It doesn't surprise me it happens within the Elsevier ecosystem.
Elsevier has a long tradition of scientific misconduct and scientifically immoral behavior (see Wikipedia).
The operating margin of Elsevier is around 40% which is huge! At the end mostly paid by tax-payer money.
Personally, I never review or publish with Elsevier.
MDPI is gamed by design, I think that while Elsevier is awful, MDPI is even worse with 100s of special issues where you are guaranteed to land publication in journals with quite nice IF (which is inflated by publishing large proportion of reviews and less original research).
I wonder if the term "published" as a binary distinction applied to a piece of writing is a term and concept that is reaching the end of its useful life.
"Peer reviewed" as a binary concept might be as well, given that incentives have aligned to greatly reduce its filtering power.
They might both be examples of metrics that became useless as a result of incentives getting attached to them.
I'm certain that the comment you responded to never claimed that it was "isolated to Elsevier" in the first place, nor is it very compelling to speculate about how in the future something even worse might emerge.
Right now Elsevier is by far the biggest offender and also happens to the be the topic of the conversation and the article.
Exactly. Elsevier is a dominant company. Of course it's going to have a huge share of anything that goes into journals. They probably also have a huge share of the Nobel prize winning papers too.
That being said, I'm happy to encourage open access.
One of the reasons why in Germany universities were able to collectively negotiate better open publishing deals with Wiley and Springer, but Elsevier just flat out refused to agree to any better terms for three years.
I've heard of Chris but not too well. This guy does not f*c$ around, don't get on his bad side.
The state of research is dire at the moment. The whole ecosystem is cooked. Reproducibility is non-existent. This obvious cartel is a symptom and there should be exemplary punishment.
Publishers are commercially incentivized to simply maximize profit and engagement. The main actors are academics and most of them try to uphold the high standards and ethics. Yes there is free-riding, backstabbing and a lot of politics but there is also reputation and honesty.
A few academics give academia a bad name, at the worst possible time and when society needs honest, reliable, reproducible and targetted research the most.
There's a bunch of needlessly inflammatory bullshit in that article. "Innumerate woke Bolshevik" and making fun of someone because he thinks she looks like a Harry Potter character. This guy seems like nothing more than a high school bully. E-mailing someone asking them to respond is nothing more than a fig leaf.
Huh? The linked article is nothing more than "this guy is black, so therefore helping any underprivileged black people gain university admissions is bad"
It's outrageous racism. A conclusion about all minorities based on one person's math mistake, where the logic is entirely based on shared skin color.
If you replace the races and make it a conclusion about legacy admissions or something, it's obviously stupid and illogical, right?
"This white guy doesn't know Afghanistan from Kazakhstan. More proof legacy admissions is bad!"
All of academic publishing has fallen victim to Goodhart's law.
Our metrics for judging the quality of academic information are also the metrics for deciding the success of an academic's career. They are destined to be gamed.
We either need to turn peer review into an adversarial system where the reviewer has explicit incentives to find flaws and can advance their career by doing it well, or else we need totally different metrics for judging publications (which will probably need to evolve continuously).
I have no doubt that there are honest academics who publish research which actually contributes to humanity's corpus of knowledge. Whether that is some new insight into the past, observations on nature and man's interaction with it, clever chemical advances, or medical innovations which benefit mankind. People who publish works which will be looked upon as seminal and foundational in a decade or two, but also works which just focus on some particular detail and which will be of use to many researchers in the future.
But I can't shake the impression that a lot, perhaps the vast majority, of science consists of academics (postdocs and untenured researchers in particular I suppose) stuck in the publish-or-perish cycle. Pushing pointless papers where some trivial hypothesis is tested and which no one will ever use or read — except perhaps to cite for one reason or another, but rarely because it makes academic sense. Now with added slop, because why wouldn't you if the work itself is already as good as pointless?
Most scientists want to do good science. They get intrinsic meaning and satisfaction in doing so. But with any large group of people there will be a few bad faith actors that will manipulate any exploit in the system for their own personal benefit. The problem here is that 'the system' of academic appointments, and even more importantly, funding sources, are built around this publishing metric. This forces even the good faith scientists to behave poorly because it was a requisite to even being able to exist as a working researcher.
0. I think your perspective is really detached from the actual scientific enterprise. I think this kind of take exists when there are cultural clashes combined with a strong focus in the media and online with the mistakes and issues in science, not its successes.
Science is actually progressing at an amazing rate in recent years. We are curing diseases and understanding more about life and the universe faster than ever.
Like all of these are just from the past month or two and are pretty astounding advances. And they are just a subset of all of the scientific advances recently. All of them have contributors in academia (and science performed outside of academia would not exist without academia, as it depends upon it for most of the conceptual advances as well of course as for scientist training).
1. Stuff like paper mills and complete fraudsters exist, but for the most part, these things are the exception, not the rule. Your average scientist doesn't even hear or think about these things and the weirdos who cause them, to be honest. Nobody has ever heard of "International Review of Financial Analysis" outside of an extremely niche economics subfield.
2. "Public or perish" is not a cycle, really. While I believe it's not good for people to be constantly working under pressure, the fact that academia is so competitive currently is a healthy sign. It's because we have so many people with extremely impressive resumes and backgrounds, doing extremely impressive work, that makes funding so competitive. And when funding is competitive, it's no wonder that funders prefer to fund people who have produced something and told the world about it ("publish").
3. Fraudsters and hucksters have been in science forever. Go read an account of science in the early 19th century. There are tons and tons of stories of crazy scientists who believed ridiculous things, scientists who kept pushing wrong dogma, and so on. And yet nobody knows about them today, because the evolutionary process of science works: the truths that are empirically verifiable win out, and, given enough time, the failures are selected against.
Fantastic effort post and the necessary dose of fresh air to balance out hedonic skepticism.
The collapse in faith of institutions in various ways, for different reasons has created a vibe that gives any criticism of any institution has a whiff of plausibility, and these days that's all you need for some people to treat it as settled fact. That is basically what I think the poisoned and anti intellectual attitude of hedonic skepticism is all about.
