iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Pablo Gómez Barreiro @pagomba.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

I think I'm providing nesting material for all the leafcutter #bees in the neighbourhood. 🐝 🍃

Shrub with numerous circular cutouts in its leaves, made by leafcutter bees

Reposted by Pablo Gómez Barreiro

Sholto David @sholtodavid.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Recently published "Expert Review of Clinical Immunology": A so called "scattered plot", which plots something against nothing in particular. A diagram that looks convincing but is back to front; assigning low COVID-19 mortality to western countries. 10.1080/1744666X.2026.2664060

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Pablo Gómez Barreiro @pagomba.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Not immediately, though. More like it takes 37 days. Figure from direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

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Sajad Alipour @sajadalipour98.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Tussilago farfara Asteraceae Tehran, Iran February 2026 Elevation 1800m

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Pablo Gómez Barreiro @pagomba.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Ah, I remember the twitter days and the hashtag #receptiogate to refer to this case.

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Pablo Gómez Barreiro @pagomba.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

🌲 CT scan of an Allocasuarina tessellata cone. With thanks to the National X-ray Computed Tomography group.

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Pablo Gómez Barreiro @pagomba.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

🌲 CT scan of an Allocasuarina tessellata cone. With thanks to the National X-ray Computed Tomography group.

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Plants, People, Planet @plantspeopleplanet.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Climate-driven intraspecific shifts in seed germination phenology: Consequences for native temperate woodland restoration and regeneration Dayrell et al. 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... @robertadayrell.bsky.social @rbgkew.bsky.social #PlantScience Photo: @pagomba.bsky.social

Close-up photo of a line of germinating seeds.

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Pablo Gómez Barreiro @pagomba.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Late to the party. Took me a while to find an old section pic of a Ceiba seed

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Sarah Hird, PhD @sarahhird.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

I appreciate that the scientists who made this both convey their results & their personal opinions on the taxa. Bats = beautiful, majestic creatures worthy of our investigation & wonder Rodents, monkey, dog, cow, donkey = meh Humans = barely tolerable Cats = laughable evolutionary mistakes, idiots

Phylogeny with various taxa represented by pictograms

Close up of the 2 bats who are very detailed and in gray scale.

Close up of dog and cat. Dog is silhouette of real looking dog. Cat is definitely not a real cat with eyeballs, a nose, three legs in a weird pose and … fingers?

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Jean-François Cudennec @limpetnerd.eurosky.social · 12/03/2026

1/ Homing is a widespread animal behaviour and uses lots of different mechanisms : magnetoreception for migrating birds, time-compensated sun compass for monarch butterfly... But one animal's homing ability remains unexplained after 60+ years of research: the limpet.

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Pablo Gómez Barreiro @pagomba.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

I'm going to click save. Wish me luck

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Al Yankovic @alyankovic.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Did you know that strawberries are not berries, and are actually mammals?

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Pablo Gómez Barreiro @pagomba.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Maybe it was 17, and then the union got involved and gave editors a tea break. A wild guess of course

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Pablo Gómez Barreiro @pagomba.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Loving the wild energy of this invitation to publish with #MDPI. Keep it up!

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Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

All set for New Horizons 💎 #OpenAccess in Nijmegen! Thank you to the organisers for the opportunity to speak on the Strain, Stain, & Drain of scientific publishing. Looking forward to great conversations on moving #ScientificPublishing forward! bit.ly/StrainQSS www.horizondiamond.nl#schedule

The Drain of Scientific Publishing
Fernanda Beigel, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto, Gemma Derrick, Aileen Fyfe, Pablo Gomez Barreiro, Mark A. Hanson, Stefanie Haustein, Vincent Larivière, Christine Noe, Stephen Pinfield, James Wilsdon
The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments and Universities, to lead the drive to re-communalise publishing to serve science not the market.
Comments: 1 Figure, 1 Table, 1 Supplementary Table
Subjects: Digital Libraries (cs.DL)
Cite as: arXiv:2511.04820 [cs.DL]
(or arXiv:2511.04820v2 [cs.DL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.04820
Focus to learn more
Submission history
From: Dan Brockington [view email]
[v1] Thu, 6 Nov 2025 21:20:22 UTC (2,101 KB)
[v2] Mon, 17 Nov 2025 20:05:17 UTC (2,113 KB)

