*C’était l’heure de commencer une métaliste sur la publication_scientifique* business…

AI Is Inventing Academic Papers That Don’t Exist — And They’re Being Cited in Real Journals

The proliferation of references to fake articles threatens to undermine the legitimacy of institutional research across the board.

As the fall semester came to a close, Andrew Heiss, an assistant professor in the Department of Public Management and Policy at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, was grading coursework from his students when he noticed something alarming.

As is typical for educators these days, Heiss was following up on citations in papers to make sure that they led to real sources — and weren’t fake references supplied by an AI chatbot. Naturally, he caught some of his pupils using generative artificial intelligence to cheat: not only can the bots help write the text, they can supply alleged supporting evidence if asked to back up claims, attributing findings to previously published articles. But, as with attorneys who have been caught generating briefs with AI because a model offered false legal precedents, students can end up with plausible-sounding footnotes pointing to academic articles and journals that don’t exist.

That in itself wasn’t unusual, however. What Heiss came to realize in the course of vetting these papers was that AI-generated citations have now infested the world of professional scholarship, too. Each time he attempted to track down a bogus source in Google Scholar, he saw that dozens of other published articles had relied on findings from slight variations of the same made-up studies and journals.

“There have been lots of AI-generated articles, and those typically get noticed and retracted quickly,” Heiss tells Rolling Stone. He mentions a paper retracted earlier this month, which discussed the potential to improve autism diagnoses with an AI model and included a nonsensical infographic that was itself created with a text-to-image model. “But this hallucinated journal issue is slightly different,” he says.

That’s because articles which include references to nonexistent research material — the papers that don’t get flagged and retracted for this use of AI, that is — are themselves being cited in other papers, which effectively launders their erroneous citations. This leads to students and academics (and any large language models they may ask for help) identifying those “sources” as reliable without ever confirming their veracity. The more these false citations are unquestioningly repeated from one article to the next, the more the illusion of their authenticity is reinforced. Fake citations have turned into a nightmare for research librarians, who by some estimates are wasting up to 15 percent of their work hours responding to requests for nonexistent records that ChatGPT or Google Gemini alluded to.

Heiss also noticed that the AI-generated notes could be convincing to a reader because they included the names of living academics and titles that closely resemble existing literature. In some cases, he found, the citation led him to an actual author, yet the heading of the article and the journal were both fabricated — they just sounded similar to work the author has published in the past and a real periodical that covers such topics. “The AI-generated things get propagated into other real things, so students see them cited in real things and assume they’re real, and get confused as to why they lose points for using fake sources when other real sources use them,” he says. “Everything looks real and above-board.”

Since LLMs have become commonplace tools, academics have warned that they threaten to undermine our grasp on data by flooding the zone with fraudulent content. The psychologist and cognitive scientist Iris van Rooij has argued that the emergence of AI “slop” across scholarly resources portends nothing less than “the destruction of knowledge.” In July, she and others in related fields signed an open letter calling on universities to resist the hype and marketing in order to “safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity.” The authors claimed that schools have “coerced” faculty into using AI or allowing it in their classes, and they asked for a more rigorous, comprehensive analysis of whether it can have any useful role in education at all.

Anthony Moser, a software engineer and technologist, was among those who foresaw how chatbots could eventually hollow out educational institutions. “I’m imagining an instructor somewhere making a syllabus with ChatGPT, assigning reading from books that don’t exist,” he wrote in a post on Bluesky in 2023, less than a year after the AI model first came out. “But the students don’t notice, because they are asking ChatGPT to summarize the book or write the essay.” This month, Moser reshared that post, commenting: “I wish it had taken longer for this to become literally true.”

Moser tells Rolling Stone that to even claim LLMs “hallucinate” fictional publications misunderstands the threat they pose to our comprehension of the world, because the term “implies that it’s different from the normal, correct perception of reality.” But the chatbots are “always hallucinating,” he says. “It’s not a malfunction. A predictive model predicts some text, and maybe it’s accurate, maybe it isn’t, but the process is the same either way. To put it another way: LLMs are structurally indifferent to truth.”

“LLMs are pernicious because they’re essentially polluting the information ecosystem upstream,” Moser adds. “Nonexistent citations show up in research that’s sloppy or dishonest, and from there get into other papers and articles that cite them, and papers that cite those, and then it’s in the water,” he says, likening this content to like harmful, long-lasting chemicals: “hard to trace and hard to filter out, even when you’re trying to avoid it.” Moser calls the problem “the entirely foreseeable outcome of deliberate choices,” with those who raised objections “ignored or overruled.”

But AI can’t take all the blame. “Bad research isn’t new,” Moser points out. “LLMs have amplified the problem dramatically, but there was already tremendous pressure to publish and produce, and there were many bad papers using questionable or fake data, because higher education has been organized around the production of knowledge-shaped objects, measured in citations, conferences, and grants.”

Craig Callender, a philosophy professor at the University of California San Diego and president of the Philosophy of Science Association, agrees with that assessment, observing that “the appearance of legitimacy to non-existent journals is like the logical end product of existing trends.” There are already journals, he explains, that accept spurious articles for profit, or biased ghost-written research meant to benefit the industry that produced it. “The ‘swamp’ in scientific publishing is growing,” he says. “Many practices make existing journals [or] articles that aren’t legitimate look legitimate. So the next step to non-existent journals is horrifying but not too surprising.”

Adding AI to the mix means that “swamp” is growing fast, Callender says. “For instance, all of this gets compounded in a nearly irreversible way with AI-assisted Google searches. These searches will only reinforce the appearance that these journals exist, just as they currently reinforce a lot of disinformation.”

All of which contributes to a feeling among researchers that they’re being buried in an avalanche of slop, with limited capacity to sift through it. “It’s been incredibly disheartening for faculty, I think fairly universally, especially as fake content gets accidentally enshrined in public research databases,” says Heiss. “It’s hard to work back up the citation chain to see where claims originated.”

Of course, many aren’t even trying to do that — which is why the phony stuff has been so widely disseminated. It’s almost as if the uncritical and naive adoption of AI has made us more credulous and sapped our critical thinking at the precise moment we should be on guard against its evolving harms. In fact, someone may be toiling away on a (real) study of that phenomenon right now.

▻https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-chatbot-journal-research-fake-citations-1235485484
#IA #AI #intelligence_artificielle #édition_scientifique #science #ESR #université #citations #chatbot #références #faux #erreurs

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ajouté à la #métaliste sur la #publication_scientifique*:
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

L’#Académie_des_sciences et le #CNRS s’unissent pour développer un modèle de publication en #libre_accès sans frais, ni pour le lecteur ni pour l’auteur.

Dans un contexte où la diffusion des savoirs est fragilisée par un modèle économique déséquilibré, l’Académie des sciences et le CNRS signent un accord de coédition pour développer un modèle de publication scientifique en libre accès diamant, gratuit pour les auteurs comme pour les lecteurs. Cette initiative, qui se matérialise à travers les Comptes rendus de l’Académie des sciences, vise à proposer une #alternative éthique et équitable face à la #dépendance croissante du monde de la recherche internationale envers des éditeurs commerciaux.

▻https://www.cnrs.fr/en/node/12218
#open_access #DOAJ #diamond_open_access #recherche #ESR #édition_scientifique #résistance

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ajouté à la métaliste sur la #publication_scientifique :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

Un grand pas de plus vers la science ouverte

A partir du 1er janvier 2026, le #CNRS coupera l’accès à l’une des plus importantes bases bibliométriques commerciales : le #Web_of_Science de #Clarivate_Analytics ainsi que les #Core_Collection et #Journal_Citation_Reports.

▻https://journals.openedition.org/cybergeo/42519

#science_ouverte #édition_scientifique #revues_prédatrices #résistance #WOS #Elsevier #Scopus #ESR #science #recherche #publications_scientifiques

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ajouté à la #métaliste sur la #publication_scientifique* :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

The fall of a prolific science journal exposes the billion-dollar profits of scientific publishing

One of the 15 publications that put out the most studies globally has been expelled from the indexing system for irregularities. Its publisher, #Elsevier, has a 38% profit margin that reached $1.5 billion in 2024

With humanity terrified by the deadly second wave of the coronavirus, in the fall of 2020, a scientific journal published a study with a solution: jade amulets from traditional Chinese medicine could prevent COVID-19. The proposal was outlandish, but the editor-in-chief of the weekly, Spanish chemist Damià Barceló, defended its quality controls. That journal, Science of the Total Environment — one of the 15 that publishes the most studies worldwide — has just been expelled from the group of reputable publications by one of the leading evaluation companies, after dozens of irregular articles were discovered. The scandal exposes the windfall profits of scientific publishers, who in recent years have amassed billions of dollars in earnings from public funds earmarked for science.

