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Comment by setgree | Hacker News Reader

So here I'm learning that Nature published their paper, which claimed an absolutely world-changing breakthrough, after the lead authors had already had two papers retracted?

the Springer Nature Group has a profit margin of 26% on annual revenue of ~€1.7bn [0]. If they were keen to publish this paper, they could have afforded to send an expert to the lab to actually see the process for themselves.

But that's not the kind of thing you do if your core business model is to publish splashy headlines...

[0] https://group.springernature.com/gp/group/media/press-releas...

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> a profit margin of 26%

that seems entirely too high for merely hosting and publishing papers. They don't do verification themselves, since scientific papers are meant to be peer reviewed (and unpaid peers, for that matter).

Really? That seems insanely low to me. Where is the other $1.26 billion going?

Executives.

Springer is a huge publishing conglomerate that also deals in physical books, besides the payroll for editing and typesetting, the cut from retail channels, etc.

The scientific publishing industry is ridiculously profitable.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

> 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.

It's the perfect rent-seeking business: grant bodies and governments judge scientists by approval of journals, scientists need to play the game of getting into 'reputable' journals, journals sit in the middle, outsource most of their work into unpaid work to scientists, and laugh all the way to the bank.

Then governments introduced mandatory open access for scientific research, for a moment it looked like journals' chokehold might fail, but they just adjusted: Nature journals charge authors ~$10,000 per open access paper. That's all taxpayer money going to for-profit organisations with little justification for the price.

> grant bodies and governments judge scientists by approval of journals

so this is the lynchpin - how is it that such judgement is reliant on the journals, when it is peer review that gives papers their credibility?

Therefore, shouldn't the peer review system be the judge of quality? Which means by exposing more peer review and making it way more open and participatory, the gov't will no longer need to rely on reputation in journals to judge grants or progress?

I think what you're looking for is the next step of plan S: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03342-6

But in the meantime:

The first step for acceptance is the journal editor - in lower tier journals, that's an unpaid Professor, in higher tiers it's a paid staff member (usually academic background too) - who decides whether the journal thinks this paper is a good fit or not. Most papers die there, too low impact, too niche outcomes, not enough wide readership etc.

If it has passed the editor it goes to peer reviewers, unpaid academics, who make similar decisions; is it technically sound? Is it impactful?

Impact is measured by the number of citations this paper will have, a bit of an educated guess. A paper on an obscure seagrasses will have few citations, a paper on a novel cancer-defeating mechanism will have many.

High impact factor journals are selective in which papers they accept (via editors and journals) to keep up the high impact factor. That double-gated decision is what turned into a stamp of approval; it's the journal's brand which is the lynchpin for the academics' career, not the peer review

One of the retractions occurred after this paper was published. So just one prior retraction.

Ok, this is at least partly exculpatory.

People will still link other Nature articles as if they mean anything. Gell-Mann Amnesia.

So any source that's ever been wrong is not credible?

What infallible sources or publications are you relying on?

Fox News

Fox News has never published a retraction?

I think the more productive question is to ask: how many times can you cry wolf before you lose a grade of credibility?

when a group stops large disclosed retractions and starts publishing the retraction somewhere in the Sports Section -- or worse yet : when the retractions stop.

Well, if you uncritically share Nature articles, you're a sucker. It doesn't matter too much to me. Poor choices by others helps me make money.

How does the choice to share Nature articles make you money?

Polymarket.

much like Das Kapital, Gell-Mann Amnesia is sound in its observations, but poor in its conclusions

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