The Issue with Special Issues: when Guest Editors
Publish in Support of Self
Paolo Crosetto1*, Pablo Gómez Barreiro2
, Mark Austin Hanson3*
1. Univ. Grenoble Alpes, INRAE, CNRS, Grenoble INP, GAEL; Grenoble, France
2. Department of Science Operations, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Wakehurst, UK
3. Centre for Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter; Penryn, Cornwall, UK
* corresponding authors – PC: paolo.crosetto@inrae.fr, MAH: m.hanson@exeter.ac.uk
Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID)
PC: 0000-0002-9153-0159
PGB: 0000-0002-3140-3326
MAH: 0000-0002-6125-3672

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🌴 Scott Zona, Ph.D. 🌴 @scottzona.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

Two weeks ago, I posted this photo of Guiacum sanctum seed, which prompted a viewer to ask, What is the function of ruminate endosperm? This week, we’ll look at ruminate (not ruminant 🐄) endosperm. 🧵 #Zygophyllaceae #seed #endosperm #ruminate #Botany 🌾🧪🌱 1/2

Close-up photo of a seed that has been cut in half longitudinally. One half has the cut surface exposed (right), showing the embryo and ruminate endosperm. The other half (left) is turned to show the surface, which is dark brown and covered with tiny pits. Photo by Scott Zona CC BY-NC 2.0.

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Jeffrey Brainard @jeffreybrainard.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

#SpecialIssues have fueled the growth of some of the largest #OpenAccess publishers. Does a journal that allows a #GuestEditor to both plan a special issue and write many articles in it have a conflict of interest? #scicomm #peerreview @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...

science.org

Some guest editors pack special issues with their own articles

Thousands have penned more than one-third of a journal issue, raising conflict-of-interest concerns

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Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

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Pablo Gómez Barreiro @pagomba.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

🧪 Thousands of special issues are stained with PISS (>33% of articles authored by the guest editor). See @hansonmark.bsky.social's thread below for a brief summary, read our preprint (arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563), explore our ShinyApp to see where it occurs (paolocrosetto.shinyapps.io/Editors_as_a...).

arxiv.org

The Issue with Special Issues: when Guest Editors Publish in Support of Self

The recent exceptional growth in the number of special issues has led to the largest delegation of editorial power in the history of scientific publishing. Has this power been used responsibly? In thi...

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Pablo Gómez Barreiro @pagomba.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

I’ve zoomed in on the graph peaks and enhanced the result.

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Public Knowledge Project @pkp.sfu.ca · 08/12/2025

📣 Our friends at the #ScholCommLab have published a preprint, "The Drain of #ScientificPublishing", and are calling for #research communities, funders, governments, and #universities to "re-communalise publishing to serve #science not the market" doi.org/10.48550/arX... #ScholComm #AcademicSky

Infographic titled “The Drain of Scientific Publishing,” describing four problems in scholarly publishing: Money, Time, Trust, and Control.

Money: Illustration of flying dollar bills and buildings beside a bank. Text explains that for-profit publishers charge unreasonable reading and publishing fees disconnected from production costs, noting that Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis made $US 12 billion profit from 2019–2024.

Time: Illustration of a stressed researcher surrounded by stacks of papers and a clock. Text states researchers spend enormous time as authors, reviewers, and editors, maintaining a system that prioritizes quantity over quality, causing burnout and reduced rigor.

Trust: Illustration of a magnifying glass over retracted papers. Text describes commercial pressures to publish quickly, enabling low-quality and fraudulent papers, eroding public confidence.

