#scientific-publishing — Public Fediverse posts

@oatp
Is this a thing? Is it real? I still search for words and phrases and authors in Google Scholar and elsewhere, and follow threads of citations from one paper to the next backwards to find relevant papers.

Am I obsolete? Is the body of knowledge we create through publication now just grist for an AI search engine?

"Pinter: In 2026, Artificial Intelligence has become the primary consumer, parser, and filter of scholarly research. Large Language Models (LLMs) and specialized AI research assistants are entirely rewriting how scholars discover and synthesize literature (discoverability). If a monograph is not ingested into the core databases from which AI systems learn, it effectively ceases to exist for international science."

I begin to think we need a new global scientific effort to develop synthesize and integrate publications into a better catalog so that we can look papers up the same way we'd find a flight or a hotel reservation instead of hoping an AI will make the right connections.

#LLMs #ScientificResearch #ScientificPublishing

In mid-February, I set up a small informal seminar in my department, the "Semiautomatic Lean Working Group", to actively test out new LLM-based Leaning capabilities of commercially available models.

Until then, I had refused direct engagement with such systems, for any purpose whatsoever, but I could not look away any longer, especially due to what I understood about its impending impact on the journal business.

We set out to share our experiences, exchange technical tips, discuss the latest news, and try to understand this better. Rather quickly, the seminar evolved into more of a "support group", where we would joke at the latest over-stretched analogy, speculate on optimistic/pessimistic futures, admit to our token dependencies, and express our grief.

The working group has reached a natural coda, as the department (with broader university backing) has just set up a broader committee to grapple with the big shifts underway.

I learned a lot through the working group, went through a lot of phases, and am grateful to the other members for walking together in this journey. Building and strengthening connections, sharing and reflection with others, this is how we move forward in this.

#generativeAI #formalization #semiautomatic #lean #scientificpublishing

I have a feeling that we finally are getting some movement in the #polsci, specifically the #policystudies sphere around taking back control over our journals (current state is pretty awful). Just learned about the new Public Policy Journal, which is run by respected scholars, independently, and seems to run on #openjournalsystems. Cool!

https://publicpolicyjournal.org

#OpenScience #scientificpublishing

@deevybee

"by considering provenance of research, we risk moving back to a time when research was trusted only if it came from people with some kind of track record, and/or who were personally known to the reviewer or editor."

That has been my concern since LLMs started not being entirely nonsensical. I haven't yet seen any alternative to a web of trust.

All aggravated by soft money faculty positions, for-profit universities, and for-profit journals, which together create perverse incentives.

#academia #ScientificPublishing

Ars Technica: Peer review is overwhelmed—can it survive in the AI era?. “The number of papers indexed in the databases Scopus and Web of Science, for example, has recently been increasing exponentially, at a rate of 5.6 percent per year. By one estimate, researchers around the globe are devoting a collective 15,000 years of work to peer review every year—work that, if paid, would cost $1.5 […]

The State Scientific And Technical Library Of Ukraine, and machine-translated from Ukrainian: MES opens interactive dashboard “Specialized publications of Ukraine”. “As part of the work of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine to develop an open and transparent system of scientific professional publications, an interactive dashboard ‘Professional Publications of Ukraine’ was created. […]

Hundreds of free open access journals to receive significant financial support!
@ojcollective.bsky.social, which launched in January, has already raised £1.56 million of its £2.65 million target and will start to financially support 297 journals.

These journals include many of the journals in the Free Journals Network, which I'm on the Advisory Board of, but we plan to wind down as our journals join OJC! https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsepress/2026/07/29/the-power-of-collective-funding-for-open-access-publishing/ #scholarlypublishing #scientificpublishing

“Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations… a community of minds, reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars”*…

The sharing of experimental results and the underlying data is critical to the advance of science. Indeed, when I had the chance to do a scenario planning exercise with a collection of the leading research university librarians in the U.S. a couple of decades ago, the biggest threat/fear they surfaced was the concern that the free and open exchange of ideas and data, as manifest formally in scientific publication and informally in the collegial cooperation among scientists, would be occluded by an increasing proprietary embrace of knowledge.

73% of geneticists surveyed in an article in the 23/30 January 2002 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association agreed that although keeping data private may help the individual researcher, data hoarding is detrimental to the progress of science Still, sadly, that threat has grown since the turn of the millennium.

By way of current (and dramatic) example: as Celina Zhao reports, more than half of AI “unicorns” have never published a paper or preprint…

Today’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) startups make no shortage of bold promises. Their technologies, some boast, will revolutionize software development, drug discovery, and scientific research.

