to do what it is doing: keep knowledge private and keep profits high. Full stop.
It is a web of self reinforcing feedback structures that even if you know how they operate, it requires too much coordination to control. It is a sticky web, the more you move, the more it binds.
Is reading the astralcodexten post among your allowed thoughts? I don't downvote comments, but I think POSIWID is total bollocks. It may mean "some systems are somewhat corrupted by malign influences", in which case phrasing that as POSIWID is an outrageous exaggeration, or it may mean "there are no purposes", which is just untrue, or "your hoped-for purpose is naive", which is made less clear by phrasing it as POSIWID.
You can ask dang specifically or another moderator to prove if you are being trafficked down to irrelevancy by bots. I'm very certain you're wrong either way.
Robert Maxwell, Ghislane Maxwell's father, was a big player in turning the industry towards profit seeking (though I agree with the sibling comment that it's capitalism's fault ultimately).
I am still suspicious that this has something to do with the relationship between Springer-Verlag and the Max Plank Digital Library (MPDL) which supports open access.
In 2014 MPDL purchase 110k out-of-print and historically significant titles.
In 2015 Springer acquired open-access journals from Max Plank Society.
In 2022 There was an open-access book deal allowing Plank Institute members to more easily publish books.
Things were more not always so intertwined and in 2007 the Society canceled a licensing agreement with Springer due to subscription prices and usage restrictions.
> I am still suspicious that this has something to do with the relationship between Springer-Verlag and the Max Plank Digital Library (MPDL) which supports open access.
Why? Max Plank (the dead Physicist) has nothing to do with whatever the Institute is doing these days. Or the library. Or anything that was named after him.
The system is fine. The culture is broken. Scientific publishing isn't forced on the community by regulation or necessity. You can publish papers in infinite number of ways online. Unlike something like healthcare or housing, where there are no alternatives, there are plenty of alternatives when it comes to media publishing.
There are not if you are working in it. Some grants for example include provisions that you publish in tier so and so journals. If that is the case, there might be one of those that is open-access / independent, but more likely there is not.
What they are saying is that this is nearly a 100% self-own. The department and the academic structure sets the KPIs, like where to publish and how much. This is very much a monkey caught with their hand in a jar moment.
Sometimes, sure, but as someone new, you have no power to change it. Department head might, I cannot really say. In addition, I believe funding agencies have the bigger role, and they also have such requirements.
> […] the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
completely unsurprised, given the state of online papers publishing. if you don’t have an subscription or aren’t an organisation member, the fees are insane
What's most bothersome is there is work for them to do.
How about assigning a real copy editor with subject matter expertise? How about publishing open source libraries that automatically validate and output visualizations for their formats? How about hosting multimedia supplements?
It would not be difficult at all to earn the money they charge. There is so much room for creativity and innovation and adding value in scientific publishing.
That sounds an awful lot like "costs" which seriously compromises the "free profit" model.
Why pay money to make a better product when you can pay zero money for a worse product and no change in subscriptions? What are your customers gonna do, go get the paper somewhere else?
20 years ago, that argument would make sense. They had no competition and could do what they wanted. As an earlier comment stated: that is starting to change, and if they wait until open competitors are fully established, then it will be too late. Now is the time for them to realize that their parasitic business model is coming to an end and they need to change if they want to survive long term.
They can of course choose short term profits over long term viability, which wouldn't be all that surprising, but that changes the explanation from "more profits" to "short-sightedness/incompetence"
Do you think these papers have the economic position they have because they are better than some competitor? Or because they have copyright: they provide exclusive access to some important things ...
Well, maybe no competition when we're talking about institutional access rights on dry land. However, for everyone else, there's quite a bit of competition out there in the high seas.
That's only for individual usage, which, I assume, is small potatoes compared to institutional usage. No major research institution is going to use piracy as an institutional policy, and neither is it going to boycott Springer, since at least some researchers would put up a fuss—because you don't just need access to lots of papers, sometimes you need access to that specific paper.