Damià Barceló, 71, took over as editor of the journal in 2012. In just two years, he doubled the number of studies published. In a decade, he increased the number tenfold, with the journal reaching nearly 10,000 articles annually. As the number of articles increased, the quality declined, because there was a perverse incentive to accept mediocre work: to publish research open access in the journal, a scientist has to pay $4,150 plus taxes.

Emilio Delgado, professor of documentation at the University of Granada in Spain, explains it this way: “It’s clearly an open-door journal that takes almost anything. It’s what I call a mega-journal, that is, a mega-business.” The publication belongs to the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier, which dominates the world of science publishing, with a 17% share of the global market. Its 3,000 journals published 720,000 studies last year. Swedish businessman Erik Engstrom, CEO of RELX (the multinational that owns Elsevier), earned more than €15 million ($17.4 million) in 2024 between his salary and other compensation.

Delgado and his colleague Alberto Martín analyzed the unusual behavior of the mega-journal at the request of EL PAÍS. Of all the studies published in Science of the Total Environment, 40% are by Chinese authors and 8% are by Spanish authors — percentages that are double the usual ratio in the subject area. The third institution that publishes the most articles in this journal, after two Chinese organizations, is the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain’s largest scientific organization, where Barceló himself worked until his retirement last year. “With these patterns, one might consider the possibility of publication fraud, but this is speculation,” says Delgado.

The scientific system operates in a controversial way. Researchers’ funding and promotions depend largely on the number of studies they publish in journals, which are validated by a handful of private companies. One of these companies, the London-based multinational Clarivate, removed Science of the Total Environment from its database on November 18. “The journal was removed because it no longer meets our publicly available quality criteria,” explained a spokesperson, who declined to offer further details.

In theory, the quality of scientific journals is safeguarded by anonymous experts who voluntarily review manuscripts to determine whether they should be published. In Science of the Total Environment, this system was allegedly compromised. The publisher Elsevier itself has retracted some 50 studies published by the Brazilian biologist Guilherme Malafaia, after discovering that his work had been “reviewed” through fake peer reviews signed with the names of real scientists without their consent — as was the case with an article on coronavirus in fish and another on the toxicity of a herbicide in turtles. Malafaia and Barceló are co-authors on several studies on microplastic pollution, but these shared investigations have not yet been retracted.

The four major scientific publishers — Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis — earned more than $7 billion in 2024, with profit margins unimaginable in almost any other industry, exceeding 30%, according to a new analysis led by British anthropologist Dan Brockington of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. This collective windfall is explained by the “publish or perish” system — which rewards improbably prolific scientists who produce a study every two days — as well as a shift in the industry’s business model. Previously, readers paid subscription fees to access quality journals. Now, amid the push for open access to science, it is the authors themselves who must pay to have their research published so that others can read it for free. This perverse incentive — whereby both scientists and journals earn more the more they publish, regardless of quality — has fueled a flood of millions of low-quality studies.

Elsevier is the publisher that publishes the most studies and earns the most, with a 38% profit margin ($1.5 billion in 2024), according to the analysis by Brockington and his colleagues. The researchers call for efforts to “dismantle the system” that sees billions of dollars of public money being spent on publishing empty studies for the exclusive benefit of private companies. According to their calculations, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis have received more than $14 billion in profits over the last six years. Among the co-authors of the analysis is the Spanish engineer Pablo Gómez Barreiro, from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in southern England.

An Elsevier spokesperson defended the company’s actions. “We uphold the highest standards of rigor and ethics in our publishing to protect the quality and integrity of research,” they stated. The publisher conducted an initial investigation that resulted in dozens of retractions in Science of the Total Environment, officially due to the fraudulent peer review of articles. “We are now undertaking a broader investigation focused on conflicts of interest, as well as reviewing papers flagged for other potential indicators of misconduct,” the spokesperson added. The publisher intends to “fully rehabilitate” the journal.

Damià Barceló is a hyper-prolific scientist, one of those who publishes a new study every five days or even less. He has authored some 1,800 papers in his lifetime, more than 200 of them in Science of the Total Environment, his own journal. His name appears numerous times as editor of his own studies, such as one on drugs in wastewater in Mexico and another on chemical pollution in the Ebro and Guadalquivir rivers in Spain.

The Elsevier spokesperson explained that Barceló “stepped down” as editor-in-chief in March 2025. “This change was part of a broader effort to strengthen the journal’s governance and address concerns raised,” the spokesperson stated. Elsevier maintains that the “systemic problems” that led to the expulsion of Science of the Total Environment “cannot be attributed to any single individual.” EL PAÍS requested a comment from Barceló, both via his personal WhatsApp and the email address associated with his current position as honorary professor at the University of Almería, but did not receive a response.

Barceló’s prolific output helped him enter the Highly Cited Researchers list, a ranking compiled by the multinational Clarivate that includes some 7,000 researchers worldwide. The more highly-cited researchers a university has, the higher it ranks in the influential Shanghai Ranking, which designates the supposedly best academic institutions in the world. An investigation by EL PAÍS revealed in 2023 that Saudi Arabia offered bribes of up to €70,000 ($81,000) a year to highly-cited scientists to falsify their affiliations in Clarivate’s database, claiming they worked at an Arab university in order to boost those institutions in the ranking.

Damià Barceló had been listed as a professor at Saudi Arabia’s King Saud University since 2016, despite his primary role being director of the Catalan Institute for Water Research in Girona, Spain. Barceló told this newspaper at the time that he had not been receiving the €70,000 annual salary. In 2013, the Spanish chemist received a $133,000 award from Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz for his research on water contaminants.

Spanish universities, like those in other countries, have become places where producing research papers is prioritized above all else, almost like a large-scale factory farm that churns out studies, according to Emilio Delgado and Alberto Martín, bibliometrics experts at the University of Granada. Professors with completely inflated CVs have risen to full professorships or even rectors. Spurred by various international manifestos, the National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA) —the Spanish agency that decides whether a university professor can be promoted or deserves salary increases — has changed its criteria to stop evaluating scientists based on sheer volume.

The president of the Spanish Research Ethics Committee, Dr. Jordi Camí, has called for further action. “We must clean up this mess,” he proclaimed at a conference in Barcelona on November 6. In his opinion, “we must continue to introduce measures to discourage, almost penalize, publishing for the sake of publishing.”

►https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2025-11-28/the-fall-of-a-prolific-science-journal-exposes-the-billion-dollar-pr
#recherche #édition_scientifique #revues_scientifiques #science

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ajouté à la #métaliste sur la #publication_scientifique*:
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

The Drain of Scientific Publishing

The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments and Universities, to lead the drive to re-communalise publishing to serve science not the market.

▻https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
#édition_scientifique #recherche #publication #revues_prédatrices

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ajouté à la métaliste sur la #publication_scientifique* :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

Against publishing

#Preprints are read, shared, and cited — yet still dismissed as incomplete until blessed by a publisher. Matti Vuorre argues that the true measure of scholarship lies in open exchange, not in the industry’s gatekeeping labels of what counts as published.

Preprints—scholarly manuscripts not yet captured by the publication industry—are widely read and circulated, yet the ‘intellectual perestroika‘ they could facilitate hasn’t been uniformly realized because scholars continue to think of preprints as less authoritative than their industry-captured (‘published’) counterparts. It is time to free the scholarly literature from hostile captivity and embrace preprints as the primary objects of scholarly communication.

385 days ago, I submitted a manuscript for evaluation at an academic journal. Around the same time, I submitted the same manuscript to PsyArXiv, a document sharing website popular in the psychological sciences. The results: Radio silence for the journal submission; 334 downloads and 4 citations for the PsyArXiv version.

But this is a meaningless comparison: The PsyArXiv version hasn’t been peer-reviewed and listed on a journal’s website: It is not published, and everyone knows that publications are more valid than preprints, and that it is publications, not preprints, that provide the pitons on a scientist’s climb to success and fame.

