April Patreon Video: Academic Publishing

Good luck with even getting people to read a publishing. Especially if you didn't come out of academia.

I'm curious about what you said at 31:30 re:pay when at Kentucky. By contrasting between funding by their parents with working full-time, are you saying y'all weren't paid by the department (either as TAs or researchers)? In my program, you got part-time (20hrs/wk) pay initially and full-time pay + a pay increase after quals, just for doing your research. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding. Did you just mean that students from poorer families felt like they had to take on a second job beyond their research in order to supplement their income? Was the area not relatively low cost of living? Not contesting that reviewers should be paid or that people from rich families have a much easier time since they don't have to budget or cram in with 3 roommates, by the way. Was just curious about the situation you were eluding to since it seemed unusual to me.

It’s amazing both how little they pay (or not at all pay) for the people doing the work, and yet how much they charge to publish. I am fortunately in a space where we have a few journals that you don’t have to pay to publish. 1000% agree with your perspective on the overall expense. These publishers are predatory.

Having only very basic knowledge of the process this was very interesting to hear about in detail!

You asked for feedback on the video quality. The video of you in the lower right corner is very blurry, smudged. It looks like it may be related to the light source. I know an effect like this but only from photography. On a bright but overcast day, daylight is very diffuse, it's coming from everywhere. And a polarisation filter lets you take photos that look a lot crisper, less blurry, more contrast. Perhaps that works on video cameras as well? I don't see why it shouldn't.

I'm so sorry but I want to say something else as well. If people make the argument that paying for reviews would be bad because lots of people would apply to do that, and then also assume that people would mostly just want to get the money and not do a good job reviewing papers ... then they are cherrypicking which side of the capitalism coin they want to be the only one you look at. Capitalism bad! It attracts douchebags! Money causes a decline in quality! Shock and despair! We can't do that! This side of the coin is only chosen when it suits them, when they don't want to pay people. The same people will also stone cold claim the opposite effect of capitalism when it suits them, that without paying for services (like reading a paper online, or like publishing a paper in their journal), it's not possible to deliver high quality services. Or they say that if publishing were free, then there would be no competitive factor that (they claim) is necessary for maintaining a high quality standard. Well ... no one is preventing them from rejecting papers based on their actual value. It's not difficult at all for them to maintain a high quality standard - it's their journal, they could just *choose* to reject inconsequential slop. Academia is allowing the market to drag it through the arena with a leash on a nosering. The only real achievement of the people running "Nature" and the like is that they've created an image of prestige and high value only through (financial) gatekeeping access to this prestigious realm. It's "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps". It is self-perpetuating, the restrictive access to the value is creating the value in doing so. That last aspect wouldn't need to change, they could just choose to publish according to the scientific value, instead of maximising the monetary value they can squeeze out of a journal for rich scientists.

Science has an internal process of producing and checking new research, but it has been completely ... what's the word? co-opted? hijacked? by capitalist structures and actors external to the actual research and science, who cajole the academics into making money for the journal owners, and also accepting zero pay or just way too little pay. It would be fine that people involved in the publication process get paid for this. But what you're describing is that the whole network is completely geared towards making money for just a few (not towards enabling the best research and the best researchers), and they're not the ones who actually advance the understanding tha t humanity has achieved. The whole structure not only needs lots of people to be underpaid or not paid at all, it's almost as if it's also serving as a bootcamp, to make even the smartest of us accept and believe that this is what the world has to be like, and that there's no other way. And if you in any way refuse to play ball, you're gaslighted as being a quitter, or as not being up to the task or sth. like that, you know? "If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen." That sort of disgusting thinking. If you complain about abuse, it's obviously just your fault that you're not willing to become the abuser yourself. Gosh why do your videos make me think of "The Rules Of Acquisition" all the time?

