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> […] the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is neverthele

• stncls 3mo ago
  Oh even if your org has a subscription, the fees are insane. You just don't see them. Things are slowly changing but I can't wait for this parasitic business model to collapse for good.
  • jrumbut 3mo ago
    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.
    • vitally3643 3mo ago
      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?
      • MostlyStable 3mo ago
        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"
        • spwa4 3mo ago
          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 ...
        • HPsquared 3mo ago
          They have no competition on any given paper that they hold the rights to.
          • 12_throw_away 3mo ago
            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.
            • JadeNB 3mo ago
              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.
              • fc417fc802 3mo ago
                > 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.
        • thayne 3mo ago
          Oh they are very aware of the threat. But their weapon of choice is the legal system and regulatory capture, not improving their product.
      • GTP 3mo ago
        Yes, many students and researchers resort to piracy.
        • monocasa 3mo ago
          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.
        • DrBazza 3mo ago
          Back in the 90s, my post-doc piracy was photocopying and distribution at every conference, and large mail drops.
      • leephillips 3mo ago
        Well, yes. There are several ways to get papers: https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/ https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/
        • macbend 3mo ago
          Great resource. Thanks Lee. (Loved your book about Noether, BTW)
          • leephillips 3mo ago
            You’re welcome. I hope it’s useful. And I’m glad you loved my book!
    • PaulHoule 3mo ago
      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
      • oliculipolicula 3mo ago
        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
        • deleted 3mo ago
          [deleted]
    • karencarits 3mo ago
      [dead]
  • morelandjs 3mo ago
    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.
    • 12_throw_away 3mo ago
      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).
      • mattkrause 3mo ago
        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!
      • KennyBlanken 3mo ago
        It could be incompetence, or it could be reviewers and others intentionally trying to sabotage other people's work.
        • wormius 3mo ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
• dieselgate 3mo ago
  The fees to publish in journals for authors/labs are insane too.
  • dpoloncsak 3mo ago
    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!
    • bruckie 3mo ago
      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.
    • ACCount37 3mo ago
      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.
      • otherme123 3mo ago
        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.
• tcp_handshaker 3mo ago
  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.
  • fhdkweig 3mo ago
    Even emptiness can be plagiarized. See Cage's 4'33" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#Plagiarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#Plagiari...
    • Noumenon72 3mo ago
      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. 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-11964995 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-11964995
    • dotancohen 3mo ago
      4'33 is not empty! That is a common misperception. 4'33 is the sound of the ambient space around the listener. Each performance is unique.
      • tanseydavid 3mo ago
        IMHO they are both arrogant scoundrels for doing this.
        • badprose 3mo ago
          its always seemed like a prank to me; and I'm impressed that he never broke during the performance to ask "are you people really falling for this???"
          • 3mo ago
• xp84 3mo ago
  I was going to post that snippet as well. 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.
  • fl0id 3mo ago
    When their jobs don't depend on it. (as in it is evaluated for hiring and promotion) Ofc it differs depending on discipline.
• deleted 3mo ago
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• anigbrowl 3mo ago
  The greed of scientific publishers is beyond parody at this point, these companies need to be destroyed.
• jrflo 3mo ago
  Good thing sci-hub exists…