Never mind that my colleagues are reading and citing the document on PsyArXiv. For this manuscript to count as a legitimate scientific product I must first endure inexplicable delays; arbitrary formatting requirements (the formatting manual costs $47.99); conflicts between my scholarly values and the astronomical profits that private publishing companies make from our taxpayer funded work; introduction of errors into my manuscript by the journal’s proofreaders; websites from hell; and of course peer review. Without that process of publication, my work will remain a ‘preprint’—an incomplete and unreliable artifact unworthy of a place in the scientific literature.

Could things be better? I surmise that, like fish unaware of their wet surrounds, academics don’t feel the pain because it’s all they’ve ever known.

For one, peer review has nothing to do with commercial journals or publishers—it’s the voluntary labor of our colleagues in service of scientific progress. We could, right now, be reviewing each others work on PREreview or Review Commons. Alas, instead of these scholarly debates we are complacent with pretending that a 40% profit margin industry is somehow facilitating the peer-review process better than the transparent platforms already available to us, for free.

Neither does the role of an editor have to be tied to a commercial rent-seeker: The Publish, Review, Curate model of scholarly communication enables a given scholarly work to be included in a plurality of collections, perhaps analogous to journal volumes or blog categories, each curated by different editors on different platforms. Many editorial teams are already recognizing that things could indeed be better, and are resigning en masse to start free scholar-run journals.

These alternatives to ‘Big Academic Publishing‘ are already making it faster and cheaper to get one’s work permanently available and findable online, vetted by editors, and reviewed by peers.

Considering the estimated $8.97 billion dollars of (mostly) taxpayer money hoovered up in four years by only six commercial publishers on Open Access (OA) article processing fees, Elsevier’s $3,480 median hybrid OA processing fee, and an average turnaround time of 111 days, alternatives fare well: Peer Community In, an online platform for reviews and ‘recommendations’ (brief editorial reports), reports total costs of €369 per article. We’ve known these flawed economics for decades, yet the scientific literature remains in captivity. Maybe we just lack the sufficient anger for change.

Perhaps the time to replace academic journals is now. For me, it should have been 385 days ago.

▻https://universonline.nl/nieuws/2025/10/14/against-publishing
#recherche #édition_scientifique #publication #ESR #université

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ajouté à la métaliste sur la #publication_scientifique :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

Retrospective and prospective study of the evolution of #APC costs and electronic subscriptions for French institutions

A journal article dataset has been developed with metadata of articles by France-based authors in the period 2013-2020. The purpose of this dataset was to form a basis for the retrospective and prospective analyses of the total costs of APCs paid by French institutions. APCs are the article processing charges (APCs) that researchers must pay to have their articles published in some open access journals. The main results of the retrospective analysis of the dataset regarding the numbers of APC-paid articles with a France-based corresponding author: - the total cost of APCs has tripled in the period 2013-2020. The major driver is the growth of articles in Gold OA journals, i.e. fully open access journals with APCs (without this growth, the APC cost would have been multiplied by 1,69 instead of 3) - the journal publishers and dissemination platforms have been categorised in four tiers, each publishing between 20% and 32% of all articles with a French co-author in 2020: tier 1 with the top publisher (Elsevier), tier 2 with three publishers, tier 3 with 16 publishers and tier 4 with the long tail of publishers (n=1995). The highest growth rate of APC-paid articles by France-based corresponding authors is seen in journals published by tier 2 publishers (Springer Nature, Wiley and MDPI) - more than three quarters of the APC-paid articles by France-based corresponding authors are in the fields of biology and medical research. The main observation regarding the price evolution of the APCs is that the APC-level for HybridOA articles started in 2013 at a high level (2 453 € in average) but have been stable over the years with 2 488 € in average in 2020. The APC-level for articles in Gold journals started considerably lower with an average APC in 2013 of 1 395 €. However, a rapid increase in the level of APCs for Gold OA articles has been observed, with an average APC of 1 745 € in 2020. This has led to a calculation of the total cost of APCs paid by French institutions between 2013 and 2020. In addition to the above-mentioned article dataset, 2019 and 2020 data from the ERE survey by Couperin (the national consortium of research performing organizations that negotiates with publishers the prices and conditions of access to research publications for the benefit of its members) were analysed in order to assess the total subscription costs of journal packages for French institutions. This data was compiled in Microsoft Power BI with additional information about the categories of the products, the publisher tiers, and the respondents to both surveys. This resulted in an estimate of ca. 87,5 M€ for the total expenditure on journal packages by all Couperin members in 2020. An analysis by Couperin of the ERE surveys 2014-2021 showed that the price increases per year in this period varied between -1,95% and +7,22% with an average price increase of 1,76% per year. The evolution of the total journal subscription costs based on this average annual growth rate results in an estimated 97,5 M€ in 2030. Using known and trusted data from our dataset (i.e. excluding articles for which the country of the corresponding author could not be determined, or whose APC price could not be precisely estimated), we developed mixed-effects models of APC prices as a function of other articles’ features. These models were used to predict the evolution of the total cost of APCs for the period 2021-2030, in various situations,: - under the assumption of continuing and unchanged trends. The predicted cost of APCs in 2030 is 50,6 M€, whereas the total expenditure on journal subscriptions would be 97,5 M€ - for a scenario with an acceleration towards Gold OA, the predicted cost of APCs in 2030 is 68,7 M€; - and for a scenario with increase of Green OA and a transition from HybridOA towards Gold, the predicted cost of APCs in 2030 is 38,5 M€. Finally, a situation was simulated where 90% of all articles by France-based corresponding authors would be Gold OA (and 10% would be published in Diamond OA journals) in order to assess the cost ceiling of such a 100% open access situation. In this case the predicted cost of APCs in 2030 is 168,7 M€.

▻https://hal-lara.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03909068v1
#édition_scientifique #recherche #coûts #France #ESR #recherche #université #article_processing_charges (#APC)

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ajouté à la métaliste sur la #publication_scientifique:
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

L’#édition_scientifique en #France : de la #censure à l’#ouverture : révolutions politiques, commerciales, technologiques… et autres problèmes éthiques

A travers une analyse systémique de l’édition scientifique en France – et plus particulièrement via une étude des contextes historiques, socio-économiques et politique – cet article soulève les problématiques éthiques qui ont jalonné la construction de l’écosystème scientifique et l’exploitation des produits de la #recherche, et livre une réflexion sur les défis éthiques liés à la mise en place depuis 2018 de la politique de la #Science_Ouverte mais aussi des conséquences directes que cela va avoir sur les pratiques des chercheurs.

▻https://www.unilim.fr/interfaces-numeriques/5262
#éthique #ESR #université

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ajouté à la métaliste sur la #publication_scientifique* :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

Journal editors are resigning en masse: what do these group exits achieve?

Editorial rebellions seem to be on the rise, as researchers seek more control over scholarly communication.

(#paywall... arrgghhh)
▻https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00887-y

#résistance #édition_scientifique #résignation

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ajouté à la métaliste sur la #publication_scientifique:
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

Derrière la promesse de l’#open_access, la #marchandisation renouvelée de l’#édition_scientifique

Depuis le début du siècle, de nouveaux modèles de diffusion de la recherche scientifique sont apparus. Marchandisant à leur profit l’injonction à l’open access, ils piègent les chercheurs mal informés ou souhaitant répondre plus facilement aux demandes de leurs institutions. Pour éviter la dégradation de la qualité scientifique provoquée par ces mégarevues, il est urgent de repenser les modalités d’#expertise et d’#évaluation de la recherche.

En France, la réforme de la recherche publique s’est accélérée à la fin des années 2000, visant notamment l’intensification et l’internationalisation de la #production_scientifique pour rivaliser avec les pays aux universités prestigieuses. Dans cette quête d’#excellence, une #concurrence accrue a été instaurée entre scientifiques comme entre institutions de recherche. Considérée comme vertueuse, elle a renforcé le besoin d’#indicateurs pour évaluer les travaux et faire converger les moyens vers les « meilleurs ».

