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Academic Publishing is a Racket

by Dr David Livermore
25 January 2024 9:00 AM

A couple of days ago Peter Civáň wrote an excellent account of why he’s given up refereeing for academic journals. I quite understand. The system is broken and referees are slave labour. Their only recompense is being able to write “Referee for Journal of Futile Endeavour“, on their C.V., hoping this improves employability. It doesn’t, I promise. I’ve sat on numerous appointment panels and only recall one interviewer taking the slightest interest in a candidate’s refereeing efforts. “This chap reviews for a lot of journals; but doesn’t publish much himself,” he observed. The candidate didn’t get the job.  

I’m sure that’s not Peter’s problem, but – forgive me, and I hope this isn’t taken badly – I do rather sense a shocked innocent recoiling from the brothel curtains. So, let an old roué and sometime Editor for three mid-ranking journals (Journal  of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, Journal of Medical Microbiology and International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents) take you on a tour. As for my further credentials, I’ve published over 500 papers and appear on Clarivate’s ‘Most cited‘.

The model I entered, late in the 1980s, was the one that Robert Maxwell built. Maxwell’s genius, with Government help, was to establish new journals or to agree, for a cut, to manage those owned by professional societies. His vehicle, Pergamon Press, recruited senior academics as editors and lesser ones as sub-editors. The subs batted the papers to and from referees and the senior put the journal together. Pergamon promoted itself as ‘the place to publish’, taking trade stands at conferences and ear-bending librarians. They didn’t need to work too hard. The Senior Editor pressed his staff and friends to publish in his new journal. Authors insisted that their university library subscribe. Even if it was still ‘society-owned’ the journal charged libraries far more than an individual subscription. Members could be blackballed for sharing their private copy.

Ker-ching!!!

Academics, who did most of the work, were recompensed by status and hospitality. Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy dined me at the Savoy when I finished my three-year stint; Journal of Medical Microbiology had glorious two-day meetings at a hotel near Tintern Abbey. I shudder to recall how many hours I spent to earn these treats.

Maxwell prospered until he over-reached himself elsewhere and walked off the back of the Lady Ghislaine. Subscriptions, subscription rates and journal numbers rose. Pharma companies learnt that a journal’s name added respectability to promotional copy and sponsored supplements on their new drugs, paying handsomely for mountains of reprints. Elsevier entered the fray,  bought out Pergamon and became far the largest scientific publisher. 

Even so, there were costs. Journals had to be typeset, printed and distributed.  At Journal of Medical Microbiology we bickered with Churchill Livingstone about how to balance the number of papers accepted with the costs of page allocation. If we increased the page count it cost the society and increased the postage bill.  Alternatively, we could reject more papers, or adopt a narrower typeface. As we did.

The new century changed everything, with online publishing, impact factors and open access.  

Online option became online only, turning silver mines into gold mines. No more paper, printing or distribution costs. No more balancing papers with page allocation. It also became far easier to start a new journal, as publishers recognised. No need to pulp unsold issues and bear the loss if no one subscribed. 

Just find some rising academic and flatter him, saying what an important person he was becoming and how it’d look good on his C.V. to  be Editor of the Journal of Rapid Diagnostics. “You recruit a few sub-editors, work with them to pull in papers and have them refereed; we’ll do everything from there,” they’d promise. Which meant a website and a bit of semi-automated formatting, subcontracted to India. A subscription to his new journal was included in a huge bundle of online subs, which the publisher sold to university libraries.   

Only if the journal began to succeed did the publisher take any real interest. After all, they’d taken the same punt on scores of other academics. It’s the venture capital model. Spread your bets all over the table. Anticipate a few big winners amid many losers. Then run winners and cut losers. With the wonderful refinement that, in academic publishing, unlike venture capital, the losers cost the publisher next to nothing. The sucker is the rising academic who wasn’t half as clever as he thought he was. He’s wasted evenings and nights on a doomed venture that would have paid him nothing had it succeeded.   