> No major research institution is going to use piracy as an institutional policy
But they could adopt an official policy of all publications being CC licensed and uploaded to at least one of a few officially sanctioned preprint services. That would do a lot to undercut the publishers going forward.
At this point a lot becomes open access after a few years anyway. The issue is historic papers but all of those can be reliably found on the high seas.
The time was more than a decade ago. They've consistently chosen to do nothing more than make vague noises about improving.
In addition to the high seas we've got a plethora of preprint services. Between arxiv and bioarxiv alone you can access a decent chunk of the modern literature. What we need at this point is for institutions to require uploading all publications to one of a handful of officially sanctioned preprint services under a CC license and to strictly forbid publishing with any venue that objects to authors disseminating a CC licensed version of the work.
It would be nice if billion dollar big tech, in particular those that have R&D donate and form a not-for-profit together with universities that puts this to sleep once and for all. The small irony is that they're paying to submit their own research to another company to make it publicly available.
The students and researchers weren't the customers, but instead the large institutions they belong to. In a sense, they should be the same from this context, but the amount of consolidation that has occurred in the academic publishing space means that large institutions don't really have the same plausible deniability that their individual members do.
I was involved with arXiv when it first came to Cornell (blame me if you can't get an endorsement!) and we did plenty of analysis about the cost structure of academic publishing.
When we looked at well-run noncommercial journals, like The Physical Review, the cost was justified by exception handling in the peer review process. The average peer review case goes smoothly but if somebody has a complaint and there a lot of appeals and reviews the cost can skyrocket.
Our cost structure was $3-$5 a paper but we struggled to get even that. arXiv was unfunded at Los Alamos and I think Cornell never appreciated the value that it created for the world, had we found a way to capture a few percent of the value we created we would have been "sustainable" but I think that is incompatible with running it on a shoestring the way we did.
I am not enthusiastic about arXiv being independent, I don't have any problem with the high salary they want to pay the director, you are going to pay that for a good non-profit manager in NYC but you could just as easily pay that much for a bad non-profit manager.
I have nightmares though that had arXiv been independent in the 2000s somebody I know might have wound up at Epstein's island not because I think he's evil or perverse but rather because he's naive [1]. arXiv is a gem that would be attractive to somebody like Epstein and would be very possible for somebody like that to have funded it 100% back then. As it is it will be sucked into a somewhat corrupt NGO-industrial complex and end up spending $30-$50 a paper just on fundraising. It's sad.
[1] so many people who got in his circle strike me like children who were playing in the street and got hit by a car, and you'd hope people in those leadership positions should have better judgement
Not much to worry about then: Ginsparg* doesn't seem like he would have triggered Ghislaine's matcher, plus these guys don't like to step into the same river twice (out of superstition, mainly)
(delete this conspiracism if PP makes highlights?)
As it is Garry still isn't distancing himself [further] from PLTR (I think), and I wonder if _you'd_ apply to Dialog for a snark?
*Ginsparg comes off as having some of the same curmudgeonly bits of Habermas so they might even fear him long after it doesn't matter anymore
Some people aren't cut out for celebrity. We were sitting around Ginsparg's office talking about how cringe it was that Steve Wolfman had nominated him for a McArthur Genius award.
It was a running gag that Ginsparg would get a speaking invitation and he'd nominate me to go in his stead because I had a reputation of being somebody who could go anywhere and not get in trouble. The library would never pay for my travel though because I didn't have an MLS degree.
I might go to somewhere like Dialog if I got invited and didn't have to pay for a ticket and especially if they paid for my hotel and accommodations, but most of the people who show up at that kind of thing have opinions that are strongly held but rather ordinary and it just as much fun to go to a lower-tier music festival and pass a joint around the firepit. Thiel being involved breaks the deal, like I am still kicking myself for letting myself get tricked into buying a Girard book by one of his minions.
You (or PaulG) could get invited* & "illegible Paul" go with intent to stir fully funded but transferable trouble. It could be harder then-- or easier now-- than you think
>I met some real eccentrics and weirdos. I appreciated that about it.
