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Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel
- roflmaostc 8mo agoIt doesn't surprise me it happens within the Elsevier ecosystem. Elsevier has a long tradition of scientific misconduct and scientifically immoral behavior (see Wikipedia). The operating margin of Elsevier is around 40% which is huge! At the end mostly paid by tax-payer money. Personally, I never review or publish with Elsevier.
- jcattle 8mo agoOne of the reasons why in Germany universities were able to collectively negotiate better open publishing deals with Wiley and Springer, but Elsevier just flat out refused to agree to any better terms for three years. (See Project DEAL: https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier)
- pseudohadamard 8mo agoHappened in other countries as well, see e.g. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elsevier-boycott-looms-down-under https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elsevier-boycott-l...
- seanhunter 8mo agoYou are in very very good company. The British mathematician Timothy Gowers famously boycotts Elsevier also https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-...
- pseudohadamard 8mo agoHuge numbers of academics have signed up to the Elsevier boycott, see http://thecostofknowledge.com/ http://thecostofknowledge.com/
- apwheele 8mo agoI am skeptical it is a problem isolated to Elsevier. Given the LLM craze now prioritizes open access, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/08/28/deep-research-and-open-access/ https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/08/28/deep-research-and-open..., it would not surprise me people start gaming MDPI in the same way for example.
- xhkkffbf 8mo agoExactly. 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.
- azan_ 8mo agoMDPI 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).
- Wobbles42 8mo agoI wonder if the term "published" as a binary distinction applied to a piece of writing is a term and concept that is reaching the end of its useful life. "Peer reviewed" as a binary concept might be as well, given that incentives have aligned to greatly reduce its filtering power. They might both be examples of metrics that became useless as a result of incentives getting attached to them.
- fc417fc802 8mo agoBoth metrics are supposedly binary but in reality have always depended heavily on surrounding context. Archival journals have existed all along. Publication is useful as an immutable entry in the public record made via a third party. Blog posts have a tendency to disappear over time.
- EA-3167 8mo ago
- roysting 8mo agoI’m not sure why I’ve never really concerned myself with Elsevier, but that makes a lot of sense, knowing a rather vile and slimy con artist snake that works/ed for them.
- johnbarron 8mo ago[dead]
- gostsamo 8mo agoAlmost hoped for an analysis about what, how, and why happened, but it turns out that Elsevier has little to do with the story and the author had a Twitter spat with someone years ago and is now celebrating the fact that the other side has been shown to do what? for which some of their papers had been retracted. Yes, I'm as confused.
- uniqueuid 8mo agoPublishers have the final say in appointing editors in chief (EIC) and editors. So they bear the ultimate responsibility for holding editors accountable. A lot of people are to blame here, but Elsevier is definitely among them.
- gostsamo 8mo agoI 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.
- 7777777phil 8mo agoElsevier had no reason to stop this. Inflated citations mean higher impact factors, and higher impact factors justify higher subscription prices. Lucey published 56 papers in one year, the publisher got better metrics to sell. Hard to call that a rogue actor..
- science_casual 8mo agoRight — and once someone is pumping out 56 papers/year, the journal becomes dependent on their output. Who in the chain is going to flag a problem that looks like productivity from every direction?
- jcattle 8mo ago> Elsevier had no reason to stop this If Elsevier had no reason to stop this, why did they stop this?
- ceejayoz 8mo agoThey had no reason to stop this until it became publicly embarrassing for them.
- shevy-java 8mo agoWe need open publishing. This is why Elsevier etc... use an outdated business model. That Elsevier now also runs more into fake-articles and fake-research, all fueled by the money-addiction, just adds to the problem (and also invalidates Elsevier's model, by the way - why do we now have to deal with fake science that is costly? That is Elsevier's business model). I fail to see why taxpayers money has to go into private companies for research already financed by the taxpayers. We are paying twice here, Elsevier.
- mentalgear 8mo agoSpot on, and beyond the 'double-dipping' business model of "academic publishers" like Elsevier and Springer, there’s a massive systemic issue: taxpayers fund >90% of foundational research, only for private pharma/bio/tech firms to add a thin layer of additional research (or design) on top and then lock it behind patents for decades. Another example of how private interests are offloading the risk and costs to taxpayers while privatizing all the rewards.
- lotsofpulp 8mo ago> 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.
- cucumber3732842 8mo agoAny 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.
- BrenBarn 8mo agoElsevier is certainly evil, but I would say the root issue is the practices of the institutions where these "authors" are employed. This kind of thing is academic misconduct and should result in them losing their jobs.
- permo-w 8mo agoEvil Seer would be a good anagram if only Elsevier did any of the actual [re]viewing themselves
- grumbelbart2 8mo agoThis goes deeper than the institutions, actually. The KPI for many (non-industrial) researchers is the number of publications and citations. That's what careers and funding depends on. Goodhart's law states "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", and that's what we see here. There is a strong incentive to publish more instead of better. Ideas are spread into multiple papers, people push to be listed as authors, citations are fought for, and some become dishonest and start with citation cartels, "hidden" citations in papers (printed small in white-on-white, meaning it's indexed by citation crawlers but not visible to reviewers) and so forth. This also destroys the peer review system upon which many venues depend. Peer reviews were never meant to catch cheaters. The huge number of low-to-medium quality papers in some fields (ML, CV) overworks reviewers, leading to things like CVPR forcing authors to be reviewers or face desk rejection. AI papers, AI reviews of dubious quality slice in even more. Ultimately the only true fix for this is to remove the incentives. Funding and careers should no longer depend on the sheer number of papers and citations. The issue is that we have not really found anything better yet.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- laylower 8mo agoI've heard of Chris but not too well. This guy does not f*c$ around, don't get on his bad side. The state of research is dire at the moment. The whole ecosystem is cooked. Reproducibility is non-existent. This obvious cartel is a symptom and there should be exemplary punishment. Publishers are commercially incentivized to simply maximize profit and engagement. The main actors are academics and most of them try to uphold the high standards and ethics. Yes there is free-riding, backstabbing and a lot of politics but there is also reputation and honesty. A few academics give academia a bad name, at the worst possible time and when society needs honest, reliable, reproducible and targetted research the most.