Impact factors are a bureaucrat’s dream. The higher the impact factor, the greater the journal’s status. Accordingly, impact factors are carefully  husbanded. Publishing likely-to-be-cited reviews is smart, as are papers from high-profile authors. Themed issues help because authors cross cite one another, inflating impact factors. Things to avoid are case reports and papers on unfashionable topics, which no one cites, however important they are.  Controversial papers ought to drive impact, but editors avoid them, fearing that, as with Wakefield, they’ll pull the journal into the mud. Many of us saw that during Covid, but it is not new. A friend struggled for ages to publish a novel hypothesis on the time-course of evolution. I don’t say he’s right or wrong. I don’t know.  But I do know that evolution has run swifter than conventional models explain. So novel ideas deserve interest. 

And so to Open Access. Around the turn of the century Maxwell’s model met a rebellion of sorts, with libraries finding that they could no longer afford every journal they were pressed to take. What’s more, funders began to say that “The public paid for this research; they ought to be able to see the results for free.” So, a new model – Open Access – developed. Here the academic, university or grant pays to publish the paper, which then becomes openly available. The going rate is £2,000-£4,000 per paper, depending on the journal.  

Set up with these good intentions, Open Access has infected not just the bordello but also the surrounding countryside. First, it means that anyone without publication funds struggles to be published, however interesting their observations. If you’re a jobbing physician with a peculiar case series, an independent scientist, or a grant-less writer of theories, then hard lines, unless you have deep pockets.

Second, it has enabled a proliferation of predatory ‘journals’ run by people, often in India and China, who make Major Maxwell look like Mother Theresa. They gull the unwary and desperate into publishing with them at considerable cost and to no benefit. Despite blocking dozens of these shysters, my spam folder remains awash with their invites. Some are genuinely nasty people who threatened an honest librarian, Jeffrey Beall, who published a list of the biggest offenders. All claim to have peer review, but will publish anything if payment, or a promise of payment, is proffered – as demonstrated by folks who’ve deliberately submitted garbled rubbish as an experiment.

Ker-ching!!! 

Third, Open Access has opened new income streams to the more ‘reputable’ publishers and their academic society partners. If my paper is accepted by their old, free-to-publish journal, I’m encouraged, as I sign the copyright transfer form, to make it Open Access by paying the appropriate fee. UEA has a bulk-payment agreement with Elsevier, I’m helpfully informed. All I need do is click one little box. I don’t seem to need anyone’s approval.  

Ker-ching!!!  

If, on the other hand, my paper is rejected by the old free-to-publish journal, I’m immediately encouraged to transfer it to an Open Access stablemate, or the publishers ‘All Topics’ science journal, with rejection hinted to be less likely.  

Ker-ching!!!

A mid-range Open-Access journal, publishing 15 papers per month at £3,000 apiece turns half a million pounds a year, with very low costs. Last year I was invited to become a Senior Editor for one such organ. To my surprise, they said they’d pay me $6,000 per annum. On top of which I’d be encouraged to develop themed issues, suggesting topics and finding authors. From these I’d receive a further cut, bringing my income to $12,000 p.a., with most of the work done by junior editors and AI tools. I confess I was tempted, but ultimately turned it down. I didn’t like the way the folks at the bottom got nothing – not even two days at Tintern. And, with profit depending on papers published, there was too much pressure to accept,  particularly for those themed issues. Nor do I trust AI to be objective, particularly when it meets a theory that runs against conventional wisdom.

But $6,000 or $12,000 or £500,000 is a drop in the bucket. Anyone wanting to see the real money should look at Elsevier. Back in the 80s it wasn’t in the FTSE 100, though Reed International, with which it later merged, was there. Now it’s London’s eighth biggest company by market capitalisation, and that’s not down to Reed.

Turnover is £8bn per year and profit £1.6bn, while the bright folks who do the legwork do not even get the minimum wage.