I think you'd do better than Ezra bc one of you is primed to participate as a Martian (eg). tag teaming for the reportage could also work
Later in the comments makes me think you might have already anticipated this:
>... you were put in a low-tier breakout room
(Presumably wo firepits)
*either the emails went direct to the spam bin or minions weren't competent enough to have PaulG on the radar (grade D perhaps?)
I published in Nature Physics and the copy-editing process was quite embarrassing, to the point where we had to repeatedly nag them to stop them from making the manuscript presentation worse.
To be clear, I’m not talking about subjective style issues, I mean conforming to their own spec and avoiding careless bugs.
All remaining work fell on the backs of the physics referees. I’m not sure what value Springer provided from an editorial standpoint. It was disappointing to say the least after all that hard work.
Right? A lot of journals make a big deal about submitting your manuscript in the proper format (sometimes even LaTeX if you're lucky) and then you get the galley proofs back and half the equations and citations now have typos in them.
The entire publishing process often feels like a chain of "you had ONE job"-type errors from the journals (presumably because they're wildly underpaying and overworking the people whose one job these things should have been).
On top of that, the whole thing is done in fits and starts. You send in the final revision, it vanishes into the void for some unspecified time, and then they offer[*] you 48 hours--sometimes not even lined up with two working days!--to figure out what they "fixed" and repair it yourself.
[*] Nothing usually happens if you push back on this fake deadline, though I suppose your paper might end up in a different issue of a printed journal. It's just annoyingly rushed--give me a week!
> it could be reviewers and others intentionally trying to sabotage other people's work
Anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge about the topic being discussed would know that everything I described happens after reviewers and editors approve the manuscript. At this stage, they have all long since ended their involvement in the process.
As with most conspiracy theories, this "theory" reveals much about you, but fails to say anything at all about the topic at hand. [1]
I'm not familiar here, but if both the publishers and readers are unhappy, why do these services still exist? Is it the 'prestige' of being published with some of these guys? Or do you need to be published for xyz reasons?
Seems like, in 2026, we can have direct publishing without the need of these services? Is it the infra, like query tools and such, that prevent a migration away?
edit: I'm not going to reply to every comment, but thank you all, helps paint the picture a bit better for me!
A lot of academic reputation, as well as performance evaluation (for example toward tenure) is based on being published in "prestigious" journals. If you could fix that problem, I suspect the parasitic journals would evaporate overnight.
Publishing is how scientists get their street cred. Thus, the scientists themselves want to publish in big name journals to up their rep - hitting something like Nature is major coup. And then they can convert their standing in the big science gang to things like research grants, commercial projects, academic tenures, etc.
If you don't care about how science street cred works, nothing stops you from just throwing your papers up on arxiv. But then you get no publishing rep. And no visibility either. A big name journal in a given field gets eyes on your paper by default - but in the pits of arxiv, if you don't put your work out there yourself in the circles, no one will see it.
Arxiv is not p2p, is a preview of what will be published hopefully.
Then you had promising projects like Plos, but they sold themselves. They turned into a joke: open access and good IF, but high fees for the author, thus becoming a quick way to get a sub-par paper published "for the points" if your lab can pay the fee. Pay to win, using a gaming term. If you know you have a good paper, you publish on any other (closed) journal with similar IF but cheaper.
It's "not p2p", it's just used like p2p. A lot of papers on arxiv nowadays are "preprints" that will only ever get "printed" on someone's office laser.
The authors who put them up there didn't even plan on publishing in a journal. They just throw their work out there - no peer review, no nothing. Post the link on Twitter and maybe someone in the field will see it and find it useful.
This is especially true in fast-moving and highly applied fields like ML - the fields that are less "big science gang" and more "high intensity corporate R&D warzone".
Donations hasn’t been a successful path for the wider internet, no reason to expect any difference here. Ads embedded in the images, or perhaps listen to a message from our sponsor while we prepare your PDF?
Donations likely won't work, but a combination of realistic publishing fees that do not enrich a publishing house plus government sponsorship (which would sort of happen implicitly when those fees are paid from grant money) likely would.
Even just the basic admin costs associated with paper review - handling that for a medium sized journal is at least one full time job - are going to add up to more than I think donations will ever generate for such a task.