Déjà central, le rôle de l’article scientifique en tant qu’unité d’analyse de la #performance s’en est trouvé accentué. Comparer, classer et distribuer les ressources à cette aune est d’autant plus commode qu’un #facteur_d’impact (FI)[1] est attribué à la plupart des #revues anglo-saxonnes publiant ces articles, contribuant à leur #hiérarchisation. Certes, l’activité d’évaluation ne se résume pas à faire des additions et tient compte d’autres référentiels et supports de publication (liste de revues d’audience nationale, livres et chapitres d’ouvrages collectifs dans bien des disciplines des sciences humaines et sociales). Mais, comme le souligne Yves Gingras, cette #métrique internationale et ses déclinaisons (classement des revues par quartiles, #h-index, etc.) constituent un point d’appui pour établir les jugements, justifier et accélérer les sélections.

(#paywall)

▻https://aoc.media/analyse/2025/08/14/derriere-la-promesse-de-lopen-access-la-marchandisation-renouvelee-de-leditio
#recherche #université

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ajouté à la métaliste sur la #publication_scientifique* :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

La #fraude aux #publications_scientifiques s’industrialise, alerte une étude américaine

Dans un article publié lundi 4 août dans « PNAS », la revue de l’Académie nationale des sciences des Etats-Unis, des mathématiciens et des biologistes ont recensé des #pratiques_frauduleuses grandissantes dans les revues de recherche.

C’est une étude en forme de cri d’alarme qu’une équipe pluridisciplinaire de chercheurs a publiée lundi 4 août dans PNAS, la revue de l’Académie nationale des sciences des Etats-Unis. « La #fraude_scientifique se développe beaucoup plus vite que la production scientifique dans son ensemble », lit-on dans cet article dont le premier auteur, Reese Richardson, est chercheur en biologie computationnelle à l’université Northwestern, dans l’Illinois.

Pour cet imposant travail, ces mathématiciens et autres biologistes ont, par exemple, passé au crible 276 956 articles publiés entre 2006 et fin 2023 dans PLOS One, une revue en ligne à comité de lecture, et ont suivi 134 983 auteurs et 18 329 éditeurs relecteurs ayant validé ces articles. Cette revue américaine a été choisie non pas en raison de suspicions spécifiques, mais parce que les métadonnées associées aux articles qu’elle publie sont transparentes et exploitables.

Qu’ont-ils constaté ? Que certains filtres censés garantir le processus de #relecture_par_les_pairs, principe au cœur de la confiance dans l’édition scientifique, étaient défectueux. Ou pire encore, étaient gagnés par des pratiques frauduleuses.

Des résultats aberrants

L’étude mentionne ainsi 45 éditeurs de PLOS One qui avaient un taux anormalement élevé de publications qu’ils avaient acceptées et qui ont été ultérieurement rétractées ou critiquées sur PubPeer, le site de référence en matière d’évaluation par les pairs après parution. Ces éditeurs (0,25 % de l’ensemble des éditeurs de la revue) « ont édité 1,3 % de tous les articles publiés dans PLOS One, mais 30,2 % des articles rétractés ». Information aggravante, plus de la moitié d’entre eux sont également auteurs d’articles publiés par PLOS One qui ont été ultérieurement rétractés. La #rétractation d’un article est le plus souvent motivée par les fautes professionnelles des auteurs (comme des données falsifiées ou le plagiat), ou les fautes des éditeurs, telles que l’absence de contrôle qualité minimal des travaux soumis.

« Statistiquement parlant, nous ne pouvons pas dire si PLOS One est plus ou moins exposé à des risques que d’autres revues, précise Thomas Stoeger, enseignant-chercheur en biologie moléculaire et coauteur de l’article. Mais, ce qui se passe avec PLOS One est alarmant, car cela montre que même les revues basées aux Etats-Unis, et celles dans lesquelles nous publions nous-mêmes, peuvent être touchées. » La direction de PLOS One dit aujourd’hui que ces éditeurs ont depuis été renvoyés et que ses procédures de contrôle ont été renforcées.

Dans un second volet de l’étude, les chercheurs se sont intéressés aux #images (graphiques ou photos d’expériences) dupliquées, qui sont souvent la signature d’usines à articles, ou « paper mills » (littéralement : « moulins à papiers »). En se servant des cas signalés sur PubPeer, ils observent d’abord que « bien que la duplication d’images implique que ces études ne se sont pas déroulées comme prévu, seulement 34,1 % d’entre elles ont été retirées ». Mais surtout, ils ont constaté, en reliant les études partageant un même schéma, qu’elles étaient souvent publiées dans un laps de temps court et par des éditeurs voisins. Bref, que c’était organisé.

Ce que révèle l’étude des articles considérés comme suspects provenant de « #paper_mills », identifiés grâce à des contenus communs, est une forme d’#industrialisation_de_la_fraude. « Ces schémas anormaux concordent avec un mode opératoire dans lequel les usines à articles coopèrent avec des intermédiaires (…) qui contrôlent au moins certaines des décisions prises par les revues ciblées et peuvent garantir la publication simultanée de lots d’articles frauduleux dans une seule revue », écrivent les auteurs. Et lorsqu’une de ces revues dites « prédatrices », car non regardantes sur les articles qui lui sont soumis, est désindexée par des agrégateurs, ces courtiers en articles falsifiés se reportent sur une autre.

Ce phénomène, que les auteurs appellent le « #journal_hopping » (« saut d’une revue à l’autre »), provoque parfois des résultats aberrants. Plusieurs titres indexés par l’Association pour la recherche et le développement universitaires (ARDA) ont été ainsi pris, pourrait-on dire, en flagrant délit, en publiant par exemple un article sur la torréfaction des noisettes dans une revue spécialisée sur le sida, ou un article sur la détection des logiciels malveillants dans une revue sur l’éducation spécialisée.

Autre type de fraude à la qualité de la production scientifique : la publication d’articles issus de conférences pourtant labellisées. Là encore, un défaut de contrôle et des complicités sont évoqués par les auteurs, qui citent en exemple les conférences organisées par l’Institut des ingénieurs électriciens et électroniciens (IEEE). Plusieurs centaines de conférences tenues dans ce cadre depuis 2003 ont eu un nombre anormalement élevé de leurs publications rétractées.

Des mesures correctives timides et tardives

Pris dans son ensemble, le phénomène de fraude reste marginal dans l’univers de l’édition scientifique. Mais la tendance est alarmante : « Le nombre d’articles rétractés et d’articles commentés par PubPeer double respectivement tous les 3,3 et 3,6 ans, tandis que le nombre total de publications double tous les quinze ans. Et les articles suspectés d’être issus d’usines à papier doublent tous les 1,5 an. » En outre, les pratiques frauduleuses ne sont plus le cas de chercheurs isolés, mais de systèmes bien huilés : « De larges groupes de relecteurs et d’auteurs semblent avoir coopéré pour faciliter la fraude à la publication. Des réseaux d’articles frauduleux liés suggèrent une production à l’échelle industrielle. Les organisations vendent des services de fraude contractuelle. »

Face à cela, les mesures correctives ou punitives s’avèrent trop timides, sinon trop tardives. Seuls 28 % des articles identifiés dans cette étude comme étant issus d’usines à papiers ont été rétractés. Ce qui compromet la #qualité des #archives_scientifiques. L’une des explications avancées au développement de cette fraude est l’inégalité entre chercheurs pour l’accès aux financements. Or la #concurrence et l’#incertitude propre au travail de chercheur y contribuent. « Pourquoi risquer l’échec, mettant en péril sa #carrière, alors que, moyennant une somme relativement modique, on peut facilement obtenir des publications et des citations qui nécessiteraient autrement un travail considérable ? », interroge cette étude. De fait, le nombre d’articles publiés reste l’étalon. Pour David Sanders (Université Purdue, Indiana), qui n’a pas participé à l’étude, l’une des causes du mal est l’inflation du nombre d’articles, « ce qui empêche que des contrôles appropriés par les pairs puissent être mis en place ».

« A notre avis, la gravité de la situation exige une action urgente », écrivent en conclusion ces chercheurs. Ils déplorent que le travail de lutte contre ces fraudes reste trop souvent l’œuvre d’un petit nombre de bénévoles isolés.

▻https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2025/08/10/la-fraude-aux-publications-scientifiques-s-industrialise-alerte-une-etude-am
#édition_scientifique #recherche #revues_scientifiques #peer_review

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Ces « bibliothèques de l’ombre » où les scientifiques du monde entier partagent gratuitement des articles

« Un monde de pirates » (2/5). Les sites sur lesquels les #articles_scientifiques sont mis à disposition, en toute illégalité, sont très populaires au sein de la communauté universitaire. Rapides, efficaces, ils incarnent l’utopie d’un savoir accessible à tous.

