Julien Cloarec
LightNews LightNews
banner
juliencloarec.com
Julien Cloarec
@juliencloarec.com
430 followers 150 following 12 posts
Full Professor | Vice-President for Digital Strategy and Artificial Intelligence | Director of the iaelyon Center for Artificial Intelligence • Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
chenchenzhang.net
"Rather than democratizing scientific publishing, Open Access has helped commercial publishers generate more profits".
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · Nov 11
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.
December 4, 2025 at 12:52 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
annemascret.bsky.social
Même si les budgets initiaux sont toujours plus pessimistes que les comptes certifiés, ce tour d'horizon d'AEF dans 11 universités montre que la situation budgétaire se dégrade en raison de l'accumulation des mesures étatiques non compensées sur +sieurs années
www.aefinfo.fr/depeche/7429...
Budgets initiaux 2026 : tour d
Des résultats prévisionnels en déficit, des seuils prudentiels qui se dégradent et parfois qui sont dépassés, des campagnes d’emplois réduites… C’est...
www.aefinfo.fr
December 22, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
garjoh.bsky.social
Appeared on today's Marketplace Tech podcast to discuss the challenges & benefits of integrating ads in AI search engines.

www.marketplace.org/episode/2025...
The challenges of integrating ads in AI search engines
Garrett Johnson, professor of marketing at Boston University, shares his thoughts on the nuanced challenges of adding advertising to generative AI search platforms.
www.marketplace.org
December 18, 2025 at 7:44 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
ireneer.bsky.social
Où les copains de @limitesnumeriques.bsky.social reviennent sur leurs travaux sur les interfaces numériques, concluant que l'IA, c'est de la vente forcée (même si c'est "gratuit"). Dans le contexte du "Digital omnibus", pas sûr que l'appel soit entendu.
www.lemonde.fr/sciences/art...
« La manière particulièrement agressive dont les entreprises poussent à l’adoption de l’IA doit nous inquiéter » Tribune Anaëlle Beignon designer numérique et doctorante en design à l’université de Strasbourg Nolwenn Maudet designer numérique et maîtresse de conférences à l’université de Strasbourg Thomas Thibault designer numérique, spécialisé dans les enjeux écologiques, membre de Designers éthiques Dans une tribune au « Monde », des chercheurs proposent d’interdire aux acteurs du numérique de forcer les usagers à utiliser des fonctionnalités d’intelligence artificielle, souvent activées par défaut.
December 17, 2025 at 8:28 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
signal.org
If you’ve felt safer sending a message because you sent it on Signal, please support our work. As a nonprofit, Signal exists because of your donations.

In the app: Settings > Donate
On the web: Signal.org/donate
Donate to Signal Private Messenger
Your donation helps pay for the development, servers, and bandwidth of an app used by millions around the world for private and instantaneous communication. Please make a donation today.
Signal.org
December 17, 2025 at 6:07 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
alexis-verger.cpesr.fr
" if you need an LLM to provide the text for you, it may be because you are unwilling to do the thinking."
December 17, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
alexis-verger.cpesr.fr
We all need to be far more skeptical about the "promises" of AI in academia.

This hands a terrifying amount of power to AI companies.

And if we’re delegating all the critical thinking to AI (generate papers, summarize papers, review grants and papers, analyse data), this is the end of academia.
December 16, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
mrmunchertoyou.bsky.social
Just so I'm clear on this, computer memory has tripled in price because a bunch of it that hasn't been produced yet has been ordered to populate GPUs that aren't installed in data centers that aren't built yet in order to service a demand that doesn't exist to make profits that don't happen.
December 15, 2025 at 12:21 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
timnitgebru.bsky.social
When this "AI" bubble pops, the men pretending they weren't pushing the hype, like "critics" whose position is "AGI is real but LLMs aren't the way," who were in eugenicist and "AI existential risk"🙄 circles, will get specials discussing what they saw coming, when its the women who told you so.
December 10, 2025 at 8:52 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
ferrydanini.bsky.social
I'm sorry, DNA?
anneapplebaum.bsky.social Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.bsky.social · 10d
It's not just social media. Looks like visitors to the US from Europe and other countries that are part of the visa waiver program will have to submit an enormous amount of data about themselves and their families, including DNA, if proposed new rules are accepted
December 12, 2025 at 6:32 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
proton.me
We’re building an Internet where people are before profits; Carissa Veliz’s new book Prophecy shows how Big Tech’s analytics betray that mission. Discover what links CEOs and medieval astrologers this April… 👇