My mental model is a non-print journal, so there are very few "publishing" costs, but the overall administration of things, from the tech side to the typical scientific paper processing workflow, is not a long term task for volunteers (I suspect).
Works pretty well for Wikimedia which has gotten incredibly rich while providing an essential service for the internet public. (Off the back of volunteers, of course.)
It's also misses the point. People don't want "glam" papers for ego boosts and bragging rights. They want them to keep the current jobs and perhaps get better ones.
Any replacement system needs to somehow serve as a token for people who can't/won't actually read your papers.
(read the other replies first, I'm going to assume you understand that first!)
There are a lot of researchers writing papers. In many fields it isn't possible to read them all, so you need someone to make a selection of what is useful. Get into Nature any "everyone" will read your paper because it is important. However if you fail that you only get into a small niche publication - the only people who will read your paper are people who search it out - likely because they are in that tiny niche (and have personally met you to discuss this niche at a conference). There are even lower grades up publications which nobody reads, but in theory someone could find it in a search.
What physics papers should a chemist read? If you are a physicist you should be reading more papers, but there are still too many to read them all so you need a selection, but that selection should bias to others working on similar problems to you. The same applies for every other field: you can't know everything so you need someone to apply a selection to tell you what is important for you to know.
Because the journal is a stamp of approval, and scientists are measured almost exclusively through their publication record. Getting a paper accepted by Nature can make a career.
It's easy for anyone to publish papers online, but it's very difficult for a journal to build credibility and reputation. If you publish in some random journal no one has ever heard of, everyone will assume your paper couldn't get through peer review at a "real" journal.
To be fair, the Springer empty PDF paper for $39.95, has zero errors, and zero plagiarism, so it is above the bar of their other paywalled proceedings papers.
That page says that eight years after the supposed lawsuit "Batt admitted that the alleged legal dispute had been a publicity stunt and that he had actually only made a donation of £1,000 to the John Cage Foundation."[1] I guess that he plagiarized it is sure even if the copyright claim was not litigated.
How much longer are scientists going to continue respecting and embracing the useless parasites that are journal publishers, with their right-out-in-the-open, obvious, intentional grifting. You don't need these jackasses.
What you rely on them for technically, the dissemination of papers, could be done with an $80/mo Kubernetes cluster and like three part-time volunteers.
Now in terms of what they provide for the peer-reviewing process... It's not like they pay reviewers. And most of that money is definitely not going to editors. It appears journal brands are only useful as signals of prestige, but with their ethics increasingly circling the drain, I'm not even sure that trust is well-placed.
Max Planck published the same paper in multiple journals in the 1940s, which was common practice at the time. He also published a second unrelated paper that happened to have the same title as the paper it was a response to. In 2011 both papers were retracted from their journals' archives, most likely because a bot incorrectly flagged them for plagiarism.
1. Springer Nature are happily selling an empty PDF for $39.95.
2. Springer Nature responded that they’re not going to tell you why they retracted it, because retraction details are normally only shared with the author (who in this case died almost 80 years ago).
Worse than anecdotal - even if there is real measured data: aerodynamics of windshields will have changed and have an effect and so we still cannot draw conclusions from this. Only if the experiment is more controlled (that is the same car driving on the same roads at the same speeds at the same time) could we draw a conclusion.
Same roads doesn't even control. If you lived in a town that e.g. changed the very local environment (say drained one specific swamp), the nearby roads my have less bugs for a very uninteresting reason
We can't draw conclusions from that study because it's been retracted on the basis that data has been faked.
On the other hand there are other similar studies that reach similar conclusions, and specifically try to control for aerodynamics e.g. [1] which says
> The weak positive relationship between vehicle registration year and splat rate suggests that newer vehicles are more efficient at sampling insects than older vehicles.
i.e. they saw more insects on newer cars compared to older ones in the same time period.
In general ecology studies aren't like lab physics, you can't control every possible confounding variable; the systems are too complicated and studies ex-situ have their own limitations. But refusing to engage with the data we do have because it's not perfect isn't going to help you make better decisions, and doesn't represent some moral high ground.