The pace of technological advance over the past 5-10 years is staggering in so many ways. If our era weren't known for collapse of democracies and conflict, it could have been heralded as a major historical moment of technological advance on a number of levels.
One cartel gone, incentive structure intact. Academic prestige is entirely mediated through journal placement, so whoever controls prestige journals can extract rents indefinitely. Elsevier did not invent this, they just ran it more aggressively.
The fix is not enforcement. It is tenure committees that stop treating impact factors as proxies for researcher quality. Until that changes, any successor recreates the same behavior. The cartel is a symptom.
Elsevier is certainly evil, but I would say the root issue is the practices of the institutions where these "authors" are employed. This kind of thing is academic misconduct and should result in them losing their jobs.
This goes deeper than the institutions, actually. The KPI for many (non-industrial) researchers is the number of publications and citations. That's what careers and funding depends on.
Goodhart's law states "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", and that's what we see here. There is a strong incentive to publish more instead of better. Ideas are spread into multiple papers, people push to be listed as authors, citations are fought for, and some become dishonest and start with citation cartels, "hidden" citations in papers (printed small in white-on-white, meaning it's indexed by citation crawlers but not visible to reviewers) and so forth.
This also destroys the peer review system upon which many venues depend. Peer reviews were never meant to catch cheaters. The huge number of low-to-medium quality papers in some fields (ML, CV) overworks reviewers, leading to things like CVPR forcing authors to be reviewers or face desk rejection. AI papers, AI reviews of dubious quality slice in even more.
Ultimately the only true fix for this is to remove the incentives. Funding and careers should no longer depend on the sheer number of papers and citations. The issue is that we have not really found anything better yet.
As for an alternative, how about using the social fabric of researchers and institutes instead? A few centuries of science ran on it before somebody had the great idea to introduce "objective" metrics which made things worse. Reintroducing that today would probably cause a larger spread in the quality of research, which is good: research is kind of a "hit-driven industry" - higher highs are the most important thing. The best researchers will do the best research, probably better without carrot and stick than with.
> As for an alternative, how about using the social fabric of researchers and institutes instead? A few centuries of science ran on it before somebody had the great idea to introduce "objective" metrics which made things worse.
Oh boy, you seem to be missing the forest for the trees.
When science was a hobby of the rich, there was no need to measure output. Only when "scientist" became a career and these scientists started demanding government funding (which only really crystallized in the 20th century), then we started needing a way to measure output.
You could try doing away with an objective measure of academic output and replace it with the "social fabric of researchers and institutes" (whatever the fuck that means) instead , but then all you'd have is a good ol' boys club funded by taxpayer money.
What the guarantee is that folks won't abuse this system in the same way they do the citation system? The recommendation letter system is often abused for the pettiest of reasons...
The decision makers who are the target audience for these metrics value "objective" data. They value the appearance of being quantitative, but lack the intellectual tools to distinguish between quantitative science and pseudoscience with numbers bolted on.
A few centuries of science of white males. While I agree that the system with ”objective metrics” has a lot of problems, but just removing it would bring us back to the old days when almost all science was done by a few privileged white men.
Almost all science was done by "a few privleged white men" because Europe and the Americas were the only places that had modernized with large central states, university systems, and educational systems. Even in that scenario before the "objective metrics" of the post-war system came about, we still had people like Madam Curie and Ramanujan being able to work with stellar results. The idea that somehow academia would stonewall all of the non-whites is absurd.
It’s really hard to come up with better examples of the exceptions that prove the rule than Marie Curie and Ramanujan. How many more names can you come up with?
I’d even argue that still today women and minorities are strongly disadvantaged at many institutions. I’d say that as a white male that recently left academia myself. I have seen how some of my colleagues have been treated.
What you describe is still a problem with the institutions, because it is ultimately the institutions that provide the incentives (in the form of jobs). You're right that they're using bad metrics, but it is the institutions who are making those bad decisions based on the bad metrics.
There are lots of better things, like people making hiring and firing decisions based on their evaluation of the content of papers they have actually read, instead of just a number. If someone is publishing so many papers that a hiring committee can't even read a meaningful fraction of them, that should be a red flag in itself, rather than a green one.
It's true that hire and tenure decisions are under the institution's control. But a lot of funding comes from external sources, and most public funding uses some sort of publication-based metric. There are exceptions, but that's the game.
The CV of your PhD's is often judged by the publication list and the corresponding citations. That's research institutes where they might go, other universities, large companies etc. will look at this. It's difficult to change this system as isolated player, and coordinates efforts so far failed on the "what else" question.
A problem with the public sector in this instance is it has money to spend, but no way of allocating it particularly well.
It will just pick the best allocation metric it has available, even if that metric would never stand up to scrutiny in the private sector, or any more directly measured domain, public or private.
I think the state could simply allocate money to long-lived scientific institutions and let the experts there handle things as long as there is no obvious corruption.
Self-regulation has a tendency to either work well for a few years, then gradually become corrupted... or be corrupt from the beginning.
A distressingly high percentage of humans like zero-sum status games. More people are happier when status is recognized as a semi-unbounded positive-sum game.
To dig even deeper into the problem: you have to get a large number of institutions to agree to stop this at once, none will voluntarily risk their (generally) working pipeline and system first. It disrupts a lot of different things and takes them out of the currently established model that everyone still uses to measure success. It reminds me of how most people who say “well not everyone should go to college!” Are obviously omitting “…except for my kids of course.” It borders on an expressive response, it’s not something anyone wants to actually take action on.
There’s not a whole lot to gain for the individual or even the institution unless they hit an absolute home run on the first try that also shows positive results very quickly. More than likely the decision will be questioned at every turn
And incorrect assumptions. As I understand it, "I did a study on this and it turns out there's no connection" generally results in the study not being published (if the study was testing for the validity of the connection)... which is sad, because that's still useful information to have.
Elsevier had no reason to stop this. Inflated citations mean higher impact factors, and higher impact factors justify higher subscription prices. Lucey published 56 papers in one year, the publisher got better metrics to sell. Hard to call that a rogue actor..
Right — and once someone is pumping out 56 papers/year, the journal becomes dependent on their output. Who in the chain is going to flag a problem that looks like productivity from every direction?