Re: hourly rates I've seen daily (8 h) rates for IT consultancy work of about 1500 $, but without any academic degrees and also in a country where everything costs half of US prices or less, for at least comparable quality, or better. So a rough estimation would be that for you, a PhD and in the US where a lot of stuff in life is outrageaously expensive, an hourly rate of 500-600 $ (before taxes) could be justified. Could. I don't know. But even if that is an overestimation, something like 300 $ / hour before taxes, for Physics PhD level consultancy work or reviewing, should be almost lowballing it.

Love this video!! I love all of your videos about academia and education, I feel like they really give deeply inside perspective on things that are too complicated for those of us outside these areas to understand. Yet to find a topic I don’t enjoy you doing a video about!

This was on my wish list of if I paid enough to request topics I'd request this. Thank you very much.

Can we have a new merch tshirt: "they should be embarrassed"?

oh i am curious what did you do about the person contacting you? that sounds mortifying

Disclaimer: It has been mumblety-mumble years since I was active in academia. But I worked in a computer science subfield that, at the time, had one major conference each year. Acceptance standards for papers for that conference were absolutely higher than most journal acceptance standards. I imagine it to have been a supply-and-demand problem. Everyone in the subfield wanted to get a paper from every active research project of theirs accepted into that conference every year. A professor got tenure at the top-twenty research university I was attending, having published exactly one paper in that conference ever (and also having published a slew of journal articles, of course.)

Great video, I've heard many of the same comments by other academics (I won't mention Sabine because I know you don't like to be compared to her... oops, too late😉), but you discuss some unique context, especially around editor responsibilities and reviewers. It seems a common theme is pay, which leads me to the conclusion I make with education and healthcare and law enforcement, that capitalism isn't always the most appropriate funding model. My only constructive criticism, you apologize too much... you should apologize.

Your feelings about the editors not reading anything that's sent in just has me wondering what can you sneak in there that's salacious or so extreme that they would be forced to comment on it. Something so extreme that if it's not mentioned you know they did not read it. Kind of like how Matt Damon & Ben Affleck put in a sex scene between the two male leads for the first draft of Good Will Hunting, so they knew which studio exec read the script or not. Or not, I guess academic papers are a whole another ball game compared to screenwriting. Maybe some throw-away lines about a flat earth. It's flat, but for a good reason; we're on the back of the Great A'Tuin carrying a giant disc on the backs of 4 elephants.

Good video. I'm certainly looking forward to the Maxwell video you've been putting so much time into. Glad it won't be released in 4 installments!

Boring? I don't think this topic is boring at all. In fact, I enjoy the look behind the scenes. And I'm fascinated by the insights into why my late father, who spent most of his working life in academia, complained about his job so much. It wasn't because of the research, or the collaboration with other researchers, or the teaching -- he enjoyed all of those things, and those are the things that academia should really be all about. It's the "everything else" that can suck the joy out of it.

I was kinda expecting to do one of your surprise reveals half way through and start talking about why the journal system is the way it is. It's because of Ghislaine Maxwell's dad. Not a joke. Back in the day he saw that publishing of science was done sporadically and for free and it was difficult to find papers on things you were interested in especially if they were in another country and/or language. So he strove and was successful in becoming the middle man who took all the money and set all the rules and made sure the work was still being done for free (as it was before the systemisation). Behind the Bastards did a two parter on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnmFTvlrsOo I'm not really a fan of the whole tech industry disrupter thing but it seems like the problem could potentially be overcome now in a way it couldn't previously. If a proper charity or non-profit admin'd by the kind of people who do good reviewing/editting now and they had their own free/very cheap publishing site/app with proper editors and reviewers and payment etc. and it got sufficient support it could technically work. I don't think it ever will, the system is too ingrained, but you know, theoretically.