Dr. David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.

Tags: AcademiaBig PharmaPeer reviewScientific journal

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5 Comments
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Major Panic in the jabby jabbys
Major Panic in the jabby jabbys
3 years ago

so are SAGE models not The Science then?

16
0
RW
RW
3 years ago

According to a recent Facebook-ad PHE is now “preparing for a worst-case winter scenario”. This implies that they must be pretty certain that the “worst-case summer scenario” Neil “No lockdown will keep my cock down!” Ferguson referred to as “inevitable” last week won’t happen.

14
0
yohodi
yohodi
3 years ago

SAGE…Soothsayers Against Genuine Evidence.

30
0
William Gruff
William Gruff
3 years ago
Reply to  yohodi

Subjecting Analysis to Gross Exaggeration?

2
0
MikeAustin
MikeAustin
3 years ago

Can we just stop using these bogus so-called ‘cases’. They are meaningless figures and bear little relation to actual illness and death.

30
0
TheyLiveAndWeLockdown
TheyLiveAndWeLockdown
3 years ago

The models are always wrong, but these models are not even useful as they are the opposite of what happens and have negative predictive usefulness.

25
0
RW
RW
3 years ago
Reply to  TheyLiveAndWeLockdown

Attempts to predict the future are always wrong. Even (even more so) when they’re based on complicated and messy computer programs not even the people working on them understand.

That’s just the techie equivalent of trying to read it out of the layout of guts in animals.

14
0
miketa1957
miketa1957
3 years ago
Reply to  RW

Its not quite as bad as that, for example predicting the flight of a canon ball is pretty well spot-on.

But you are right. Software engineer here. Predicting something like this is more akin to predicting the weather or the financial markets. There is no way you can have any confidence in the predictions without being able to compare predictions with real outcomes, but in this case the real outcomes to compare against are few and far between (and clearly not ameneable to experiment).

There is no way anyone should attribute any significance to the models’ predictions.

Last edited 3 years ago by miketa1957
13
-1
RW
RW
3 years ago
Reply to  miketa1957

To quote one of my physics lecturers of old “The usual assumptions are implied. The austronaut has neither mass nor extent”. Or, even nicer, a former navy superior “This was a so-called five mile shot. The rocket flew for five miles and then fell into the water and we don’t know why”.

🙂

Can’t even remotely get this to work using multiple threads and won’t fork it instead because we’re either ideologically blinded VMS fans and/ or nobody ever even got this to compile outside of Ferguson’s Windows laptop is entirely damning.

The mere fact that this program is a chaotic system whose parts interact in unpredictable ways doesn’t make it a suitlable “model” of some other chaotic system.

6
0
TheyLiveAndWeLockdown
TheyLiveAndWeLockdown
3 years ago
Reply to  RW

I dont think Fergusson even knows how little he knows about programming when you get those sort of comments in the code.

It’s not a model it’s an expensive simulated dice.

13
0
JohnK
JohnK
3 years ago
Reply to  TheyLiveAndWeLockdown

If he had tried to be a bookmaker, he’d be bankrupt by now!

1
0
prod_squadron
prod_squadron
3 years ago

Cartoons like this Bob one are brilliant not least because humourous ridicule is an excellent device for swinging things our way. See also the photo circulating today of Macron so heavily festooned in Polynesian garlands that he looks like a floating tourist boat and it utterly punctures his image. This approach secretly appeals to the majority, regardless of stance. It has to be the right side of bitchy. Snide is too much.

17
0
Julian
Julian
3 years ago

We had a very strong idea they were wrong from the start, and it was proved shortly afterwards beyond a reasonable doubt.

11
0
NonCompliant
NonCompliant
3 years ago

To my memory not one single modelled prediction SAGE has made has come true.

In a private business these jokers would’ve been fired by June 2020.

Fake it til you make it?