Yet a new preprint posted on 16 July on bioRxiv suggests many of these firms barely participate in one of science’s most fundamental practices: publicly documenting discoveries in scientific literature so other researchers can evaluate and build on them. More than half of AI unicorns—private companies valued at more than $1 billion—have never played a leading role in publishing a scientific paper or preprint, according to the new analysis. Collectively, they accounted for just one in every 1000 AI papers published in 2025.

“For a field that is supposedly reshaping science and is so advanced in terms of scientific potential, not having any scientific documentation seems like a very weird paradox,” says paper co-author John Ioannidis, a metascientist at Stanford University [see here]. “How can you judge that what they say is real, validated, and reproducible?” The scarcity of publications, others say, also makes it harder to assess AI’s social impacts, including energy use and safety.

But University of Alberta AI ethicist Mohamed Abdalla says the findings reflect the incentives facing commercial AI developers, rather than solely a failure to uphold scientific norms. “It’s not the company’s job to advance science, right?” he says. “The company’s job is to advance money.”

Ioannidis has long studied how unicorns, particularly in biotech, engage with the scientific literature. (In 2015, he was the first to publicly scrutinize the lack of peer-reviewed studies produced by Theranos, the blood testing startup that proved to be based on fraudulent data.) He wondered whether AI unicorns would show similar patterns.

To find out, he and his team first identified all 317 unicorn AI companies that have existed from 1998 to 2025. Then, they searched for publications affiliated with these startups—including journal articles, conference papers, reviews, and preprints. They selected those where a company researcher played a leading role as a first or last author, indicating the startup had made a substantial contribution to the work. The final data set included 2077 final publications, comprising 1389 peer-reviewed papers and 688 preprints.

More than half of the startups had never produced a single qualifying paper, the analysis revealed. Scientific influence proved even more concentrated, with the top 5% of firms accounting for greater than 90% of all citations. OpenAI alone was responsible for nearly 40% of all citations in the data set, followed by the Chinese computer vision company Megvii and the platform Hugging Face. And even at the most prolific companies, much of the output came from the same small group of repeat authors. For example, despite OpenAI employing roughly 4500 people, only eight researchers had authored five or more qualifying papers.

The findings are unsurprising to some AI researchers given how the industry is structured. For example, unlike the pharmaceutical industry, where published discoveries can be protected by patents, AI companies have learned they often gain little from publicly disclosing technical advances, says Nur Ahmed, an AI researcher at the University of Arkansas. Google’s landmark 2017 paper on the transformer—the architecture that underpins today’s large language models—has become a classic cautionary example, Abdalla adds. Although Google patented aspects of the technology, “I don’t think anybody’s paying Google for that,” he says.

Startups also operate on much faster timelines than academia, where peer review can lumber on for months or even years. That’s why many AI companies have embraced what Avijit Ghosh, an AI policy researcher at Hugging Face, calls the “blogification” of research: announcing new models and releasing code or data sets through blog posts and technical reports rather than scientific journals. The new analysis didn’t track those outputs, he points out.

For Ghosh, the debate shouldn’t center on publishing in journals versus blogs. What matters is whether companies are releasing enough code, data sets, or model weights (the numbers that determine how a model interprets and responds to a prompt) for others to independently verify and build on their work, he says.

The preprint also found that firms based in China consistently published more papers than their counterparts based in the United States. Whereas leading U.S. frontier labs have increasingly kept the details of their most capable models secret or “closed sourced,” leading Chinese companies have embraced “open-source” models. Moonshot AI, one of the Chinese startups included in the study, recently unveiled Kimi K3—one of the strongest open models to date—and publicly released its model weights through Hugging Face today.

But whether models are open or closed, the rapid pace toward increasingly powerful generalist AI worries Emma Pierson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. She argues AI research—whether published freely or kept secret—risks accelerating models that pose serious societal and safety concerns, including supercharging cyberattacks. “If we were racing forward on cancer-curing AI, I would be like, ’Fantastic, full steam ahead,’” she says. “But that’s not what we’re racing toward, right?”…

The secretive unicorns: “AI’s top startups are barely publishing their research,” from @science.org.

By way of example? In order to have a broader footprint in AI for (default proprietary) scientific discovery, Google moves away from a successful AI effort (that did publish): “Google DeepMind dismantles Nobel-winning AlphaFold team in strategy shift” (gift article from the FT). One wonders: when these LLMs run out of published papers on which to train, where (and how) will they source the knowledge they need to stay useful?