Le message, posté sur le site #Sci-Hub, est signé d’une dermatologue tunisienne : « Je veux vous remercier de permettre aux médecins d’accéder à la recherche scientifique médicale gratuitement, surtout dans les pays en développement. » « L’aide que vous avez apportée aux autres est inestimable, je ne doute pas que vous ayez sauvé des vies », surenchérit une chirurgienne galloise. Un interne turc en orthopédie, lui, ne s’encombre pas de périphrases : « Vous méritez un p***** de prix Nobel ! »
La bénéficiaire de cette effusion de gratitude est une informaticienne kazakhe : #Alexandra_Elbakyan, fondatrice de Sci-Hub, un site de #piratage_scientifique ou, en termes plus policés, une « #bibliothèque_de_l’ombre », qui met à disposition des millions d’articles scientifiques sans le moindre frais. D’où le surnom de la jeune femme : la « Robin des Bois de la science ».

Cet outil, Alexandra Elbakyan a commencé à l’élaborer pour son usage personnel, en 2011. Alors étudiante en neurosciences, elle bloque sur la rédaction de son mémoire, incapable de s’acquitter des 30 ou 40 dollars qu’exigent les #revues pour donner accès à chacun de leurs articles. C’est l’acte de naissance de Sci-Hub, nouvelle planète dans une galaxie où orbitent alors déjà d’autres « bibliothèques », telles que les sites russes #Z-Library et #LibGen – plus variés, ces derniers diffusent aussi des copies, à l’identique, de livres scientifiques ou de fiction. L’économiste hongrois Balazs Bodo, chercheur à l’université d’Amsterdam, y voit l’héritage du #samizdat soviétique, un système de #diffusion clandestin d’ouvrages interdits ou introuvables, souvent rendu possible, déjà, par des universitaires grâce à leur accès privilégié aux textes.

Ces samizdats modernes s’épanouissent bien loin des frontières de l’ex-URSS. Leurs adresses s’échangent sur les campus américains comme s’échangeaient déjà les photocopies ou, par modem, les fichiers informatiques. Les étudiants – proverbialement fauchés – comme les chercheurs sont séduits par la gratuité de ces plateformes, entièrement financées par les dons des usagers les plus enthousiastes. « C’était impossible de s’acheter autant de manuels », se souvient Jason (un nom d’emprunt car il souhaite demeurer anonyme), un utilisateur américain de ces bibliothèques depuis son master de sociologie, dans les années 2000. Au téléphone, ce quadragénaire souligne les prix prohibitifs des manuels aux Etats-Unis, où ils peuvent dépasser 100 dollars l’unité.

Equipe de bénévoles

Soucieux de rendre une partie de l’aide qu’il a reçue de la communauté, Jason est devenu, pendant la pandémie de Covid-19, le modérateur d’un forum où se coordonnent les #bénévoles. Comme lui, ceux-ci ont été séduits par la dimension politique du projet – mais aussi par l’image romantique du « #pirate_du_savoir », vent debout contre la #privatisation de la #science. Une mythologie flibustière qui motive étudiants et chercheurs à user de leurs accès privilégiés aux réseaux universitaires pour aider d’autres usagers en manque d’une référence.

Sur ce forum, Jason et les siens trient et approuvent les ouvrages numériques, quitte à retoquer les éventuels trolls qui soumettent de faux livres, derrière la couverture desquelles on ne trouve qu’une publicité incitant à acheter l’œuvre originale. Ils corrigent ensuite ce qui doit l’être. Titre, auteur, image de couverture : les articles et livres ont besoin d’une sorte de « mise en beauté » avant d’être mis à disposition du public. A leur manière, ces bénévoles férus d’informatique effectuent un travail de bibliothécaire : curation, étiquetage… « Cela nécessite beaucoup de travail manuel et il n’y a jamais assez de bénévoles », confirme Jason. Il faut dire qu’il n’est pas évident, pour un aspirant « bibliothécaire de l’ombre », de savoir comment se rendre utile, les équipes responsables des sites ne brillant pas par leur transparence.

Car… chut ! Comme dans une authentique bibliothèque, on est prié de ne pas faire de bruit. Pas tant pour ne pas déranger les autres lecteurs que parce que le partage d’articles est illégal, et qu’il est risqué de s’impliquer dans la gestion du site. Les échanges informels sur les réseaux sociaux restent anonymes, quand ils n’ont pas plutôt lieu sur des groupes privés, fonctionnant par cooptation.
Ces précautions ne sont pas superflues. Depuis une dizaine d’années, la guerre est déclarée entre les « bibliothèques » et les puissants groupes d’édition scientifique, à commencer par les géants américains #Elsevier et #Springer. Propriétaires légaux des #articles_scientifiques, ils ont peu à peu obtenu le blocage des sites pirates dans plusieurs pays. Alexandra Elbakyan elle-même a été contrainte de prendre ses distances avec Sci-Hub : en 2021, en raison d’un procès l’opposant à Elsevier en Inde, elle a préféré geler le site, qui demeure accessible mais n’est plus alimenté. Visée par une enquête du FBI, elle vit dans la clandestinité, dans le nord de la Russie.

La Z-Library est logée à la même enseigne. Ses domaines ont été saisis par la justice américaine en 2022. Deux individus, russes, accusés d’être impliqués dans la création du site, ont été arrêtés en Argentine et se sont depuis évadés. Un événement qui a conduit la Z-Library à revoir les mesures de sécurité de son équipe composée, selon l’un de ses porte-parole sollicité par Le Monde, de « dizaines de spécialistes » en informatique.

Modèle asymétrique

#Menaces, #fermetures, #condamnations… Dans le domaine des #publications_scientifiques, la lutte contre le #piratage a ceci de particulier que les auteurs, qui pourraient légitimement se sentir lésés, ne se pressent pas pour se ranger du côté de la loi. Beaucoup d’entre eux estiment que le très profitable modèle économique des principaux éditeurs est particulièrement asymétrique, pour ne pas dire injuste : à leurs yeux, les éditeurs privatisent la science en exploitant le travail des chercheurs, qui ne sont pas rémunérés en retour pour leur publication ou évaluation d’études.

Dans ce contexte, les pirates suscitent plus souvent l’admiration que la réprobation. D’autant que leur histoire reste marquée par la mort brutale d’#Aaron_Swartz, militant révéré de l’#open_access (accès libre). Visé par des poursuites judiciaires du FBI pour avoir téléchargé des centaines de milliers d’articles scientifiques, cet Américain de 26 ans s’est suicidé en 2013. Dans son « manifeste de l’Open Access Guerilla », il incitait étudiants, bibliothécaires et chercheurs à partager leurs ressources, leurs mots de passe, leurs fichiers. « Vous avez la possibilité de participer à ce banquet de la connaissance alors que le reste du monde en est exclu », insistait-il.

Pour l’heure, les fermetures de plateformes pirates sont rarement définitives. La bataille que leur livrent les éditeurs s’apparente davantage à un jeu du chat et de la souris, les sites bloqués ne tardant pas à refaire surface, à l’identique, à une autre adresse. La crainte de les voir disparaître pour de bon mobilise tout de même de nombreux internautes, à l’image de « #Shrine », un universitaire qui ne donne ni son nom ni son âge, mais explique au Monde que, pour lui, ces bibliothèques sont des « ONG de la piraterie ».

En 2020, il lance un appel à l’aide sur Reddit, plateforme communautaire et plus gros forum en ligne du monde. Reprenant en préambule le mot d’ordre d’Aaron Swartz, il propose un projet d’hébergement « pair à pair », c’est-à-dire décentralisé, des sites comme Sci-Hub : dans la mesure où leur contenu sera désormais hébergé sur les ordinateurs de centaines de volontaires, il sera impossible de le supprimer en faisant simplement saisir, par la justice, quelques ordinateurs. « Shrine » affirme avoir alors vu se mettre en mouvement « une colonie de fourmis : des gens du monde entier, décidés à protéger ces fichiers, malgré les risques encourus et sans en tirer le moindre profit ».