The detection lag is telling -- this only got caught because an external journalist spotted the pattern. Elsevier had every incentive to keep looking the other way (higher impact factors = higher subscription prices). Self-regulation won't fix this. The publisher's quality control function and its profit motive point in opposite directions.
We need open publishing. This is why Elsevier etc... use an outdated business model.
That Elsevier now also runs more into fake-articles and fake-research, all fueled by the money-addiction, just adds to the problem (and also invalidates Elsevier's model, by the way - why do we now have to deal with fake science that is costly? That is Elsevier's business model). I fail to see why taxpayers money has to go into private companies for research already financed by the taxpayers. We are paying twice here, Elsevier.
Spot on, and beyond the 'double-dipping' business model of "academic publishers" like Elsevier and Springer, there’s a massive systemic issue: taxpayers fund >90% of foundational research, only for private pharma/bio/tech firms to add a thin layer of additional research (or design) on top and then lock it behind patents for decades. Another example of how private interests are offloading the risk and costs to taxpayers while privatizing all the rewards.
"only for private pharma/bio/tech firms to add a thin layer of additional research (or design) on top"
Citation needed.
Go to market cost billions and takes a decade. Doesn't sound like a thin layer. I'm not disputing fundamental research in academia is an essential fuel to keep innovation engines running. But the contributions of biotech is not "thin".
It can be. See glp1. Yes, whoever first came up with that approach is brilliant. But then the lemmings followed now a half dozen or so companies are peddling more or less the same product. And it comes at the cost of what isn’t getting investment at scale instead.
Any taxpayer subsidized industry or subject is a massive magnet for this sort of "complex business that you can't dumb down or eli5 without making it look like a racket because it's fundamentally a racket with responsibility diffused to obfuscate it" stuff because taxpayer money has the most distant of principal agent problem and the government optimizes for "cog in the machine with blinders" employees and silo'd organizations who only care about their own ass so nobody ever takes a step back and says "hey the taxpayer is getting ripped off" until the ripoff is so obvious the taxpayers leann on the politicians.
One of the things that is so deceptive is the way so many people think that ways to make money need to be both obvious and proven.
Of course you have to be very good at math or natural science to be able to figure out how to support your own research so you can get way more accomplished than you could at a unversity.
All others need not apply.
Most universities wouldn't act on your application anyway, if you got very far without being on the academic track, that could make lots of people look bad who would prefer to keep the status-quo more restrictive.
Edit: The threat to the status-quo must have gotten bigger than I thought, defensive reactions are popping up quicker than ever.
I have to be honest, I do not understand what you want to say with your comment.
My point is that outside of fields which can somehow make money through research, not much scientific progress is made outside of universities. I don't see how you address this.
It would have taken my whole life if I had stayed and gotten my PhD anyway, so why not?
People can't expect dramatically different approaches to research to do anything but make it difficult for deep understanding between them.
You really have to have an open mind.
I see raw scientific progress that many outside of instiutions do not recognize, because so many brilliant experimentalists do not have institutional credentials.
So I had a head start and took advantage of it, kept giving chemistry lessons to colleagues as they went through graduate school.
Even invented something really cool in one of their labs when I wasn't even a student any more.
Naturally I have the greatest respect for PhDs in general because that in itself is a major achievement.
But I wouldn't have gotten this far in such a non-industrial environment, core industriousness might just be a differentiation factor.
It took a long time but eventually I came to the point where I just do science every day because I'm a scientist, and make money as a byproduct of what I do.
No different than a university lab where 90% - 99% of your experiments will never pay off, if you can't handle it under a variety of financial and/or institutional situations you might need to look at reasons why like I did.
Plus with a lifetime of more intense experimentation than if I had a PhD (really do not compare myself to others) I've got zillions of financial opportunities with chemicals in particular. The most important thing turned out to be curtailing the desire to make as much money as possible, most of this stuff is toxic.
Any kind of treadmill could have led to a much worse outcome.
That is kind of my point. Outside of a few fields (some branches of chemistry certainly being one of the exceptions) will someone pay you to do your research.
I just pulled up the newest published math paper from arxiv. No one except universities will pay you to research "Quenched path limits and periodization stability for tilted Brownian motion in Poissonian potentials on Hd"
Just because your specific thing you are interested in researching has value to the free market, doesn't mean that all are so lucky.
I'm with you to a very good extent, but there are so many more promising individuals that universities just haven't had enough room for the vast majority, for quite some time.
We are all lucky that universities will still pay for advanced math progress like you have cited.
Especially math, I stuck with that pretty good before I was allowed to touch chemicals.
One of the real advantages is that all you need is a blackboard and chalk, the progress you can make is quite a bit compared to so many other things.
As an outsider I observe the lucky ones to be the few that the universities are willing to pay. I think it would be better if there were more openings and better pay too.
I know what you mean, but nobody has paid me to do research since 1982 when I was working for a commercial research startup.
That's just what I do, and never wanted to stop.
I needed to be able to pursue whatever was within reach, knowing that almost none of it was going to be interesting to anybody else, financially viable or even worth money at all. Otherwise I would have actually stayed at the university.
My most valuable milestones may be in electronics anyway where I have no university training. Had a whole lot earlier start there though.
After a lifetime as an outlier, the consistent observation is that most of the institutional systems screen out more raw talent than they employ.
I may seem extreme but it's good for somebody to strongly represent viable alternatives for that talent so maybe there will be more alternatives someday.
I have always thought that universities should expand to encompass more of what they are doing right too, but I wasn't going to hold my breath :)
Industry doesn’t really care about research that doesn’t advance the portfolio or function essentially as a demonstration of something in their portfolio. Academia is where research actually happens.
This was getting obvious even before the 1970's when university attendance went wild.
>Academia is where B/C-list performers pretend they are A-list.
The ones having top credentials and little more have gotten more & more outnumbered by more capable thinkers every decade, it's been nothing but circling the wagons which ends up creating more of an insular environment for those who love eminence and an exclusive status more than anything else.
The folks at Elsevier turned a blind eye for as long as they could because it was profitable. It's such a common story that no one even feigns to be surprised.
