Anonymous ID: 42b4ba Sept. 22, 2021, 3:01 p.m. No.14639088   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

 

It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell

by Stephen Buranyi

Tue 27 Jun 2017 06.00 BST

 

Last modified on Mon 13 Sep 2021 09.50 BST

 

In 2011, Claudio Aspesi, a senior investment analyst at Bernstein Research in London, made a bet that the dominant firm in one of the most lucrative industries in the world was headed for a crash. Reed-Elsevier, a multinational publishing giant with annual revenues exceeding £6bn, was an investor’s darling. It was one of the few publishers that had successfully managed the transition to the internet, and a recent company report was predicting yet another year of growth. Aspesi, though, had reason to believe that that prediction – along with those of every other major financial analyst – was wrong.

 

The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.

 

But Elsevier’s business model seemed a truly puzzling thing. In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.

 

The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.

 

continued here… https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science

 

https://www.books-by-isbn.com/0-08/index1.html

Anonymous ID: 42b4ba Sept. 22, 2021, 3:26 p.m. No.14639227   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>9352 >>9488 >>9591 >>9663 >>9668 >>9670

>>14639135

 

"A stain on U.S. history": Trump's attorney general pick used Guantanamo Bay to hold thousands of Haitian refugees

 

Excerpt from article:

 

But Haiti was also going through an AIDS crisis and some refugees were HIV-positive. Those who tested HIV-positive were forced to undergo a second interview at Guantanamo Bay and questioned again, facing a higher standard for proving their eligibility for asylum, according to a law paper published by Michael Ratner, the attorney who successfully fought against the HIV screening. Ratner died in 2016. The paper, titled "How We Closed the Guantanamo HIV Camp: The Intersection of Politics and Litigation," was released by the Harvard Human Rights Journal in 1998.

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/william-barr-attorney-general-nominee-asylum-seekers-haiti-hiv-positive-patients-guantamano-bay-2018-12-10/