- Freak_NL 8mo agoI have no doubt that there are honest academics who publish research which actually contributes to humanity's corpus of knowledge. Whether that is some new insight into the past, observations on nature and man's interaction with it, clever chemical advances, or medical innovations which benefit mankind. People who publish works which will be looked upon as seminal and foundational in a decade or two, but also works which just focus on some particular detail and which will be of use to many researchers in the future. But I can't shake the impression that a lot, perhaps the vast majority, of science consists of academics (postdocs and untenured researchers in particular I suppose) stuck in the publish-or-perish cycle. Pushing pointless papers where some trivial hypothesis is tested and which no one will ever use or read — except perhaps to cite for one reason or another, but rarely because it makes academic sense. Now with added slop, because why wouldn't you if the work itself is already as good as pointless? The system, as you say, is fucked.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 8mo agoMost 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.
- throwpoaster 8mo ago> On Christmas Eve, 9 “peer-reviewed” economics papers were quietly retracted by Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher. It is becoming clearer and clearer that peer review is a systematized band wagon fallacy. It relies on the belief that one’s peers in a competitive field, presented with new ideas and evidence, will simply accept it. And yet, “science progresses one funeral at a time” is an old joke. “Peer review” is an indication an idea is safe for granting agency bureaucrats to fund, not an indication of its truth, validity, or utility.
- estearum 8mo agoPeer review has never been an indication of truth, validity, or utility. It's only ever been an opportunity for other scientists (ideally more competitive than they are today) to see if they can spot some methodological problem.
- samsartor 8mo agoI feel like my papers are better for having gone through peer review, and I'm a better researcher for having had a few rejections. Of course the reviewers can't hover around in your lab watching everything you do. But even if reviewers can't check the validity of the evidence in your paper, they do a pretty good job ensuring that the claims you make are supported by the evidence you present. That's a valuable if imperfect guardrail! What would be the alternative?
- azan_ 8mo agoThat's completely upside down take. The problem with peer review is not that it does not allow good papers to get published (that rarely happens, almost all good papers get published!), but that shitty papers get published!
- the_real_cher 8mo agoThis is the academic industrial complex. Much like the military industrial complex and the healthcare industrial complex they exist to fleece people via cartel.
- __s 8mo agofraud here is real, but > a good journal—it has an 18% acceptance rate is this supposed to be read as sarcasm? amusing when the quality of a journal is measured by denying papers. kind of reminds me of one of the last People I (Mostly) Admire interviews, with Michael Crow of Arizona State https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-new-kind-of-university https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-new-kind-of-university where he critiques elite universities as measuring their value on how many students they reject, which ultimately makes them infeasible as institutions to distribute knowledge as much as possible
- cs702 8mo agoThe folks at Elsevier turned a blind eye for as long as they could because it was profitable. It's such a common story that no one even feigns to be surprised. Being an extractive business seeking to maintain a chokehold on scientists and their institutions is the least of Elsevier's problems. More problematic for Elsevier is that the current system of "peer review" may turn out be a failed experiment in the history of science: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
- ragebol 8mo agoWhat could be an improvement to or over the peer review system?
- cs702 8mo agoFor a thoughtful answer to your question, see: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-dance-of-the-naked-emperors https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-dance-of-the-nake...
- wil421 8mo ago> A tenured professor hinted she might try to get me fired. A person with a PhD accused me of “cynical metacognitive polywaffle,” which a good name for a postmodern noise band. I got some weird and vaguely threatening emails, including one that had a screenshot of my personal website with my improv experience highlighted, proof that I am literally a clown. Which is, I guess, true. (People said nice things too.)
- wolfi1 8mo agoreminds me of of the El Naschie controversy: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/11/25/elsevier-math-editor-controversy/ https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/11/25/elsevier-math...
- snowhale 8mo ago[dead]
- andreyf 8mo agoaaronsw would be proud
- tajikgpt 8mo ago[flagged]
- theSBUguys 8mo ago[dead]
- pjdesno 8mo agohttps://retractionwatch.com/2026/01/08/finance-professor-brian-lucey-ireland-elsevier-journals-retractions/ https://retractionwatch.com/2026/01/08/finance-professor-bri... I've boycotted reviewing for Elsevier for years, but it's easy for me - I'm in CS, where ACM, USENIX and IEEE offer higher-status publication venues and Elsevier journals are decidedly second-tier.
- shenberg 8mo agoMid-way I realized this was AI writing (took me a while), then I read a quote in the text about a comment that "The tragedy isn’t that they cheated; it’s that the system was designed to let them thrive for a decade before anyone bothered to look at the data." I didn't find this comment in EJMR, or anywhere on the internet except the OP post, for that matter.
- fdefitte 8mo ago[dead]
- HPsquared 8mo agoIt's as if they have captured the most significant nodes on the map. Or were these prestige journals built up under the same system?
- bitwize 8mo agoRemember, folks, you can't spell "Elsevier" without E, V, I, and L.
- kevin_thibedeau 8mo agoSomeone should write a paper on the economics of running a credential inflation ring.
- amai 8mo ago"review of this submission was overseen, and the final decision was made, by the Editor Brian Lucey, despite his role as a co-author of the manuscript." Can it be more obvious?