Being an extractive business seeking to maintain a chokehold on scientists and their institutions is the least of Elsevier's problems.
More problematic for Elsevier is that the current system of "peer review" may turn out be a failed experiment in the history of science:
> A tenured professor hinted she might try to get me fired. A person with a PhD accused me of “cynical metacognitive polywaffle,” which a good name for a postmodern noise band. I got some weird and vaguely threatening emails, including one that had a screenshot of my personal website with my improv experience highlighted, proof that I am literally a clown. Which is, I guess, true.
I've boycotted reviewing for Elsevier for years, but it's easy for me - I'm in CS, where ACM, USENIX and IEEE offer higher-status publication venues and Elsevier journals are decidedly second-tier.
Mid-way I realized this was AI writing (took me a while), then I read a quote in the text about a comment that "The tragedy isn’t that they cheated; it’s that the system was designed to let them thrive for a decade before anyone bothered to look at the data." I didn't find this comment in EJMR, or anywhere on the internet except the OP post, for that matter.
amusing when the quality of a journal is measured by denying papers. kind of reminds me of one of the last People I (Mostly) Admire interviews, with Michael Crow of Arizona State https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-new-kind-of-university where he critiques elite universities as measuring their value on how many students they reject, which ultimately makes them infeasible as institutions to distribute knowledge as much as possible
I feel like my papers are better for having gone through peer review, and I'm a better researcher for having had a few rejections. Of course the reviewers can't hover around in your lab watching everything you do. But even if reviewers can't check the validity of the evidence in your paper, they do a pretty good job ensuring that the claims you make are supported by the evidence you present. That's a valuable if imperfect guardrail! What would be the alternative?
Peer review has never been an indication of truth, validity, or utility.
It's only ever been an opportunity for other scientists (ideally more competitive than they are today) to see if they can spot some methodological problem.
That's completely upside down take. The problem with peer review is not that it does not allow good papers to get published (that rarely happens, almost all good papers get published!), but that shitty papers get published!
Almost hoped for an analysis about what, how, and why happened, but it turns out that Elsevier has little to do with the story and the author had a Twitter spat with someone years ago and is now celebrating the fact that the other side has been shown to do what? for which some of their papers had been retracted. Yes, I'm as confused.
Publishers have the final say in appointing editors in chief (EIC) and editors. So they bear the ultimate responsibility for holding editors accountable.
A lot of people are to blame here, but Elsevier is definitely among them.
I get it, but the post is literally "I don't like this guy, he has fucked up, I'm happy". Elsevier is mentioned mostly to explain from how high the guy has fallen. Not a single line about what is the issue with those papers, what does it say about the field, nor about the policies that are compromised by it. Nor it explains how Elsevier is affected from all of this and what will change.
It is a personal shitpost and I'm not sure what is interesting about it.
Well, I was in a rush writing that. I omitted the fact that not only did he publish his own papers bypassing peer review, he also set up a citation mill with a number of other Elsevier journals and was apparently involved in other shady business. It's detailed in the article... There is a personal component to it, but that's a very minor part of the article which documents the various misdeeds.
> Not a single line about what is the issue with those papers
Well that's a blatant lie. Here's a quote for you:
> After submitting that draft to the Elsevier finance ecosystem, that draft was scrubbed from SSRN, and in the final published version, an additional author (Samuel Vigne) was added as a new author, with an “equal contribution” statement
That's EXTREMELY BAD. It's someone approaching your team after the research is done and asking to be put on the paper in exchange for publishing it.
You are judging someone's post based on your expectations, only because they were "unlucky" enough to have their writing up voted here, and you had "hoped" for something they didn't write.
But, the internets' writers are not responsible for meeting your expectations.
Accept things for what they are. You can still bring up your points.
Without critiquing random people for not writing what you "hoped". That isn't a sensible standard.
It doesn't surprise me it happens within the Elsevier ecosystem. Elsevier has a long tradition of scientific misconduct and scientifically immoral behavior (see Wikipedia).
The operating margin of Elsevier is around 40% which is huge! At the end mostly paid by tax-payer money.
Personally, I never review or publish with Elsevier.
You are in very very good company. The British mathematician Timothy Gowers famously boycotts Elsevier also
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-...
I am skeptical it is a problem isolated to Elsevier. Given the LLM craze now prioritizes open access, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/08/28/deep-research-and-open..., it would not surprise me people start gaming MDPI in the same way for example.
MDPI is gamed by design, I think that while Elsevier is awful, MDPI is even worse with 100s of special issues where you are guaranteed to land publication in journals with quite nice IF (which is inflated by publishing large proportion of reviews and less original research).
I wonder if the term "published" as a binary distinction applied to a piece of writing is a term and concept that is reaching the end of its useful life.
"Peer reviewed" as a binary concept might be as well, given that incentives have aligned to greatly reduce its filtering power.
They might both be examples of metrics that became useless as a result of incentives getting attached to them.
I'm certain that the comment you responded to never claimed that it was "isolated to Elsevier" in the first place, nor is it very compelling to speculate about how in the future something even worse might emerge.
Right now Elsevier is by far the biggest offender and also happens to the be the topic of the conversation and the article.
Exactly. Elsevier is a dominant company. Of course it's going to have a huge share of anything that goes into journals. They probably also have a huge share of the Nobel prize winning papers too.
That being said, I'm happy to encourage open access.
One of the reasons why in Germany universities were able to collectively negotiate better open publishing deals with Wiley and Springer, but Elsevier just flat out refused to agree to any better terms for three years.
(See Project DEAL: https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier)
I've heard of Chris but not too well. This guy does not f*c$ around, don't get on his bad side.
The state of research is dire at the moment. The whole ecosystem is cooked. Reproducibility is non-existent. This obvious cartel is a symptom and there should be exemplary punishment.
Publishers are commercially incentivized to simply maximize profit and engagement. The main actors are academics and most of them try to uphold the high standards and ethics. Yes there is free-riding, backstabbing and a lot of politics but there is also reputation and honesty.
A few academics give academia a bad name, at the worst possible time and when society needs honest, reliable, reproducible and targetted research the most.