I have a maybe funny story from my grad school career(I wasn't a good grad student tho lol). I was sitting around and some other students were talking about a paper (I don't think they were reviewers? It might have been assigned work tho or not). But they were complaining about their methodology their data and then they capped it off with "oh and they didn't use LaTeX, they used Microsoft word. They should really up their game and it would really improve their figures and so on"

hi i suggested this one! great video. i asked about how to fix it mainly because youre in the thick of it and im not! i hear a lot about bananas papers, useless papers, and spam papers (and spam journals) and it got me thinking about how, from the perspective of someone outside of it, the academic publishing industry seems to be a credentials-issuing service that occasionally produces good science in spite of itself.

This was great. Love how you called out the worst parts of this as what they are rather than putting them under the nebulous umbrella term "gatekeeping." You commented multiple times on the camera shaking; with the presentation anchoring the video, it just added to the emotion of the scene

Great topic, probably the hardest one. Is there a premise that there is a mutual goal among people who write papers relevant to scientific thought and the general public who have some sort of conscious interest that this process goes well? It would seem prudent to realize that a good way to organize is as valid and important as the useful, and massive amounts---for better or worse---of factual good information and the developed good techniques that ultimately serve humanity to live a little better. Nerdy aside: if there can be data compression, why can't there be an equivalent in papers and the like where streamlining doesn't actually reduce the value?

Speaking of academic publishing, another YouTuber recently discussed how he was able to buy a fake scientific paper and went into some of the process. I always thought it was harder and more expensive...Boy, guess I was wrong. https://youtu.be/SEwiOykoXXc?si=Cf6PdWMtclc4IY6p

Thanks for the video. In my field, cancer biology/drug research, the process is very similar. I wanted to bring up reviewers. These are also unpaid and I've done many reviews in the "name of my" PI. I always found it as part of the training. What I found interesting is that there are more cohorts no longer doing reviews because it is unpaid. I've seen these comments mentioned on social media of tags that I follow. I totally get it and I am for this. This of course has some consequences. I've found it has become harder and harder to get peer reviewers, or quality peer reviewers, for my submissions. Journals, at least in my field, are always looking for things to publish. But the pool for peer reviewers is going down (cause it's unpaid). Journal standards are going to go down the toilet... Something has to change. The arguments of a journal not being able to pay a peer reviewer is confusing to me when you consider that the big ones, Elsevier and Springer Nature, pull in millions, if not billions, of euros a year. I feel like they have the capital to fix it if they wanted to...

Thanks for the video. Looking forward to the Maxwell one. Sound quality is fine. Video has a slight tone of "smudge on the camera" feeling, but it doesn't bother the eye imo.

The audio/video quality is good. Reminds me of practicing OBS before my first time using it to record a lecture with live demos.

Ah yes, bibliometrics. Or why even supposedly smart people fall for Strathern's generalization of Goodhart's law. I've said it before and I'll say it again, picking what is easy to measure is a form of convenience sampling, and convenience sampling will always come back to bite you in the rear end. Thanks for the video, looking forward to the book club.

Thanks for taking on what's really a complicated topic that people have been trying to figure out how to improve for a long time. I have way too many comments, but my background is that I lucked into a job where I can publish or not (sort of halfway between science and industry), so I don't have to crank out a lot of paper volume, but I think it helps me see why some people do. Especially since I have a partner who's in the straight academic track. Part of what drives the "Imma split this into 37 three-page papers" is that hiring and promotion has turned into a paper and cite counting thing, rather than an evaluation of the quality of the papers that you've written (and thus work that you've done). A five paper series gets you 5 times as many papers, and eventually 2.5 to 5 times as many cites. If you do one paper that's really amazing, it only gets cited once per other paper, and it also can take years for the cites to accumulate so that hiring or tenure & promotion committees will hire you or promote you, and you need to get a job or promotion before you're old enough to retire. So it encourages early career people to crank out lots of volume ("at school X you have to have at least N papers per year in your tenure package"), and also to get them into journals with high impact factors, which is really a prediction of the future cites of the paper that may or may not be realistic. This pressure also encourages scam and trash journals that will print random slop on the assumption that papers are being counted and not read.