Control: Illustration of a person with medals labeled with journal metrics. Text explains that rankings like journal impact factor and h-index dictate success, with infrastructures biased toward English journals and controlled by for-profit companies.

At the bottom, a stop-sign graphic reads “Stop the Drain.” Additional text calls for altering incentives and ownership of publishing, re-communalizing scholarly publishing, building community-led systems, preventing unreasonable profits, and using existing open models and infrastructures (e.g., preprints, diamond journals, OJS, SciELO). A final statement urges aligning research assessment with open, community-led publishing.

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Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

Since AI slop is again all over Scientific Reports, a thread on the economics of grey-zone publishing. Why does slop keep getting published? What does it mean for science? How can we stop this? Background readings: Understand the strain: tinyurl.com/2b6wxx5r Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy

An obviously AI-generated figure with AI slop and fake text all over it, recently published in Scientific Reports.

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Samuel Moore @samuelmoore.org · 28/11/2025

Interesting investigation into a dodgy Elsevier journal -- with the additional nugget that the CEO of Elsevier's parent company made more than €15 million in total compensation last year. english.elpais.com/science-tech...

english.elpais.com

The fall of a prolific science journal exposes the billion-dollar profits of scientific publishing

One of the 15 publications that put out the most studies globally has been expelled from the indexing system for irregularities. Its publisher, Elsevier, has a 38% profit margin that reached $1.5 bill...

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Danny Kingsley @dannykay68.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

EXCELLENT graphic on the drain of scientific publishing! zenodo.org/records/1759...

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Lizzie Wall @wall-e2.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

~$2.5bn in profits, ~35% profit margin

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Roland Pease @peaseroland.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

The numbers in here are huge, ~$2.5bn in profits (~35% profit margin) to 4 major academic publishing houses. How much lost research expenditure does that equate to?? Windfall tax, anyone?

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Golareh Khalilpour @golareh.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

This is now canon.

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Stefanie Haustein @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca · 13/11/2025

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk 🎤 If you’ve read this far and still need convincing, please check out our preprint arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 and this infographic: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 10/10

The four-fold drain of scientific publishing: Money, Time, Trust, and Control.

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Stefanie Haustein @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca · 13/11/2025

Over the past months (and at least 11 versions!), I was lucky to work with 11 amazing colleagues on a call to action to reform academic publishing. Not another declaration, but an appeal to our powerful friends, research funders & institutions, to Stop the Drain of Scientific Publishing. 1/n

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Randy Ellis @randalljellis.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

For comparison, the profits of four publishers (2.64B) amount to 5.58% of the FY2024 NIH budget. Revenues (7.36B) are *15.52%*. I agree with the authors' perspective that funders, governments, and universities should lead efforts to change this. All journals should be diamond open-access.

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Gon García-Castro @gongcastro.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

A 30-40% profit margin for a company that mostly relies on unpaid labour from their own "clients" to barely do their job making science (which they did not produce) available is a good case for abolishing the whole industry.

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Caroline Armitage @carolinearmitage.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

A really great set of 3 papers for anyone wanting to get to grips with systemic issues in scientific publishing in a concise and data-supported way!

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David Harding @groupharding.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

There's no question that some degree of regulation is now needed to bring profits into line with other industries, especially as we are mostly publicly funded.

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KaminskiMed @kaminskimed.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

time to end the exploitation! Researchers should get a part of the profits make on their publications. Reviewers should be paid for reviewing. Simple. #Pay4MyPapers #Pay4PeerReview

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Kira Hopkins @kirahopkins.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

This great article is - rightly - garnering a lot of responses from academics. Many voice outrage, a call for regulation of the market etc. But this is somewhat of an abrogation of duty! Both 'Strain' and 'Drain' cover the Big 5 - there is a wide, rich publishing ecosystem outside of them. 1/2

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Jonny Coates @jacoates.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Mark knocking it out of the park again!

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Artem Ilin @adc34.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Extremely important effort and call for action for researchers everywhere! Bravo, Mark and co!

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