About Chris, this 3.5 years old post made me wonder what he's all about. https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/this-princeton-economics-profe...
Liking free speech, disliking affirmative action, being critical of those he disagrees but also giving them a chance to respond.
edit: is what he seems to be about based on the linked article
There's a bunch of needlessly inflammatory bullshit in that article. "Innumerate woke Bolshevik" and making fun of someone because he thinks she looks like a Harry Potter character. This guy seems like nothing more than a high school bully. E-mailing someone asking them to respond is nothing more than a fig leaf.
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Huh? The linked article is nothing more than "this guy is black, so therefore helping any underprivileged black people gain university admissions is bad"
It's outrageous racism. A conclusion about all minorities based on one person's math mistake, where the logic is entirely based on shared skin color.
If you replace the races and make it a conclusion about legacy admissions or something, it's obviously stupid and illogical, right?
"This white guy doesn't know Afghanistan from Kazakhstan. More proof legacy admissions is bad!"
https://xkcd.com/385/
It's just this but with race this time.
Much has changed since this was published in 2008
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All of academic publishing has fallen victim to Goodhart's law.
Our metrics for judging the quality of academic information are also the metrics for deciding the success of an academic's career. They are destined to be gamed.
We either need to turn peer review into an adversarial system where the reviewer has explicit incentives to find flaws and can advance their career by doing it well, or else we need totally different metrics for judging publications (which will probably need to evolve continuously).
We assume far too much good faith in this space.
I have no doubt that there are honest academics who publish research which actually contributes to humanity's corpus of knowledge. Whether that is some new insight into the past, observations on nature and man's interaction with it, clever chemical advances, or medical innovations which benefit mankind. People who publish works which will be looked upon as seminal and foundational in a decade or two, but also works which just focus on some particular detail and which will be of use to many researchers in the future.
But I can't shake the impression that a lot, perhaps the vast majority, of science consists of academics (postdocs and untenured researchers in particular I suppose) stuck in the publish-or-perish cycle. Pushing pointless papers where some trivial hypothesis is tested and which no one will ever use or read — except perhaps to cite for one reason or another, but rarely because it makes academic sense. Now with added slop, because why wouldn't you if the work itself is already as good as pointless?
The system, as you say, is fucked.
Most scientists want to do good science. They get intrinsic meaning and satisfaction in doing so. But with any large group of people there will be a few bad faith actors that will manipulate any exploit in the system for their own personal benefit. The problem here is that 'the system' of academic appointments, and even more importantly, funding sources, are built around this publishing metric. This forces even the good faith scientists to behave poorly because it was a requisite to even being able to exist as a working researcher.
0. I think your perspective is really detached from the actual scientific enterprise. I think this kind of take exists when there are cultural clashes combined with a strong focus in the media and online with the mistakes and issues in science, not its successes.
Science is actually progressing at an amazing rate in recent years. We are curing diseases and understanding more about life and the universe faster than ever.
Just briefly skim some top journals right now:
Here's an amazing 'universal vaccine' for respiratory viruses in mice https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea1260
here are brand new genome editors in human cells https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz1884
Here's amazing evidence of an ancient lake on Mars https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu8264
Here's a meta-analysis of 62 (!) different studies on GLP1 receptor agonists to figure out whether they can contribute to pancreatitis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/edm2.70113
(covered here https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00552-6)
Here's identification of a new mechanism of resistance in Malaria https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10110-9
Here's curing a genetic disorder using gene editing in mice https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10113-6
Here's a study that has figured out that as CO2 levels rise, there's less nitrogen in forests https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10039-5
and here's personalized mRNA vaccines curing people of breast cancer https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10004-2
Like all of these are just from the past month or two and are pretty astounding advances. And they are just a subset of all of the scientific advances recently. All of them have contributors in academia (and science performed outside of academia would not exist without academia, as it depends upon it for most of the conceptual advances as well of course as for scientist training).
1. Stuff like paper mills and complete fraudsters exist, but for the most part, these things are the exception, not the rule. Your average scientist doesn't even hear or think about these things and the weirdos who cause them, to be honest. Nobody has ever heard of "International Review of Financial Analysis" outside of an extremely niche economics subfield.
2. "Public or perish" is not a cycle, really. While I believe it's not good for people to be constantly working under pressure, the fact that academia is so competitive currently is a healthy sign. It's because we have so many people with extremely impressive resumes and backgrounds, doing extremely impressive work, that makes funding so competitive. And when funding is competitive, it's no wonder that funders prefer to fund people who have produced something and told the world about it ("publish").
3. Fraudsters and hucksters have been in science forever. Go read an account of science in the early 19th century. There are tons and tons of stories of crazy scientists who believed ridiculous things, scientists who kept pushing wrong dogma, and so on. And yet nobody knows about them today, because the evolutionary process of science works: the truths that are empirically verifiable win out, and, given enough time, the failures are selected against.
Fantastic effort post and the necessary dose of fresh air to balance out hedonic skepticism.
The collapse in faith of institutions in various ways, for different reasons has created a vibe that gives any criticism of any institution has a whiff of plausibility, and these days that's all you need for some people to treat it as settled fact. That is basically what I think the poisoned and anti intellectual attitude of hedonic skepticism is all about.
The pace of technological advance over the past 5-10 years is staggering in so many ways. If our era weren't known for collapse of democracies and conflict, it could have been heralded as a major historical moment of technological advance on a number of levels.
One cartel gone, incentive structure intact. Academic prestige is entirely mediated through journal placement, so whoever controls prestige journals can extract rents indefinitely. Elsevier did not invent this, they just ran it more aggressively.
The fix is not enforcement. It is tenure committees that stop treating impact factors as proxies for researcher quality. Until that changes, any successor recreates the same behavior. The cartel is a symptom.
It's as if they have captured the most significant nodes on the map. Or were these prestige journals built up under the same system?
Elsevier is certainly evil, but I would say the root issue is the practices of the institutions where these "authors" are employed. This kind of thing is academic misconduct and should result in them losing their jobs.
This goes deeper than the institutions, actually. The KPI for many (non-industrial) researchers is the number of publications and citations. That's what careers and funding depends on.