I didn't mean we shouldn't engage with data at all. However there are so many possible confounding factors in this type of measurement that we should "take it with a lot of salt."
Good, now if we could get a few hundred more, every year, with registered reports, we might be able to conclude something.
How does one even peer review a single datum, published as a paper? I guess in this case, there was actually something to catch, and it still almost made it through.
I drive a 30 year old Range Rover and I can confirm that I have just about as many bug splats now as I did driving my equally un-aerodynamic Volvo 20 years ago.
Although the funniest one was driving through a cloud of moths on the A9 one summer about 30 years ago in my little Nissan, which hoovered up enough of them to choke the air filter and die on the next (fairly long and steep) hill. They were hell to get off the windscreen too.
> detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.
Good luck sharing that information with Max Planck. It's amazing how robotically humans can act sometimes. I suppose this could be an AI or automated response, but it's just as likely it's someone following the letter of the law without using any critical thought.
lol, getting paid for nothing. Highest levels of capitalism
See (and listen to): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0
The system is broken
For profit journals need to die.
There is almost zero reasons why the governments or NIH-like institutions don't have their paper repository.
it's designed that way.
Most everyone and everything has been captured by the ultimate cynicism of Capitalism: if I don’t do it someone else will, so might as well put the money in my pocket right??
I agree with @kingleopod — this system is designed to do what it is doing: keep knowledge private and keep profits high. Full stop.
What a joy to live in such a world!
For those that need it: */S*
If my use of Tor makes me look suspicious in the eyes of the police is that the purpose of Tor?
In 2014 MPDL purchase 110k out-of-print and historically significant titles. In 2015 Springer acquired open-access journals from Max Plank Society. In 2022 There was an open-access book deal allowing Plank Institute members to more easily publish books.
Things were more not always so intertwined and in 2007 the Society canceled a licensing agreement with Springer due to subscription prices and usage restrictions.
He should have known better. </sarc>
Why? Max Plank (the dead Physicist) has nothing to do with whatever the Institute is doing these days. Or the library. Or anything that was named after him.
Plank is very famous. If this happens to you, but 50 years after you die: odds are you are not famous and nobody will notice.
completely unsurprised, given the state of online papers publishing. if you don’t have an subscription or aren’t an organisation member, the fees are insane
Things are slowly changing but I can't wait for this parasitic business model to collapse for good.
How about assigning a real copy editor with subject matter expertise? How about publishing open source libraries that automatically validate and output visualizations for their formats? How about hosting multimedia supplements?
It would not be difficult at all to earn the money they charge. There is so much room for creativity and innovation and adding value in scientific publishing.
Why pay money to make a better product when you can pay zero money for a worse product and no change in subscriptions? What are your customers gonna do, go get the paper somewhere else?
They can of course choose short term profits over long term viability, which wouldn't be all that surprising, but that changes the explanation from "more profits" to "short-sightedness/incompetence"
But they could adopt an official policy of all publications being CC licensed and uploaded to at least one of a few officially sanctioned preprint services. That would do a lot to undercut the publishers going forward.
At this point a lot becomes open access after a few years anyway. The issue is historic papers but all of those can be reliably found on the high seas.
In addition to the high seas we've got a plethora of preprint services. Between arxiv and bioarxiv alone you can access a decent chunk of the modern literature. What we need at this point is for institutions to require uploading all publications to one of a handful of officially sanctioned preprint services under a CC license and to strictly forbid publishing with any venue that objects to authors disseminating a CC licensed version of the work.
https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/
When we looked at well-run noncommercial journals, like The Physical Review, the cost was justified by exception handling in the peer review process. The average peer review case goes smoothly but if somebody has a complaint and there a lot of appeals and reviews the cost can skyrocket.
Our cost structure was $3-$5 a paper but we struggled to get even that. arXiv was unfunded at Los Alamos and I think Cornell never appreciated the value that it created for the world, had we found a way to capture a few percent of the value we created we would have been "sustainable" but I think that is incompatible with running it on a shoestring the way we did.