Cette « colonie » a essaimé. Ainsi, un projet de mégabibliothèque baptisé « #Anna’s_Archive » a pour objet, depuis 2022, de constituer une copie complète des collections numériques de ses homologues. Ses promoteurs – évidemment non identifiés – entendent ainsi éviter la disparition du contenu de ces plateformes si elles venaient à fermer. Résultat : 50 millions de livres et le double d’articles scientifiques sont conservés dans « Anna’s Archive ».

▻https://www.lemonde.fr/series-d-ete/article/2025/08/11/les-bibliotheques-de-l-ombre-a-la-pointe-du-piratage-scientifique_6628300_34
#édition_scientifique #résistance #recherche #ESR

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#Elsevier parent company reports 10% rise in profit, to £3.2bn

Scientific arm of #Relx reports adjusted operating profit of £1.17 billion in 2024

Relx, the parent company of academic publishing giant Elsevier, has reported a 10 per cent underlying growth in its adjusted operating profit for 2024, reaching just under £3.2 billion from revenues of £9.43bn.

Within this, the scientific, technical and medical arm of the company—which includes its publishing business—had an adjusted operating profit of £1.17bn, with underlying growth of five per cent.

This arm had revenue of £3.05bn, giving it an adjusted operating margin of 38.4 per cent, the company reported on 13 February.

Relx said its primary research business “continued to be driven by volume growth, with article submissions growing very strongly across the portfolio, particularly in pay-to-publish”.

Its financial results come amid concern among some politicians and research organisations about money being spent on publishing by publicly funded research. Last month, 10 European research organisations announced they would help to fund broader use of the EU’s free-to-publish publishing platform, Open Research Europe.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Research Professional News has reported that the universities of Sheffield, Surrey and York have opted out of the sector-wide “big deal” with Elsevier, amid a bleak outlook on university finances and concerns over slow progress to fully open access publishing. An Elsevier spokesperson previously told RPN that Sheffield, York and Surrey “have all signed individual agreements [with the company] or are in discussions with us to continue access to Elsevier-published journals”.

Publishing evolution a risk

Among the risks Relx set out for investors, it said one was “evolution” in the scholarly publishing landscape.

The open access publishing model “now represents a significant and growing portion of the volume of primary research that we publish”, it said, adding that “rapid changes in customer choice, regulation or technologies in this area could impact the revenue mix and growth”

Relx added: “Maintaining research integrity requires us to manage risks around fraud in research papers in the context of evolving technologies.” It said that it operates “in highly competitive and dynamic markets”, which are affected by developments in technologies like artificial intelligence.

More growth expected

The company said it expects “good underlying revenue growth” in 2025, with growth in adjusted operating profit being slightly higher than the revenue growth.

Chief executive officer Erik Engstrom said: “Our improving long-term growth trajectory continues to be driven by the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher growth analytics and decision tools that deliver enhanced value to our customers across market segments.”

▻https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-world-2025-2-elsevier-parent-company-reports-10-ri
#profit #édition_scientifique #publications_scientifiques #business #ESR #recherche

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Les livres en téléchargement illégal, la nouvelle lubie des étudiants
▻https://mcetv.ouest-france.fr/mon-mag-campus/sante-et-vie-etudiante/les-livres-en-telechargement-illegal-la-nouvelle-lubie-des-etudia

Les étudiants se tournent de plus en plus vers le téléchargement illégal de livres, une tendance alimentée par des plateformes comme Z-Library. Cette bibliothèque numérique propose gratuitement des millions de livres et d’articles académiques, normalement payants. Pour de nombreux jeunes, elle représente une solution face aux obstacles financiers.

Accéder au savoir quand tu es étudiant ? Une lubie de privilégié.

UK university drops #Elsevier deal

#Surrey says Jisc-negotiated deal “not sustainable in the current financial climate”

The #University_of_Surrey has opted out of a subscription deal with the academic publishing giant Elsevier, saying the arrangement is not financially sustainable.

The move, coming after the University of Sheffield cancelled its subscription deal with Elsevier, further spotlights how the crisis in university finances is beginning to impact on universities’ subscription deals with publishers—and on the publishing industry.

Surrey had been part of arrangements negotiated by #Jisc, which negotiates publisher deals on behalf of the UK’s higher education sector and other partners. A spokesperson for Elsevier told Research Professional News that it currently has an agreement with over 150 institutions in the UK, and that the publisher was “delighted” to have Jisc “as customers going into 2025”.

However, a spokesperson for Surrey told RPN that the university continuously reviews all it commercial subscriptions for value for money, and had concluded that the Jisc-negotiated ‘Read and Publish’ deal with Elsevier was “not sustainable in the current financial climate”.

“We will continue to subscribe to the most-used individual Elsevier journal titles and will enable our students and researchers to read articles via post-cancellation access to previous subscribed content, via open access and via inter-library loans,” the spokesperson said.

“We also look forward to continuing to work with Jisc and with publishers on future publishing deals which are financially sustainable, open, transparent and equitable.”

RPN understands that publication by Surrey researchers in Elsevier journals will not be affected by the move.

Last month, the Sheffield cancelled its Jisc-negotiated subscription deal, citing concerns over the “sustainability of the current commercial scientific publishing model”. A spokesperson for Sheffield also said publication for its researchers would be unaffected.

An Elsevier spokesperson said it was “aware of the difficult financial conditions some institutions are under”, adding the company has “worked closely with Jisc to provide relief, and we’ll continue to work with them on a case-by-case basis to support UK institutions”.

▻https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-universities-2025-1-uk-university-drops-elsevie
#édition_scientifique #UK #Angleterre #Elsevier #recherche #université #résistance #abandon #abonnement #arrêt #coût #prix

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#Elsevier rewrites academic papers with AI — without telling editors or authors

The Journal of Human Evolution is published by Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers. All but one of the JHE editorial board resigned last week in the wake of Elsevier rewriting papers with LLMs — without telling either the editors or the authors: [Retraction Watch; Retraction Watch, PDF]

Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well as italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors.

… AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage.

Elsevier was also slow with open access and charged authors much more to publish in JHE — $3,990 per paper! — than its other journals. [JHE]

Finally, Elsevier demanded JHE reduce its number of editors — presumably thinking an LLM could do well enough. This was the last straw after ten years of Elsevier cutting services to the journal.

John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a frequent JHE contributor, supports the editors’ position: “if there was any notice to my coauthors or me about an AI production process, I don’t remember it.” He feels “the real lapse is a more basic matter of ethics.” [blog post]

Elsevier applies stringent policies on generative AI to its authors — but not to itself.

▻https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/01/05/elsevier-rewrites-academic-papers-with-ai-without-telling-editors-or-au
#AI #IA #intelligence_artificielle #édition_scientifique #réécriture

via @fil

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Academia in a stranglehold

Academic publishers’ most valuable asset used to be their journals. Now, it’s the data they collect from researchers and then sell. That is extremely concerning, a growing group of Groningen researchers feels. ‘They control every part of the process and register every action you take.’

When UG philosopher Titus Stahl is mulling over a new research topic, he has a range of tools available to help him get started. He could use academic search engine Scopus, for example, to point him to articles he could read online or download. He might also take notes using Mendeley, the useful software tool that helps you keep track of sources and references.

If he then writes a grant proposal to get funding, there’s a good chance that the people assessing it use SciVal – software that analyses research trends, but also contains individual researchers’ citation and publication data.

In the meantime, he could discuss his work on SSRN, a social platform used to share and peer-review early-stage research. And ultimately, of course, he’ll publish it in an open access magazine for which the university has paid article processing fees, or APCs, after which others will read it – at home, through their libraries, or again using Scopus.

Then, finally, he will enter his article in Pure, the database the university uses to register all research done at the UG. His profile might change to reflect he has done research on a new topic. Affiliations may be added, since his network has changed too, so everyone can see who he collaborates with and what his strengths are.

It’s all very streamlined and it all works beautifully. However, it doesn’t seem all that great anymore when you realise that every tool Stahl has been using, every platform on which he publishes, is owned by publishing mogul Elsevier. And Elsevier not only provides tools, it also collects user data. It logs everything Stahl does, every keystroke.

‘They know what you are working on, they know what you are submitting, they know the results of your peer reviews’, Stahl says. ‘They control every part of the process and register every action you take.’
Everything is recorded

And that gives them far more information than you might realise. When Eiko Fried, a psychologist from the University of Leiden, asked Elsevier for his personal data in December 2021, he received an email with hundreds of thousands of data points, going back many years.