Goodhart's law states "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", and that's what we see here. There is a strong incentive to publish more instead of better. Ideas are spread into multiple papers, people push to be listed as authors, citations are fought for, and some become dishonest and start with citation cartels, "hidden" citations in papers (printed small in white-on-white, meaning it's indexed by citation crawlers but not visible to reviewers) and so forth.
This also destroys the peer review system upon which many venues depend. Peer reviews were never meant to catch cheaters. The huge number of low-to-medium quality papers in some fields (ML, CV) overworks reviewers, leading to things like CVPR forcing authors to be reviewers or face desk rejection. AI papers, AI reviews of dubious quality slice in even more.
Ultimately the only true fix for this is to remove the incentives. Funding and careers should no longer depend on the sheer number of papers and citations. The issue is that we have not really found anything better yet.
As for an alternative, how about using the social fabric of researchers and institutes instead? A few centuries of science ran on it before somebody had the great idea to introduce "objective" metrics which made things worse. Reintroducing that today would probably cause a larger spread in the quality of research, which is good: research is kind of a "hit-driven industry" - higher highs are the most important thing. The best researchers will do the best research, probably better without carrot and stick than with.
> As for an alternative, how about using the social fabric of researchers and institutes instead? A few centuries of science ran on it before somebody had the great idea to introduce "objective" metrics which made things worse.
Oh boy, you seem to be missing the forest for the trees. When science was a hobby of the rich, there was no need to measure output. Only when "scientist" became a career and these scientists started demanding government funding (which only really crystallized in the 20th century), then we started needing a way to measure output.
You could try doing away with an objective measure of academic output and replace it with the "social fabric of researchers and institutes" (whatever the fuck that means) instead , but then all you'd have is a good ol' boys club funded by taxpayer money.
What the guarantee is that folks won't abuse this system in the same way they do the citation system? The recommendation letter system is often abused for the pettiest of reasons...
There is no guarantee. The current system is also not a guarantee for good results, though.
This will be a hard argument to make.
The decision makers who are the target audience for these metrics value "objective" data. They value the appearance of being quantitative, but lack the intellectual tools to distinguish between quantitative science and pseudoscience with numbers bolted on.
That's modern bureaucracy in a nutshell.
A few centuries of science of white males. While I agree that the system with ”objective metrics” has a lot of problems, but just removing it would bring us back to the old days when almost all science was done by a few privileged white men.
Almost all science was done by "a few privleged white men" because Europe and the Americas were the only places that had modernized with large central states, university systems, and educational systems. Even in that scenario before the "objective metrics" of the post-war system came about, we still had people like Madam Curie and Ramanujan being able to work with stellar results. The idea that somehow academia would stonewall all of the non-whites is absurd.
It’s really hard to come up with better examples of the exceptions that prove the rule than Marie Curie and Ramanujan. How many more names can you come up with?
I’d even argue that still today women and minorities are strongly disadvantaged at many institutions. I’d say that as a white male that recently left academia myself. I have seen how some of my colleagues have been treated.
What you describe is still a problem with the institutions, because it is ultimately the institutions that provide the incentives (in the form of jobs). You're right that they're using bad metrics, but it is the institutions who are making those bad decisions based on the bad metrics.
There are lots of better things, like people making hiring and firing decisions based on their evaluation of the content of papers they have actually read, instead of just a number. If someone is publishing so many papers that a hiring committee can't even read a meaningful fraction of them, that should be a red flag in itself, rather than a green one.
It's true that hire and tenure decisions are under the institution's control. But a lot of funding comes from external sources, and most public funding uses some sort of publication-based metric. There are exceptions, but that's the game. The CV of your PhD's is often judged by the publication list and the corresponding citations. That's research institutes where they might go, other universities, large companies etc. will look at this. It's difficult to change this system as isolated player, and coordinates efforts so far failed on the "what else" question.
A problem with the public sector in this instance is it has money to spend, but no way of allocating it particularly well.
It will just pick the best allocation metric it has available, even if that metric would never stand up to scrutiny in the private sector, or any more directly measured domain, public or private.
I think the state could simply allocate money to long-lived scientific institutions and let the experts there handle things as long as there is no obvious corruption.
Self-regulation has a tendency to either work well for a few years, then gradually become corrupted... or be corrupt from the beginning.
A distressingly high percentage of humans like zero-sum status games. More people are happier when status is recognized as a semi-unbounded positive-sum game.
To dig even deeper into the problem: you have to get a large number of institutions to agree to stop this at once, none will voluntarily risk their (generally) working pipeline and system first. It disrupts a lot of different things and takes them out of the currently established model that everyone still uses to measure success. It reminds me of how most people who say “well not everyone should go to college!” Are obviously omitting “…except for my kids of course.” It borders on an expressive response, it’s not something anyone wants to actually take action on.
There’s not a whole lot to gain for the individual or even the institution unless they hit an absolute home run on the first try that also shows positive results very quickly. More than likely the decision will be questioned at every turn
There's imperfect ways to work with goodhartable metrics. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fuSaKr6t6Zuh6GKaQ/when-is-go... talks about some of them (in the context of when they go bad).
The incentive to disprove bad science ought to be greater.
And incorrect assumptions. As I understand it, "I did a study on this and it turns out there's no connection" generally results in the study not being published (if the study was testing for the validity of the connection)... which is sad, because that's still useful information to have.
Those are separate issues.
Publishing uninteresting science for the record is different from an incentive to go against the crowd to refute incorrect claims.
Both would be good especially these days.
Exactly. There should be much greater incentives to (in)validate prior publications. That is what science is about.
The needle is beginning to move on this I believe: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00321-5
Evil Seer would be a good anagram if only Elsevier did any of the actual [re]viewing themselves
Elsevier had no reason to stop this. Inflated citations mean higher impact factors, and higher impact factors justify higher subscription prices. Lucey published 56 papers in one year, the publisher got better metrics to sell. Hard to call that a rogue actor..
> Elsevier had no reason to stop this
If Elsevier had no reason to stop this, why did they stop this?
They had no reason to stop this until it became publicly embarrassing for them.