24
0
RickH
RickH
3 years ago
Reply to  NonCompliant

I can’t think of anything coming out of SAGE that was worthwhile.

I do know that when I experimented with a prediction – against a ludicrous one pushed by SAGE – it came out over 100 times closer to the actuality. And that never pretended to be more than intelligent guess work, using a spreadsheet and a graph!

13
0
NeilofWatford
NeilofWatford
3 years ago

‘It begs the question as to why the Government and media have again so enthusiastically engaged with consistently disappointing predictions …’
To answer the question – within the Media because their paymasters (Gates, Soros, BigTech, Big Corps) tell them to. With UK Government, the Reset doctrine requires the destruction of family, small businesses and freedom to travel, and most importantly, our Judeo-Christian culture.

20
0
Dodgy Geezer
Dodgy Geezer
3 years ago
Reply to  NeilofWatford

Actually, I think it’s simpler. It’s that they had no idea what to do, and then an activist scientist poked his head around the door and said “Hang on a minute lads, I’ve got a great idea….” .

6
-1
tom171uk
tom171uk
3 years ago
Reply to  Dodgy Geezer

…you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off…

7
0
Moist Von Lipwig
Moist Von Lipwig
3 years ago

Can we say, definitively, that ZZ Top and Brian Blessed have beards?

2
0
annicx
annicx
3 years ago
Reply to  Moist Von Lipwig

Well, no- a certain Mr Beard doesn’t have a beard so that model is only 75% accurate…

2
0
Dodgy Geezer
Dodgy Geezer
3 years ago

ALL models are ‘wrong’, in the sense that they do not mirror real life completely, and so have some degree of inaccuracy.

The question is whether this is small enough to be ignored, or sufficiently large to make the modelling useless for the task you want it to do.

Climate models are a good example of the latter – they are not accurate because they are based on incorrect premises, and they are now failing badly. The usual trick, and I am sure that the Covid modellers will follow suit, is to add fudged estimations which are intended to bring the final answer a bit closer to reality, and then claim that things are near enough. The Climate people have now gone beyond that and are into ‘Look, there’s a squirrel!’ territory…..

5
-1
annicx
annicx
3 years ago
Reply to  Dodgy Geezer

The incorrect premises thing is a real problem when trying to talk to anyone- particularly the young- about climate change. They don’t start from 0, they start from something like, ‘CO2 is evil and poisonous – we’re producing CO2- we are evil. With that sort of thinking, you can’t get anywhere. Ask someone why they think CO2 is poisonous, why they think there is a ‘climate emergency’, or why climate change in itself is bad and they just throw insults at you- they simply will not think or question the premise. Sadly it’s the same with Covid; almost everyone I speak to about it thinks it’s the no.1 killer and to catch it is almost certain death. I have come to prefer the company of my dogs more and more over the past few years.

5
0
Philipleigh
Philipleigh
3 years ago

There is obviously a plan being followed here.It doesn’t matter whether the modelling is right or wrong or the data rigged. These articles and Daily Sceptic itself are doing the equivalent of studying the train track while a high speed express bears down on them.

5
0
annicx
annicx
3 years ago
Reply to  Philipleigh

I am aware of this and am doing all I can to ensure that myself and my family are not in its path. I have given up trying to convince others as they clearly do not wish to save themselves and would prefer to be part of the bleating majority. In Sheffield today they were shuffling about, masked and fearful, presumably vaccinated, without any idea what it is that they fear. I find it hard to believe that any rational person would behave like this- walking around in the open air with a piece of cloth across their face as if it will save them from something that clearly isn’t causing unmasked people to keel over and die. What hope is there for such people?

1
0
William Gruff
William Gruff
3 years ago
Reply to  annicx

Hopefully none.

1
0
William Gruff
William Gruff
3 years ago

That cartoon may well be the finest I have seen in my sixty five and not quite a half years on this planet. Brilliant, especially the placing of Johnson’s left arm.

2
0

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