He discovered that Elsevier knew his name, his affiliations and his research. That his reviews had been registered, as well as the requests for peer review he had declined. Elsevier kept track of his IP-addresses – leading back to his home – his private telephone numbers, and the moments he logged in, which showed exactly when he worked and when he was on vacation. There were websites he visited, articles he had downloaded or just viewed online. Every click, every reference was recorded.

Fried’s blog posts about this came as a shock and a revelation to Stahl. ‘It’s a long-term danger to academic freedom’, he says. ‘They control the academic process with an infrastructure that serves their interests, not ours. And they use the collected data to provide analytics services to whoever pays for them.’

Stahl is one of a growing group of researchers inside and outside the University of Groningen who are concerned about the situation. He finds Oskar Gstrein on his side. ‘There is this ingrained power imbalance between the universities and the publishers’, says the data autonomy specialist with Campus Fryslân and the Jantina Tammes School of Digital Society, Technology and AI. ‘They own the journals people want to get into. And now they have taken over the whole publishing sphere.’

In a recently published call for action, the Young Academy Groningen (YAG) and the Open Science Community Groningen, too, sounded the alarm. ‘It is time to formulate a long-term vision for a sustainable, independent higher education system’, they wrote. ‘We not only endorse this ambition but call on our university to reclaim ownership over our research output.’
New business model

They have reason to worry. Big publishers like Elsevier make billions of euros a year. Historically by publishing academic articles, but they have recently changed their business model. Now, they sell data connected to academic publishing. And that is ‘insanely profitable’, Stahl says.

Profits of Elsevier’s parent company RELX rose to 10 percent in 2023 – 2 billion euros on a revenue of 10 billion. ‘Article submissions returned to strong growth, with pay-to-publish open-access articles continuing to grow particularly strongly’, RELX reported in February this year.

Elsevier’s Erik Engstrom was the third highest paid CEO in the Netherlands between 2017 and 2020, earning over 30 million. Only the CEOs of Shell and another scientific publisher, Wolters Kluwer, earned more.

Only a decade ago, it looked as if big publishers’ hold on academia was weakening. Universities and the Dutch government were done with first funding their research with public money, offering their papers for free to publishers like Elsevier (The Lancet, Cell), Springer (Nature) or Wiley (Advanced Materials), editing and peer reviewing those papers for free and then having to pay insane amounts of subscription fees to make those same papers available to their researchers again.

They moved towards open access and as a result, 97 percent of the publications in Groningen is now published open access. ‘Their traditional business model no longer worked’, says Gstrein. ‘So publishers had to reinvent themselves.’
Gold open access

And that is exactly what they did, helped by a Dutch government that suggested ‘gold open access’ as the norm. ‘It’s undoubtedly linked to the fact that many of these publishers, such as Elsevier and Kluwer, have Dutch roots’, says Ane van der Leij, head of research support at the UB.

‘Gold’ means you don’t make the whole publishing process free – that would be the diamond option. Instead, a university pays APCs up front for its researchers, and in exchange publishers make their articles available to everyone.

That’s great for the general public, which can now read those articles for free. But it’s not so great for the universities that still provide research papers and edit academic articles without any payment. ‘And the APCs are high’, Stahl says. ‘In some cases, I estimate there’s a profit margin of 75 percent.’

Not all magazines are open access, either. Most of the traditional journals are a hybrid now – the content for which APCs have been paid are open access; the rest is still behind a paywall. ‘Unfortunately “hybrid” has become the new status quo for most of these publishers’ journals, and it has become a very profitable business model’, Van der Leij says.
Package deals

These days, publishers negotiate ‘read and publish’ package deals for their titles, which have become around 20 percent more expensive in five years. ‘Taking into account an average inflation rate of 3 percent per year over this period, that amounts to a price increase of approximately 12.6 percent’, says Van der Leij.

Elsevier has received over 16 million euros in 2024 for their deal with umbrella organisation Universities of the Netherlands. Wily gets almost 5 million, Springer 3.6 million.

The increase is not the same for all publishers, Van der Leij stresses, and the packages themselves also vary, making it difficult to compare. ‘On top of that, it’s become increasingly difficult to figure out which parts are “read” and which ones are “publish”.’

Also telling: the maximum number of prepaid publications is reached sooner every year, because universities get fewer publications for their money. ‘Four years ago, we would be sending out our emails that we’d reached the cap halfway through November. Three years ago, we did so in early November. This year, it was at the end of October’, says Van der Leij.
Commercialised research

That’s not the biggest issue, though. What is worse is the other part of Elsevier’s business model, which they came up with when they realised they needed other ways to keep making money. And the hottest commodity they could think of was data.

‘The entire infrastructure that science builds on is commercialised’, says YAG chairperson Lukas Linsi. ‘They effectively turn science into shareholder returns and dividend payouts, and it’s all public money.’

Pure, which showcases the research for almost all Dutch universities, used to be an independent Danish startup, but was bought by Elsevier in 2012. The formerly open platform Mendeley was acquired in 2013. SSRN in 2016. In 2017 Elsevier bought bepress, a repository used by six hundred academic institutes. ‘It has given them real time data access’, Gstrein says.

Publishing is no longer the main focus for RELX and its competitors; instead, they have become data brokers. They sell data to insurance companies for risk analysis, to banks for fraud detection, to universities to assess their performance, and, especially egregious, to the US Immigration Service to target illegal immigrants.
Less dependent

Many researchers are worried by this. ‘In the Netherlands, universities tend to be a bit optimistic regarding these companies’, Stahl feels. After all, universities have in the past made plans to develop ‘professional services’ together with Elsevier. ‘They just don’t seem to see the danger.’

In Germany and France, there is much more awareness about these issues. There, universities are less dependent on the big publishers, or are working to move away from them. ‘If some private parties have access to all this data, then that is a long-term threat to academic freedom. We have to do something about it. We need our own infrastructure’, Stahl says.

Per the contracts, the publishers aren’t allowed to share data. ‘There is the data processing agreement’, explains Marijke Folgering, head of the UB’s development & innovation department. That’s a legally required document stating how data will be processed. ‘They’re not allowed to just use our data. I’m sure they can find ways to do so anyway, but we also enter into these contracts on a trust basis. If they do abuse it, they hopefully hurt themselves as well.’
Critical

Researcher Taichi Ochi with the Open Science Community Groningen has his doubts about their trustworthiness, though. ‘We need to move away from them, or we risk detrimental effects’, he says.

Linsi points to the deal that academic publisher Taylor and Francis made: they sold the research published in their three thousand academic journals to Microsoft for 10 million dollars, to train their AI models. ‘This is happening now!’

Folgering and Van der Leij with the UB also worry about the seemingly unending stream of data that is flowing towards the publishers. ‘There are currently no indications that the system is being abused’, says Van der Leij, ‘but we’re getting increasingly concerned.’

‘We’re definitely critical of what they’re doing’, Folgering agrees. ‘We’re exploring our options. Several German universities have gone in a different direction. But there are limits to what we can do. We simply don’t have that many developers.’

The problem, of course, is that both researchers and university management want convenience. They want their publications in these publishers’ prestigious distribution channels. They want their tools and software to work quickly, and it’s all the better if these are available at a relatively low cost. ‘But we just don’t consider what that means in the long run. People underestimate how little choice we still have’, Gstrein says.
Long-standing reputation

The researchers don’t have an easy solution on hand. ‘If you want to move ahead in your career, you’re dependent on these companies’, Linsi realises. ‘They don’t decide what is published in their journals, but still, it’s their brands that are really important if you want to move up.’

Diamond open access journals – like the UG’s own University of Groningen Press, founded in 2015 – may be a solution in the long term, but at this point their reputation just isn’t good enough yet, compared to journals with a long-standing reputation and impact factor.

The tools the publishers provide do work very well, Linsi admits. Repositories in for example Germany – where universities are a lot less dependent on the big publishers – aren’t nearly as ‘attractive’ as the UG’s Pure.

And there’s the matter of safety too. Are universities able to build alternatives that are safe and that won’t be vulnerable to hacks? ‘In practice, this is quite difficult’, Linsi says. ‘But other countries show that there is a way back.’
Alternatives

The UG could start by using alternatives when possible, he explains. Zotero instead of Mendeley, Firefox instead of Google Chrome. ‘There are alternatives for almost every app we use.’