Right — and once someone is pumping out 56 papers/year, the journal becomes dependent on their output. Who in the chain is going to flag a problem that looks like productivity from every direction?
The detection lag is telling -- this only got caught because an external journalist spotted the pattern. Elsevier had every incentive to keep looking the other way (higher impact factors = higher subscription prices). Self-regulation won't fix this. The publisher's quality control function and its profit motive point in opposite directions.
We need open publishing. This is why Elsevier etc... use an outdated business model.
That Elsevier now also runs more into fake-articles and fake-research, all fueled by the money-addiction, just adds to the problem (and also invalidates Elsevier's model, by the way - why do we now have to deal with fake science that is costly? That is Elsevier's business model). I fail to see why taxpayers money has to go into private companies for research already financed by the taxpayers. We are paying twice here, Elsevier.
Spot on, and beyond the 'double-dipping' business model of "academic publishers" like Elsevier and Springer, there’s a massive systemic issue: taxpayers fund >90% of foundational research, only for private pharma/bio/tech firms to add a thin layer of additional research (or design) on top and then lock it behind patents for decades. Another example of how private interests are offloading the risk and costs to taxpayers while privatizing all the rewards.
"only for private pharma/bio/tech firms to add a thin layer of additional research (or design) on top"
Citation needed.
Go to market cost billions and takes a decade. Doesn't sound like a thin layer. I'm not disputing fundamental research in academia is an essential fuel to keep innovation engines running. But the contributions of biotech is not "thin".
It can be. See glp1. Yes, whoever first came up with that approach is brilliant. But then the lemmings followed now a half dozen or so companies are peddling more or less the same product. And it comes at the cost of what isn’t getting investment at scale instead.
> Another example of how private interests are offloading the risk and costs to taxpayers while privatizing all the rewards.
Another example of government leaders choosing to not spend taxpayer money to pay for the expensive trials to get medicine approved for use.
Another example of voters voting for government leaders that campaign on privatizing the rewards in exchange for the promise of lower taxes.
Any taxpayer subsidized industry or subject is a massive magnet for this sort of "complex business that you can't dumb down or eli5 without making it look like a racket because it's fundamentally a racket with responsibility diffused to obfuscate it" stuff because taxpayer money has the most distant of principal agent problem and the government optimizes for "cog in the machine with blinders" employees and silo'd organizations who only care about their own ass so nobody ever takes a step back and says "hey the taxpayer is getting ripped off" until the ripoff is so obvious the taxpayers leann on the politicians.
Academia is basically outdated, or needs incredible reform.
Industry and youtubers are making significant scientific progress. (I'm mostly joking about youtubers, but it does happen)
I think Academia is where B/C-list performers pretend they are A-list.
Who in Industry is making meaningful progress in the field of maths? How about astronomy? Particle Physics? Psychology? Sociology?
I'd wager that I could name basically any field which does not have immediately obvious and proven ways to make money with through research.
Two of these are not like the others.
One of the things that is so deceptive is the way so many people think that ways to make money need to be both obvious and proven.
Of course you have to be very good at math or natural science to be able to figure out how to support your own research so you can get way more accomplished than you could at a unversity.
All others need not apply.
Most universities wouldn't act on your application anyway, if you got very far without being on the academic track, that could make lots of people look bad who would prefer to keep the status-quo more restrictive.
Edit: The threat to the status-quo must have gotten bigger than I thought, defensive reactions are popping up quicker than ever.
I have to be honest, I do not understand what you want to say with your comment.
My point is that outside of fields which can somehow make money through research, not much scientific progress is made outside of universities. I don't see how you address this.
Very legitimate question.
I address it with my whole life.
It would have taken my whole life if I had stayed and gotten my PhD anyway, so why not?
People can't expect dramatically different approaches to research to do anything but make it difficult for deep understanding between them.
You really have to have an open mind.
I see raw scientific progress that many outside of instiutions do not recognize, because so many brilliant experimentalists do not have institutional credentials.
So I had a head start and took advantage of it, kept giving chemistry lessons to colleagues as they went through graduate school.
Even invented something really cool in one of their labs when I wasn't even a student any more.
Naturally I have the greatest respect for PhDs in general because that in itself is a major achievement.
But I wouldn't have gotten this far in such a non-industrial environment, core industriousness might just be a differentiation factor.
It took a long time but eventually I came to the point where I just do science every day because I'm a scientist, and make money as a byproduct of what I do.
No different than a university lab where 90% - 99% of your experiments will never pay off, if you can't handle it under a variety of financial and/or institutional situations you might need to look at reasons why like I did.
Plus with a lifetime of more intense experimentation than if I had a PhD (really do not compare myself to others) I've got zillions of financial opportunities with chemicals in particular. The most important thing turned out to be curtailing the desire to make as much money as possible, most of this stuff is toxic.
Any kind of treadmill could have led to a much worse outcome.
That is kind of my point. Outside of a few fields (some branches of chemistry certainly being one of the exceptions) will someone pay you to do your research.
I just pulled up the newest published math paper from arxiv. No one except universities will pay you to research "Quenched path limits and periodization stability for tilted Brownian motion in Poissonian potentials on Hd"
Just because your specific thing you are interested in researching has value to the free market, doesn't mean that all are so lucky.
I'm with you to a very good extent, but there are so many more promising individuals that universities just haven't had enough room for the vast majority, for quite some time.
We are all lucky that universities will still pay for advanced math progress like you have cited.
Especially math, I stuck with that pretty good before I was allowed to touch chemicals.
One of the real advantages is that all you need is a blackboard and chalk, the progress you can make is quite a bit compared to so many other things.
As an outsider I observe the lucky ones to be the few that the universities are willing to pay. I think it would be better if there were more openings and better pay too.
I know what you mean, but nobody has paid me to do research since 1982 when I was working for a commercial research startup.
That's just what I do, and never wanted to stop.
I needed to be able to pursue whatever was within reach, knowing that almost none of it was going to be interesting to anybody else, financially viable or even worth money at all. Otherwise I would have actually stayed at the university.
My most valuable milestones may be in electronics anyway where I have no university training. Had a whole lot earlier start there though.