I am not enthusiastic about arXiv being independent, I don't have any problem with the high salary they want to pay the director, you are going to pay that for a good non-profit manager in NYC but you could just as easily pay that much for a bad non-profit manager.
I have nightmares though that had arXiv been independent in the 2000s somebody I know might have wound up at Epstein's island not because I think he's evil or perverse but rather because he's naive [1]. arXiv is a gem that would be attractive to somebody like Epstein and would be very possible for somebody like that to have funded it 100% back then. As it is it will be sucked into a somewhat corrupt NGO-industrial complex and end up spending $30-$50 a paper just on fundraising. It's sad.
[1] so many people who got in his circle strike me like children who were playing in the street and got hit by a car, and you'd hope people in those leadership positions should have better judgement
(delete this conspiracism if PP makes highlights?)
As it is Garry still isn't distancing himself [further] from PLTR (I think), and I wonder if _you'd_ apply to Dialog for a snark?
*Ginsparg comes off as having some of the same curmudgeonly bits of Habermas so they might even fear him long after it doesn't matter anymore
It was a running gag that Ginsparg would get a speaking invitation and he'd nominate me to go in his stead because I had a reputation of being somebody who could go anywhere and not get in trouble. The library would never pay for my travel though because I didn't have an MLS degree.
I might go to somewhere like Dialog if I got invited and didn't have to pay for a ticket and especially if they paid for my hotel and accommodations, but most of the people who show up at that kind of thing have opinions that are strongly held but rather ordinary and it just as much fun to go to a lower-tier music festival and pass a joint around the firepit. Thiel being involved breaks the deal, like I am still kicking myself for letting myself get tricked into buying a Girard book by one of his minions.
https://xcancel.com/ezraklein/status/2068479476309151771
You (or PaulG) could get invited* & "illegible Paul" go with intent to stir fully funded but transferable trouble. It could be harder then-- or easier now-- than you think
>I met some real eccentrics and weirdos. I appreciated that about it.
I think you'd do better than Ezra bc one of you is primed to participate as a Martian (eg). tag teaming for the reportage could also work
Later in the comments makes me think you might have already anticipated this:
>... you were put in a low-tier breakout room
(Presumably wo firepits)
*either the emails went direct to the spam bin or minions weren't competent enough to have PaulG on the radar (grade D perhaps?)
To be clear, I’m not talking about subjective style issues, I mean conforming to their own spec and avoiding careless bugs.
All remaining work fell on the backs of the physics referees. I’m not sure what value Springer provided from an editorial standpoint. It was disappointing to say the least after all that hard work.
The entire publishing process often feels like a chain of "you had ONE job"-type errors from the journals (presumably because they're wildly underpaying and overworking the people whose one job these things should have been).
[*] Nothing usually happens if you push back on this fake deadline, though I suppose your paper might end up in a different issue of a printed journal. It's just annoyingly rushed--give me a week!
Anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge about the topic being discussed would know that everything I described happens after reviewers and editors approve the manuscript. At this stage, they have all long since ended their involvement in the process.
As with most conspiracy theories, this "theory" reveals much about you, but fails to say anything at all about the topic at hand. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzDztyS09CU
Seems like, in 2026, we can have direct publishing without the need of these services? Is it the infra, like query tools and such, that prevent a migration away?
edit: I'm not going to reply to every comment, but thank you all, helps paint the picture a bit better for me!
If you don't care about how science street cred works, nothing stops you from just throwing your papers up on arxiv. But then you get no publishing rep. And no visibility either. A big name journal in a given field gets eyes on your paper by default - but in the pits of arxiv, if you don't put your work out there yourself in the circles, no one will see it.
Then you had promising projects like Plos, but they sold themselves. They turned into a joke: open access and good IF, but high fees for the author, thus becoming a quick way to get a sub-par paper published "for the points" if your lab can pay the fee. Pay to win, using a gaming term. If you know you have a good paper, you publish on any other (closed) journal with similar IF but cheaper.