* Neil deGrasse Tyson

###

As we share and share alike, we might recall that it was on this date in 1887 that Chester A. Hodge of Beloit, Wisconsin received patent No. 367,398 for ‘spur rowel’ barbed wire (consisting of spur shaped wheels with 8 or 10 points mounted between 2 wires).  It was one of many patents for barbed wire (e.g., here), which spread across the American West rapidly (thanks, in no small measure to the guy featured in the almanac entry here)– and (by protecting farmers from foraging free-ranging cattle) paved the way for the expansion of wheat (and other kinds of) farming… even as it spelled the doom of a commons– the open range.

Our Managing Editor Dr. Barbara Hissa will talk about “A true open-access route: how to go diamond in the nanoscience field?” the 27th International Conference on Non-Contact Atomic Force Microscopy.

📍 Innsbruck, Austria
📅 August 4, 2026
🕔 5:20 pm CEST
➡️ https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjnano/news/WC4JNQBXURQ2QECDBFX264QE3Y?M=y

#EditorsTalk #EdiTours #ScientificPublishing #OpenScience #BJNANO 💎🔓

RE: https://post.lurk.org/@loriemerson/116935764227731524

The token [1] chasers creating more work for everybody. *You don’t say*

[1] Career progression tokens. Even this word has been usurped.

#academia #ScientificPublishing

Congratulations to the team behind the journal Innovations in Graph Theory, hosted on the Centre Mersenne platform, whose application to the DOAJ has just been accepted!

https://doaj.org/toc/3050-743X

Innovations in Graph Theory is a mathematical journal publishing high-quality research in graph theory including its interactions with other areas. The journal is diamond open access, meaning there are no charges for authors and no charges for readers.

#openaccess #DOAJ #scientificpublishing

Making scientific knowledge free for all https://theconversation.com/making-scientific-knowledge-free-for-all-286857

The three main approaches are Green OA, Gold OA and Diamond OA:

- Green OA : publishing in a traditional journal and then depositing an accepted but unformatted version of the manuscript in an Open Access archive or an institutional repository

- Gold OA: final article immediately accessible to everyone, but involves publication fees amounting (i.e. Article Processing Charge, APC) to several thousand euros, paid by the authors or their institutions

- Diamond OA: allows authors to publish content for free and gives readers free access, thanks to journals that are backed by scientific communities, university libraries or non-profit organisations.

#science #scientificPublishing

📢 Call for Papers: Journal of Solid Waste Valorization and Chemical Management

💡 The journal is rooted in the greendevelopment philosophy of "solid waste resource recovery and chemical risk control". Aiming to establish a professional academic platform.

📖 Join us — submit your work!

Journal Website: https://www.icjn.net/jswvcm

#SolidWaste #GreenChemistry #ZeroWaste #WasteToEnergy #CallForPapers #AcademicPublishing #ScientificPublishing #OpenAcess #OA

Due to my role as editor in a journal, I have just received a rather disturbing email from what I guess I would describe it as a scientific publication agency. Here is an excerpt:

"For manuscripts that successfully complete the journal's peer-review and editorial procedures, we are willing to pay an additional fee of up to 500 USD for accelerated review service. This fee would be separate from and additional to the journal's regular APC or publication charges."

Likely it is spam/scam, but it is hard to discount entirely, and it would reflect on a broken and further crumbling publishing system.

#scientificpublishing #scientificintegrity

Interesting wrinkle to my never quite finished stance on where to review and publish today.

I got a review request from the Journal of Human Geography. I look them up, they are published by SAGE, so I send my usual "I do not review for Big Publishing" response https://marioangst.com/en/blog/posts/dear-editors/

Then they actually get back with a note that they are a radical outfit (their page says they engage in "institutional socialism"), which does not make a profit and re-distributes all the money they get back from SAGE. I mean, that is quite cool and shows that it's not always so clear-cut.

I reconsidered, but in the end still decided not to review for them.

In effect, they are cool outfit who purchases publishing services from one of the big publishers. I do not have a problem in principle with companies providing scientific publishing services, as long as they don't extract excessive value from our work. SAGE might not do that for Human Geography, but definitely does as a whole.

So, after these considerations, I still do not think this aligns with my principles on where I contribute my reviewing labour. Especially as there are many other initiatives who actually have taken back the means of communications themselves. With Open Journal Systems software and recent initiatives like Open Research Europe, I just think we are at a different point in time now, where there are just not that many excuses to go with Big Publishing left.

#scientificpublishing #academia #publishing #OpenScience

Before submitting a paper, checking a journal’s publishing behavior may now be as important as reading its aims.

New tools use open databases to highlight suspicious shifts in output and authorship.

🔗 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01707-1

#OpenScience #ResearchIntegrity #ScientificPublishing #DataScience #AcademicPublishing

When I recently did a literature review of English-language scientific articles, I thought things were bad.