After a lifetime as an outlier, the consistent observation is that most of the institutional systems screen out more raw talent than they employ.
I may seem extreme but it's good for somebody to strongly represent viable alternatives for that talent so maybe there will be more alternatives someday.
I have always thought that universities should expand to encompass more of what they are doing right too, but I wasn't going to hold my breath :)
Industry doesn’t really care about research that doesn’t advance the portfolio or function essentially as a demonstration of something in their portfolio. Academia is where research actually happens.
OpenAI has done more for society than all academia over the same timespan.
You could probably say the same about various medical devices/medicines. The internet. Chemistry/plastics.
Sociology/psychology is historically unfalsifiable, and mostly useless, those are truly detriments.
quantum physics might be useful, but I think even there, industry will do it better.
This was getting obvious even before the 1970's when university attendance went wild.
>Academia is where B/C-list performers pretend they are A-list.
The ones having top credentials and little more have gotten more & more outnumbered by more capable thinkers every decade, it's been nothing but circling the wagons which ends up creating more of an insular environment for those who love eminence and an exclusive status more than anything else.
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The folks at Elsevier turned a blind eye for as long as they could because it was profitable. It's such a common story that no one even feigns to be surprised.
Being an extractive business seeking to maintain a chokehold on scientists and their institutions is the least of Elsevier's problems.
More problematic for Elsevier is that the current system of "peer review" may turn out be a failed experiment in the history of science:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
What could be an improvement to or over the peer review system?
For a thoughtful answer to your question, see:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-dance-of-the-nake...
> A tenured professor hinted she might try to get me fired. A person with a PhD accused me of “cynical metacognitive polywaffle,” which a good name for a postmodern noise band. I got some weird and vaguely threatening emails, including one that had a screenshot of my personal website with my improv experience highlighted, proof that I am literally a clown. Which is, I guess, true.
(People said nice things too.)
https://retractionwatch.com/2026/01/08/finance-professor-bri...
I've boycotted reviewing for Elsevier for years, but it's easy for me - I'm in CS, where ACM, USENIX and IEEE offer higher-status publication venues and Elsevier journals are decidedly second-tier.
Mid-way I realized this was AI writing (took me a while), then I read a quote in the text about a comment that "The tragedy isn’t that they cheated; it’s that the system was designed to let them thrive for a decade before anyone bothered to look at the data." I didn't find this comment in EJMR, or anywhere on the internet except the OP post, for that matter.
reminds me of of the El Naschie controversy: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/11/25/elsevier-math...
fraud here is real, but
> a good journal—it has an 18% acceptance rate
is this supposed to be read as sarcasm?
amusing when the quality of a journal is measured by denying papers. kind of reminds me of one of the last People I (Mostly) Admire interviews, with Michael Crow of Arizona State https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-new-kind-of-university where he critiques elite universities as measuring their value on how many students they reject, which ultimately makes them infeasible as institutions to distribute knowledge as much as possible
aaronsw would be proud
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This is the academic industrial complex.
Much like the military industrial complex and the healthcare industrial complex they exist to fleece people via cartel.
> On Christmas Eve, 9 “peer-reviewed” economics papers were quietly retracted by Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher.
It is becoming clearer and clearer that peer review is a systematized band wagon fallacy.
It relies on the belief that one’s peers in a competitive field, presented with new ideas and evidence, will simply accept it.
And yet, “science progresses one funeral at a time” is an old joke.
“Peer review” is an indication an idea is safe for granting agency bureaucrats to fund, not an indication of its truth, validity, or utility.
I feel like my papers are better for having gone through peer review, and I'm a better researcher for having had a few rejections. Of course the reviewers can't hover around in your lab watching everything you do. But even if reviewers can't check the validity of the evidence in your paper, they do a pretty good job ensuring that the claims you make are supported by the evidence you present. That's a valuable if imperfect guardrail! What would be the alternative?
Peer review has never been an indication of truth, validity, or utility.
It's only ever been an opportunity for other scientists (ideally more competitive than they are today) to see if they can spot some methodological problem.
That's completely upside down take. The problem with peer review is not that it does not allow good papers to get published (that rarely happens, almost all good papers get published!), but that shitty papers get published!
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Almost hoped for an analysis about what, how, and why happened, but it turns out that Elsevier has little to do with the story and the author had a Twitter spat with someone years ago and is now celebrating the fact that the other side has been shown to do what? for which some of their papers had been retracted. Yes, I'm as confused.
Publishers have the final say in appointing editors in chief (EIC) and editors. So they bear the ultimate responsibility for holding editors accountable.
A lot of people are to blame here, but Elsevier is definitely among them.
I get it, but the post is literally "I don't like this guy, he has fucked up, I'm happy". Elsevier is mentioned mostly to explain from how high the guy has fallen. Not a single line about what is the issue with those papers, what does it say about the field, nor about the policies that are compromised by it. Nor it explains how Elsevier is affected from all of this and what will change.
It is a personal shitpost and I'm not sure what is interesting about it.
Elsevier editor published his own papers in the Elsevier journal bypassing peer review.
There are three magazines involved so this is only part of the story.
Well, I was in a rush writing that. I omitted the fact that not only did he publish his own papers bypassing peer review, he also set up a citation mill with a number of other Elsevier journals and was apparently involved in other shady business. It's detailed in the article... There is a personal component to it, but that's a very minor part of the article which documents the various misdeeds.
All three journals are Elsevier owned. Do try to keep up.
> Not a single line about what is the issue with those papers
Well that's a blatant lie. Here's a quote for you:
> After submitting that draft to the Elsevier finance ecosystem, that draft was scrubbed from SSRN, and in the final published version, an additional author (Samuel Vigne) was added as a new author, with an “equal contribution” statement
That's EXTREMELY BAD. It's someone approaching your team after the research is done and asking to be put on the paper in exchange for publishing it.
You are judging someone's post based on your expectations, only because they were "unlucky" enough to have their writing up voted here, and you had "hoped" for something they didn't write.
But, the internets' writers are not responsible for meeting your expectations.
Accept things for what they are. You can still bring up your points.
Without critiquing random people for not writing what you "hoped". That isn't a sensible standard.