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Pablo Gómez Barreiro

@pagomba.bsky.social

🌱 Seeds |🌿 Plants |📜Academic publishing Most limited of all specialists. Infamous bibliometrician. Amateur photographer of tiny things 📷🔬. 👨‍💻 Too much R. Proud father of #MDPIexploreR. 📈 Surfing the strain: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00327

233 Posts1480 Follower233 Folgt
Sholto David@sholtodavid.bsky.social · 2mo ago

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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Solal Pirelli@solalpirelli.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Did you know there's a barely hidden market for authorship of fake scientific papers in conferences? New preprint w/ @abalkina.bsky.social, @mkunesova.bsky.social, and @yaamurozturk.bsky.social : arxiv.org/abs/2604.22458 We found 4,000+ ads & matched them to 1,720 IEEE conf. papers! ...🧵

Opening Pandora's box: Paper mills in conference proceedings

Paper mills are a growing threat to the integrity of science, yet their penetration in conference proceedings remains underexplored despite conferences being more important than journals in some scien...

arxiv.org

Sarah Hird, PhD@sarahhird.bsky.social · 4mo ago

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 pictogramsClose 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?
Jean-François Cudennec@limpetnerd.eurosky.social · 5mo ago

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.

Jeffrey Brainard@jeffreybrainard.bsky.social · 7mo ago

#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...

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

science.org

Pablo Gómez Barreiro@pagomba.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🧪 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...).

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...

arxiv.org

Mark A. Hanson@hansonmark.bsky.social · 7mo ago

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

Samuel Moore@samuelmoore.org · 8mo ago

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...

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...

english.elpais.com

Roland Pease@peaseroland.bsky.social · 9mo ago

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?

Mark A. Hanson@hansonmark.bsky.social · 9mo ago

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.