{"id":876,"date":"2022-01-04T14:57:05","date_gmt":"2022-01-04T14:57:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/?p=13581"},"modified":"2022-02-28T19:50:39","modified_gmt":"2022-02-28T19:50:39","slug":"13581","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/beginner\/2022\/01\/04\/13581\/","title":{"rendered":"The dark side of the scientific-publications business"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Today\u2019s post was inspired by an online course about the process and the business of publishing scientific articles. Presented in French by Julie Augustin, a doctoral student in the Department of Biological Science at the Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al, in March 2021, this course is now available as two 1-hour YouTube videos. The first, La publication scientifique, qu\u2019est-ce que c\u2019est ?<\/a><\/span><\/strong>, discusses how researchers prepare scientific articles, how these articles are reviewed by the researchers\u2019 peers, and how they are published in scientific journals. Most people who aren\u2019t scientists themselves don\u2019t know much about these processes, but nowadays, when many of us are basing critical health decisions on discussions of such articles in the media, it\u2019s good to learn more about how these articles get produced.<\/p>\n

In her second video, Le c\u00f4t\u00e9 obscur des publications scientifiques<\/span><\/strong><\/a>, Julie discusses the dark side of the scientific-publications business. As she relates, just four major scientific publishing companies\u2014Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell and Taylor & Francis\u2014own about 2000 scientific journals each, which account for nearly 70% of all scientific articles published worldwide! What makes this oligopoly a racket is that basically all of the scientific research reported in these articles is government-funded, as are many of the university libraries, institutes and laboratories that pay exorbitant fees to subscribe to these companies\u2019 journals. And the scientists who conduct the peer reviews required before these articles can be published provide this service for free. No wonder these companies make such huge profit margins, in the neighbourhood of 30 to 40%! By way of comparison, technology giants Google (Alphabet), Apple, Facebook (Meta), Amazon and Microsoft, who are no saints either, make margins of about 20%, while grocery stores make about 2.5%. In response to this shameless diversion of public funds to the private sector, a number of initiatives have been taken to promote open access to scientific publications<\/span><\/strong><\/a>. Some of these initiatives are fairly mainstream, while others, such as Sci-Hub<\/a><\/span><\/strong>, stand on shakier legal ground, but everybody uses them anyway, because subscription costs for scientific journals have become so prohibitive.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019d like to read more about these and other challenges facing science today, I recommend a long but excellent article entitled The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists<\/span><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s post was inspired by an online course about the process and the business of publishing scientific articles. Presented in French by Julie Augustin, a doctoral student in the Department of Biological Science at the Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al, in March 2021, this course is now available as two 1-hour YouTube videos. The first, La publication […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[402,403],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/beginner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/beginner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/beginner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/beginner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/beginner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=876"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/beginner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1074,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/beginner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876\/revisions\/1074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/beginner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/beginner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/beginner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}