The authors who put them up there didn't even plan on publishing in a journal. They just throw their work out there - no peer review, no nothing. Post the link on Twitter and maybe someone in the field will see it and find it useful.
This is especially true in fast-moving and highly applied fields like ML - the fields that are less "big science gang" and more "high intensity corporate R&D warzone".
PLOS One does publish pretty much anything, but that was always meant to be the point: "here's some data, make of it what you will. "
Hosting pdfs + paying out reviewers could be covered by donations.
My mental model is a non-print journal, so there are very few "publishing" costs, but the overall administration of things, from the tech side to the typical scientific paper processing workflow, is not a long term task for volunteers (I suspect).
Reviewers are not usually paid.
Any replacement system needs to somehow serve as a token for people who can't/won't actually read your papers.
There are a lot of researchers writing papers. In many fields it isn't possible to read them all, so you need someone to make a selection of what is useful. Get into Nature any "everyone" will read your paper because it is important. However if you fail that you only get into a small niche publication - the only people who will read your paper are people who search it out - likely because they are in that tiny niche (and have personally met you to discuss this niche at a conference). There are even lower grades up publications which nobody reads, but in theory someone could find it in a search.
What physics papers should a chemist read? If you are a physicist you should be reading more papers, but there are still too many to read them all so you need a selection, but that selection should bias to others working on similar problems to you. The same applies for every other field: you can't know everything so you need someone to apply a selection to tell you what is important for you to know.
It's easy for anyone to publish papers online, but it's very difficult for a journal to build credibility and reputation. If you publish in some random journal no one has ever heard of, everyone will assume your paper couldn't get through peer review at a "real" journal.
That's why the established journals exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#Plagiari...
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-11964995
How much longer are scientists going to continue respecting and embracing the useless parasites that are journal publishers, with their right-out-in-the-open, obvious, intentional grifting. You don't need these jackasses.
What you rely on them for technically, the dissemination of papers, could be done with an $80/mo Kubernetes cluster and like three part-time volunteers.
Now in terms of what they provide for the peer-reviewing process... It's not like they pay reviewers. And most of that money is definitely not going to editors. It appears journal brands are only useful as signals of prestige, but with their ethics increasingly circling the drain, I'm not even sure that trust is well-placed.
I wish I could say such behavior was shocking. Everything Springer touches turns to shit.
Time for a séance.
Saved you a click.
1. Springer Nature are happily selling an empty PDF for $39.95.
2. Springer Nature responded that they’re not going to tell you why they retracted it, because retraction details are normally only shared with the author (who in this case died almost 80 years ago).
One of the recent posts:
"A study claiming a tenfold decrease in bugs splattered on evolutionary biologist Anders Møller’s windshield over two decades has been retracted."
While the retraction brings into question the anecdotal evidence for the windscreen phenomenon ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon ), there are other studies with other sampling approaches that support the global insect population collapse ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations ).
On the other hand there are other similar studies that reach similar conclusions, and specifically try to control for aerodynamics e.g. [1] which says
> The weak positive relationship between vehicle registration year and splat rate suggests that newer vehicles are more efficient at sampling insects than older vehicles.
i.e. they saw more insects on newer cars compared to older ones in the same time period.
In general ecology studies aren't like lab physics, you can't control every possible confounding variable; the systems are too complicated and studies ex-situ have their own limitations. But refusing to engage with the data we do have because it's not perfect isn't going to help you make better decisions, and doesn't represent some moral high ground.
[1] https://cdn.buglife.org.uk/2022/05/Bugs-Matter-2021-National...
How does one even peer review a single datum, published as a paper? I guess in this case, there was actually something to catch, and it still almost made it through.
Although the funniest one was driving through a cloud of moths on the A9 one summer about 30 years ago in my little Nissan, which hoovered up enough of them to choke the air filter and die on the next (fairly long and steep) hill. They were hell to get off the windscreen too.
So a tenfold decrease is 1 / 11x ?
Good luck sharing that information with Max Planck. It's amazing how robotically humans can act sometimes. I suppose this could be an AI or automated response, but it's just as likely it's someone following the letter of the law without using any critical thought.