And it could – and should – find an alternative for Pure. ‘It’s a good first step’, Linsi feels. ‘It’s relatively easy and it is tangible.’

In fact, Van der Leij says, the UG is currently working on its own data warehouse that would hold all the UG publications’ data and metadata. ‘It might allow us to stop using Pure and keep a hold of our data.’

But it would be even better if Dutch – or even European – universities worked together on projects like these, to make sure there’s enough funding and that it is done right. In the long run, Linsi believes, it will probably be cheaper than paying huge sums of money to commercial providers.

‘We must understand our own worth’, agrees Taichi Ochi. ‘With the cost of publishing ever increasing, it also impacts how much money we can spend on other activities. We need to move away from a model that is draining money.’

▻https://ukrant.nl/magazine/elseviers-stranglehold-on-academia-how-publishers-get-rich-from-our-data

#science #recherche #université #données #édition_scientifique #publications #publications_scientifiques #Elsevier #business #données_personnelles #Stahl #RELX #Springer #Wiley #Gold_open_access

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ajouté à la métaliste sur la #publication_scientifique :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

Si stanno dimettendo in blocco molte redazioni di riviste scientifiche. L’ultima è «Philosophy & Public Affairs». Tra i dimissionari c’è il premio Nobel Amartya Sen. Sta esplodendo il conflitto tra editoria for profit e open access: o l’uno o l’altra.

▻https://twitter.com/andcapocci/status/1795336420204372301

Editors at Philosophy & Public Affairs Resign ; Will Launch New OA Journal

The executive, associate, and advisory editors and all of the editorial board members of one of the most influential journals in moral and political philosophy, Philosophy & Public Affairs, have resigned en masse.

https://dailynous.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/philosophy-public-affairs-editor-resignations.png

According to their statement (below), crucial aims of scholarly journals are “not well-served by commercial publishing.” Philosophy & Public Affairs is published by Wiley, the sixth largest publishing corporation in the world by revenue (over $2 billion annually).

The outgoing editors and editorial board members will be launching a new diamond open-access journal to be published by Open Library of Humanities (OLH), and will be occupying at the new journal the same positions they held at Philosophy & Public Affairs. (Current editor-in-chief of Philosophy & Public Affairs, Anna Stilz, is not among the statement’s signatories. In answer to an inquiry about that, she replied, “I cannot comment on this at this time.” That said, it is worth noting that Stilz has been publicly critical of Wiley in the past—see, for example, the updates on this post.)

Readers may recall the similar resignation last year of the editorial team at the Journal of Political Philosophy, another Wiley journal, and that team’s creation of Political Philosophy, also a diamond open-access journal published by OLH. At least 11 Wiley journals have seen mass editorial resignations since 2018, according to Retraction Watch.

The as-of-yet-unnamed new journal will be open for submissions beginning in September.

In the statement below, the editors and editorial board members announce their resignation, explain their reasons for it and for their creation of an open-access journal, and discuss issues related to submissions currently under review at Philosophy & Public Affairs.

The following is a statement from the executive, associate, and advisory editors and all the members of the editorial board of Philosophy & Public Affairs.

We are unanimously resigning from our editorial roles at Philosophy & Public Affairs, published by Wiley, and launching a new diamond open-access journal published by Open Library of Humanities (OLH). All of us will play the same editorial roles in the new journal and will retain the aim of publishing the best philosophical work touching on matters of public importance.

We take this step because we believe that scholarly journals—including our own—serve important purposes, and that these purposes are not well-served by commercial publishing. For three decades now, academic journals have suffered from their ownership by for-profit publishers, who have exploited their monopoly position to sharply raise prices, unduly burdening subscribing libraries and shutting out other institutions and individuals from access to research. The recent rise of the author-funded “open access” model has only reinforced academic inequality, since scholars with access to fewer resources are unable to pay the fees that make their work freely accessible; it has also incentivized commercial publishers to try to publish as many articles as possible and so to pressure rigorous journals to weaken or abandon their quality controls.

Faced with this conflict between purpose and business model, we have decided to embrace the purpose and move to an alternative model.

The alternative—which our librarian colleagues have been urging for some time—is for libraries, universities, and other academic institutions to offer direct support for the publication of open-access journals, which are guided by independent scholarly judgment and freely available for authors and readers. We are delighted to have found precisely this model at OLH, an award-winning diamond open-access publisher supported by a consortium of libraries and funding agencies.

If diamond open-access journals are so good, why are they not already dominant? Partly because we all have day jobs and transitions take time. In addition, our careers depend on publishing in journals with name recognition, reputation, and high impact factors. These publications are now typically owned by commercial publishers. Colleagues often cannot afford to take a chance on untested journals. This is why, as editors of one of the leading journals in our field, we feel a strong responsibility to move toward a new, better, arrangement.

Our plan, if Wiley permits it, is to complete the reviews for all revised submissions received prior to this announcement. We apologize to authors who recently submitted manuscripts to Philosophy & Public Affairs, and we recognize the especially high cost to authors who have been revising their manuscripts, but who have not yet resubmitted. We very much regret these costs but saw no realistic way to avoid them. We hope to make the new journal worthy of these costs.

We plan to launch the new journal (whose name will be announced shortly) and begin accepting submissions in September 2024. Please send us your best work in moral and political philosophy and adjacent fields, take note of our migration in your hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, and encourage your colleagues to do the same.

We are excited to embark on this new adventure. We hope you share our excitement and join us in making this new venture a great success.

Signed,

Outgoing Executive Editors

Jonathan Quong, University of Southern California, USA
Patrick Tomlin, University of Warwick, UK

Outgoing Associate Editors

Arash Abizadeh, McGill University, Canada
Nico Cornell, University of Michigan, USA
Garrett Cullity, Australian National University
Marc Fleurbaey, Paris School of Economics, France
Johann Frick, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Joe Horton, University College London, UK
Sophia Moreau, University of Toronto, Canada
Kristi Olson, Bowdoin College, USA
Japa Pallikkathayil, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Gina Schouten, Harvard University, USA
Zofia Stemplowska, University of Oxford, UK
Adam Swift, University College London, UK

Outgoing Advisory Editors

Charles R. Beitz, Princeton University, USA
Joshua Cohen, Apple University, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Alan Patten, Princeton University, USA
Arthur Ripstein, University of Toronto, Canada
Seana Shiffrin, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
R. Jay Wallace, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Outgoing Editorial Board

Elizabeth Anderson, University of Michigan, USA
Cheshire Calhoun, Arizona State University, USA
David Estlund, Brown University, USA
Archon Fung, Harvard Kennedy School, USA
Barbara Herman, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Pamela Hieronymi, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Frances Myrna Kamm, Rutgers University, USA
Niko Kolodny, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Jeff McMahan, Oxford University, UK
Liam Murphy, New York University, USA
Debra Satz, Stanford University, USA
Samuel Scheffler, New York University, USA
Amartya Sen, Harvard University, USA
Tommie Shelby, Harvard University, USA
Amia Srinivasan, Oxford University, UK
Jeremy Waldron, New York University, USA
Stuart White, Oxford University, UK
Gideon Yaffe, Yale University, USA

▻https://dailynous.com/2024/05/22/editors-at-philosophy-will-launch-new-oa-journal

#édition_scientifique #revues_scientifiques #revues_prédatrices #recherche #université #ESR #résistance #démission #Wiley

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ajouté à la métaliste sur la #publication_scientifique :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

Academic Publishing

It’s not about the money…

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukAkG6c_N4M

#édition_scientifique #vidéo #absurdité #recherche #publication_scientifique #business #prestige #argent #coût #business

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ajouté à la métaliste sur l’édition scientifique :
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#Édition_scientifique : #accord national de 33 M€ annuels avec #Elsevier (#Abes, #Couperin, #MESR)

L’Abes, Couperin et le MESR annoncent l’attribution d’un marché national à l’éditeur Elsevier d’un montant annuel de 33 M€, le 30/04/2024. L’accord, négocié par Couperin et porté par l’Abes, est signé pour quatre ans…

(#paywall)

▻https://education.newstank.fr/article/view/323526/edition-scientifique-accord-national-33-annuels-elsevier-abes-cou
#France #budget #recherche #revues_scientifiques #revues_prédatrices #ESR #université #publication_scientifique

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ajouté à la une métaliste sur la #publication_scientifique :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396