But now I review articles in German and things are much, much worse: No DOIs, no online access, articles available only in print at a small university a day trip away … articles published in a journal discontinued in 1984, and articles only available on an obscure CD-ROM that needs Windows 98 to display its content. 😶

#ScientificPublishing

"Why have papers by one of history's most famous physicists been retracted?" <https://doi.org/10.1126/science.zwsaifa>

> In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature? [...]
>
> The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. [...]
>
> Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95. [...]
>
> Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.” The company also nixed an editorial that Scarlata planned to write about the retractions.
>
> The retraction of the second Planck paper, published in 1940, left Gingras and Khelfaoui even more baffled. It also cited copyright violation—yet the piece had never appeared elsewhere. Then Khelfaoui noticed something that added to suspicions that an algorithm was at work.

Here's one of the retracted papers on Springer: <https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01475382>. Luckily still on Archive: <https://archive.org/details/sim_naturwissenschaften_1942-02-27_30_9-10>

#science #scientificpublishing #academia #springer

Die @dfg_public hat ein Video zum wissenschaftsgeleiteten Publizieren veröffentlicht.

#ScientificPublishing

https://youtu.be/vjckj9Hp1RY

Sometimes I still can't wrap my head around how messy #ScientificPublishing is.

I have user accounts at 3 different universities, and for a simple literature review I need all three of them but still don't have access to all articles I need to read.

Also, during my search I came across articles published in peer-review journals of the most renowned scientific publishers … and they're full of errors.

PS: If I have to click one more #CloudFlare captcha, I will run amok. (Not really, but still…)

Together with our Editor-in-Chief, Gerhard Wilde, our Managing Editor Dr. Barbara Hissa will give an invited talk as part of the spring/summer series 2026 of the Israel Vacuum Society (IVS).

The talk will take place online on June 25, 2026 at 1:00 pm CEST.

Participation is free ➡️
https://www.ivs.org.il/_files/ugd/ab9e6a_308d24dec1464c70947096a506a4ff50.pdf

#EditorsTalk #EdiTours #ScientificPublishing #DiamondOpenAccess #OpenScience #BJNANO 💎🔓

@rupdecat @KorinnaAllhoff

Indeed: APCs of like £100 / paper, if that; likely far less [1]. And ideally, of that amount per submission, which correlates far more with actual work to do [2].

[1] Such as in fields like machine learning https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/

[2] https://albert.rierol.net/tell/20161008_Breaking_even_in_scientific_publishing.html

#ScientificPublishing

From Alex Eve (executive director of the society journal Development) and James Briscoe (editor-in-chief of Development):

"We contend that Development is a key example that demonstrates the lack of correlation between the impact factor metric, and the trust, reputation and scientific rigour of the articles we publish."

"The elephant in the room: impact factor"
Alex Eve and James Briscoe, 2026 editorial
https://journals.biologists.com/dev/article/153/12/dev205838/371997/The-elephant-in-the-room-impact-factor

#Development #ScientificPublishing #DevBio #ImpactFactor

@KorinnaAllhoff

At least PLoS is a non-profit, and publishes its finances. Editors are often not professional, and yes, APCs make no sense when authors, reviewers and editors are all practicing scientists. Hosting a bunch of PDFs and the editorial management software does not cost nowhere near as much per paper.

I only review and edit for non-profit journals. If we all did the same the for-profit journals would soon collapse, because they rely completely on our unpaid labour of us academics. (If they attempt to circumvent our boicot with LLMs, well, whatever happens to them will be well-deserved and self-inflicted.)

#ScientificPublishing

Preprints are bad because we need peer review to ensure quality and integrity of the scientific record. 🤥😜

🤑🤑🤑 #Elsevier

#ScientificPublishing #SciPub 🧪

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4x4id4pf2mryakvmphrpi2eb/post/3moph2kceuc2x

The problem is not APCs, the problem is rent-extraction of #ScientificPublishing by for-profits. It's senseless.

But pay those same APCs to someone like CoB? They'll find their way towards sponsoring conferences, travel awards, studentships, etc...

Nothing wrong with that!

2/2

The TLDR: Impact Inflation tells you when a journal is "punching above their weight", or have an "inflated value" in terms of IF. Golf rules, lower is better. IF is a flawed metric. Impact Inflation normalizes the IF so you can tell what it means. #SciPub #ScientificPublishing

The strain on scientific publi...

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x6bajgevb6y6m5w6zplsbr35/post/3moll7ze3w22q

@thetransmitter

Scientific publishing has barely adapted to the internet ... but sure likes to profit from LLM-generated papers that bring those sweet APCs.

#ScientificPublishing