Ven Popov
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venpopov.bsky.social
Ven Popov
@venpopov.bsky.social
63 followers 140 following 28 posts
I build mathematical models to understand cognition and behavior. Care about history and philosophy of science.
Tenured Senior Scientist, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich.
https://venpopov.com
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venpopov.bsky.social
The academic publishing system is so rotten, it must be completely dismantled. Not partially, and not improved. Dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.

When I tell non-academic friends how it all works they stare at me in disbelief. Not only that it exists, but that we still allow it to.
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 1d
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 12, 2025 at 9:24 AM
venpopov.bsky.social
I love wikipedia. Why, yes, I'm glad a counterexample exists, without it I was still skeptical 😆

"All horses are the same color" - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_hor...
November 12, 2025 at 9:11 AM
venpopov.bsky.social
A followup response from @olsonscholcomm.bsky.social after @briannosek.bsky.social’s last email message I reported in the article. I do hope this is taken as seriously as it should. As others replied to my original post, this faulty spam handling is not new. Policy needs to be fundamentally reworked
November 8, 2025 at 11:26 AM
Reposted by Ven Popov
philippmusfeld.bsky.social
To not get this wrong: I am a huge supporter of OSF / COS and think they did an incredible job to make science more open and transparent to everyone. Stuff like this can happen, it’s good that they are identified and reported. Let’s just hope that incidents like this make the platform even stronger.
November 6, 2025 at 8:32 PM
venpopov.bsky.social
A recent redesign of OSF by @cos.io led to widespread access failures. What began as a few broken download links became for me a total disappearance of eight years of DOI-registered work. What happened, how was it resolved, and what it reveals about trust and infrastructure in open science
Open Science needs reliable infrastructure – Ven Popov
After OSF’s October 2025 redesign, I discovered that eight years of DOI-linked preprints and materials were silently hidden by an automated spam flag. What happened, how it was resolved, and what it r...
venpopov.com
November 6, 2025 at 6:13 PM