https://www.carissaveliz.com/prophecy
December 10, 2025 at 9:25 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
ianhussey.mmmdata.io
I am not anti LLM across the board. But if your use case starts with the necessary assumption that the model is a vessel of all human knowledge, then you are consulting an oracle not doing scientific research.
December 10, 2025 at 10:17 AM
juliencloarec.com
Je viens de découvrir cette information. Quel piètre Léonard je fais...
pverschu.bsky.social Pierre Verschueren @pverschu.bsky.social · 13d
Y'a bien la Sorbonne à Roscoff, hein
December 9, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
hyderules.bsky.social
L'IA dans la recherche, très très loin de nous faire gagner du temps et produire du savoir, nous en fait perdre en facilitant les comportements non éthiques tout en nous obligeant à nous transformer en flics.
December 8, 2025 at 11:57 AM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
hyderules.bsky.social
J'accepte d'évaluer un article, dont le sujet m'intéresse, dans une bonne revue. Je le feuillète, et très vite je tombe sur au moins deux citations qui n'existent pas, dont une à mon propre travail. Misère de "l'intelligence artificielle", une fois de plus.
December 8, 2025 at 9:47 AM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
anamartinovici.bsky.social
Regular reminder to use R Projects and the `here` package. Future you will be happy tidyverse.org/blog/2017/12...
Project-oriented workflow
Advice on workflows for developing R scripts. How to think about whether an action belongs in the script or elsewhere.
tidyverse.org
December 8, 2025 at 3:49 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
lakens.bsky.social
In my paper Sample Size Justification I discuss 6 approaches to justifying sample sizes. The focus of the paper is to teach people the tools they need to be honest when they explain where their sample size comes from. I know, so radical ;) online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art...
December 7, 2025 at 10:12 AM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
rawx.bsky.social
Oh look, AI research has it's first AI-slop Sokal affair:

"A single person claims to have authored 113 academic papers on artificial intelligence this year, 89 of which will be presented this week at one of the world’s leading conference on AI and machine learning".
Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’
AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a ‘disaster’
www.theguardian.com
December 6, 2025 at 7:47 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
naitian.org
A couple years (!) in the making: we’re releasing a new corpus of embodied, collaborative problem solving dialogues. We paid 36 people to play Portal 2’s co-op mode and collected their speech + game recordings.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.03381
Website: berkeley-nlp.github.io/portal-dialo...

1/n
A figure demonstrating the different aspects of the corpus described in the tweet. There is a main isomorphic 3D view of a level in the Portal 2 co-op game, with some portals, lasers, and the blue and orange players. Inset, there are first-person captures of the blue and orange player views. There is also a box containing the transcribed dialogue with timestamps and labels for the discursive acts. Finally, there is a box containing a task and a list of subtasks. Some subtasks are already crossed out, with the time that they have been completed. The last subtask ("Player 2 places portal 4 on wall 4") is marked incomplete. The dialogue is as follows: Blue: Can you put your other portal up here? (tagged as directive) Orange: Where? (tagged as request for clarification) Blue: On uh, on this wall. (tagged as directive) Blue: So that it uh points at the circle. (tagged as directive) Orange: Okay. (tagged as commit) The full list of subtasks is: Task: Redirect lasers Subtask: Player 1 places portal 1 on wall 1. (completed) Subtask: Player 1 polaces portal 2 on wall 2 or 3. (completed) Subtask: Player 2 places portal 3 opposite of portal 2. (completed) Subtask: Player 2 places portal 4 on wall 4. (incomplete)
December 5, 2025 at 6:54 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
proton.me
You requested it, now it’s here - introducing Proton Sheets! The privacy-first alternative to Excel and Google Sheets.

Spreadsheets form the framework of modern businesses, and with Proton Sheets, you can ensure your data is private and secure.

1/4
December 4, 2025 at 12:30 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
lakens.bsky.social
P-values do each of these things *better* than Bayes factors, through equivalence testing, sequential analysis, and meta-analysis. Better, because you get error control, so you do not make false claims too often. 2/2
December 4, 2025 at 12:11 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
lakens.bsky.social
3 Bayesian lies, from a preprint abstract: "Unlike p-values, Bayes factors allow for quantifying support both for and against the existence of an effect, facilitate ongoing evidence monitoring, and maintain coherent long-run behavior as additional studies are incorporated." 1/2
December 4, 2025 at 12:06 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
monniauxd.bsky.social
Blaguons sur les GPU. Vers 2000, ils étaient conçus pour faire du rendu graphique pour les jeux 3D - précision arithmétique non garantie. Puis on les a améliorés pour pouvoir faire du calcul scientifique (plus grande précision, respect de IEEE-754…).

MAIS
December 3, 2025 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Julien Cloarec
nora.bz
on rappelle toutefois que ce n'est pas l'IA qui supprime des emplois, mais les patrons. www.liberation.fr/economie/eco...
L’IA a pris leur emploi : «On ne pensait pas que ce serait si violent»
Ex-employé de Microsoft, graphiste, traducteur… Cinq Français racontent à «Libé» comment l’intelligence artificielle a fait chuter leurs revenus, supprimé leur métier ou remplacé leurs postes du jour ...
www.liberation.fr
December 2, 2025 at 11:54 PM