Thanks for the video! It was about what I expected. An overview of the process and its various problems, I had heard of some of these issues before, but it was still nice to get a more complete picture. I have never submitted a paper but I have done a lot professional software engineering and there we have the same problem with "no comment" reviews. That either meant the change was trivial or the reviewer didn't read it (or not all of it) because perfect code doesn't exist. Getting 2 reviewers solved part of that problem, as did making the changes relatively compact so they could be reviewed in only a few minutes. Every step would be linked to a ticket and version control so there was an electronic paper trail. Not something that could easily be applied to scientific publishing, I know, but I think it's obvious the whole process could use some more modernization and professionalism :) Regarding the video itself, sound quality was perfect, video was maybe a little bit blurry but good enough imo.

Well, I just love the heck out of your video style. One of the best parts is how you say the quiet parts out loud. That is, you know, you leave in the offhand bits about what you're doing wrong, or maybe you'll improve on. But someday. Not right now. It's funny. It's endearing. It's casual. I mean, I feel like it's up for grabs whether you need glasses. I believe you. I believe that's not a part of your video fiction. But I also feel like it's none of my business. So I'm agnostic about it. Protectively. Protecting myself, protecting you, whatever. As for academic publishing, I voted against. I almost feel like, well, impostor syndrome, like why do I get to advise you? Just for a couple extra bucks? Heck. I'm glad to give it for nothing. Zero ROI. It's not an investment. It's less than not-for-profit. I subscribe to stuff I never watch. Like, I hate the NYT so I don't pay them, but I've come to hate the Atlantic because everyone there thinks they're smart, but I'm only average, and even I think they're all stupid now. I have so much less respect for David Brooks now that he jumped ship to The Atlantic. He's been wrong and wrong over the years, and to his credit he's shown me he knows a fraction of the stuff that I do that's mere child's play to me. Anyway, I feel we're not gonna solve publishing or sci comm on this venue. I'm glad you pointed out that the stuff you think people wanted you to tell us how we could fix aren't at the top of your own list. It's a big subject because there's so many reasons for everything being how it is that it's gonna take a long time before halfway decent fixes come into view, if they ever do. Everyone remotely like you has their different ideas what to fix and how to go about it. I feel like you did a great job of scratching the surface. I still don't feel like even one of your top ideas about the most urgent things to change will be implemented by 2030 in any meaningful way. I feel like it's optimistic to venture 50/50 chances the whole edifice doesn't entirely collapse instead. OTOH, I don't feel like telling me your best take on the distinctions or lack thereof between the ways the Virial Theorem is used in astro vs. chemistry vs. quantum mechanics is an idea you should entertain, like that'd be a suitable "refinement" of the celestial mechanics topic. I don't wanna try to persuade you to give us all your take on a specific issue of interest to me, but not to most of your patrons. But then, you know, academic publishing is a wide umbrella and everyone's interested in your take. I'm glad you did it. But I feel like whether it's you or some other random youtube channel, in today's world, it's both pushing on a string and we got bigger fish to fry. So thank you as always, do keep on keeping on, please. A motivated Dr. Collier helps me to stay happy. And, you know... Best Wishes.

Biochemist Derek Lowe, in his "In the Pipeline" blog on the Science site, has often railed against many aspects of the corruption in academic publishing. In May 2025 Lowe covered a topic you didn't touch on in this video, the rise of fake journals, paper mills, that exist solely to collect publishing fees: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/inside-scientific-paper-mill I found the sound quality on your video perfectly fine.

Thank you for another great video

Reviewer was all let me in on that action? I gasped in shock!

Great video. Just to add my experience: generally for-profit journal companies are considerably worse than non-profit journals (e.g. run by societies like APS, ACS, etc..). Many non-profit journals only charge a fee for open-access, but you can still publish your article for free if it's behind a paywall (this may vary between fields though). I've also seen prestigious journals hire full time editors that are either straight of grad school or early career people and don't know what they're really doing.

Excellent topic. In defense of academic publishing ivory costs a lot and towers are both tall and compilcated structures.