Paolo Crosetto

@paolocrosetto.bsky.social

2.8K followers 1.3K following 550 posts

Experimental & Behavioural economist INRAE Grenoble • President of the French Association of Experimental Economists • Scientific publishing measurement & reform • Experiments on food labeling - risk - choices • Rstats • Italian Food Police honorary member .. more

Videos

Business 25%

Economics 25%

Posts Replies Media Videos

Pinned

Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 16d

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma.

It's *scientific publishing*.

We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_...

Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

Reposted by Paolo Crosetto

Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 3h

In general, let's just stop paying companies that host this BS.

Fight the drain of scientific publishing.

arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820

An infographic describing the drain of scientific publishing

Reposted by Garry Peterson, Paolo Crosetto

Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 3h

Scientific Reports has a ⬆️ Impact Inflation: a very high IF given their citation network (self-citing, citation cartels, etc).

They'll even typeset & publish AI slop for a fee!

Strain: bit.ly/StrainQSS
Strain explorer β: pagoba.shinyapps.io/strain_explo...

#SciPub #ResearchIntegrity #AcademicSky

A chart showing the Impact Inflation of Scientific Reports is much higher than the average journal. Biology Open, the "anything technically sound" megajournal of the non-profit Company of Biologists is shown for comparison given these two journals started in 2012 and 2013 respectively. The two have different management strategies: one focuses on profit via immense publication output (SciRep), the other focuses on publishing sound science (BiolOpen).

Reposted by Bartosz Bartkowski

Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 18h

It's that time of the year again

Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 23h

That's so good. Wait, why am I crying?

Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 1d

Fifteen Years

xkcd.com/3172/

Comic. Panels up to the 10-year point are grayed out. New panels since the Ten Years comic, which chronicles the first ten years of PERSON 1's journey with cancer: (1) [two people in bed] PERSON 1 (woman): One more chapter? PERSON 2 (man): Don’t we both have to get up early? PERSON 1: Nnnnnggggh PERSON 2: Sure, good point. (2) [many people wearing masks, walking while looking at graphs on their phones] (3) [birds landing on people] PERSON 2 in beanie and scarf: Hah! They like *my* seeds best. PERSON 1 in scarf holding phone with a bird sitting on it: Wait, how do I take a picture of this one? (4) [two people rowing boats with tree landscape] (5) [Person 1 carries overflowing stack of things to Person 2 in bed] PERSON 1: I brought you honey lemon tea, more pillows, a cinnamon roll, Tylenol, another blanket, a– PERSON 2: It was just Appendicitis, I’m really– PERSON 1: *It is my turn to take care of you and I am going to do it right!* (6) [Two people in car] (7) [still in car) PERSON 1: Oh my god. PERSON 2: Oh my god. (8) [car driving] PERSON 1: Pull over! PERSON 2: I am! (9) [both people get out of car] (10) [Large colored panel of aurora borealis over water with both people looking on] (11) [Person 1 sits against tree while Person 2 lies on the ground] PERSON 1: Fifteen years. No sign of the cancer. (12) I *am* having some weird symptoms. Joint pain. Fatigue. I think I’m losing my close-up vision. PERSON 2: Yeah. Me too. (13) PERSON 2: I think we’re getting old. (14) PERSON 1: I guess that’s okay. PERSON 2: It’s all I wanted.

Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 1d

What does it take to publish in Scientific Reports?

Access to an LLM, a few weeks, and 2690$ for the APC.

What does it take to obtain a retraction?

A lot of sleuthing time & work, pubpeer, repeated emails, time, evaluation committees, appeals, and more.

Let's make errors like this costly!

Jack Ryan 🙏🧪 @jacksonwryan.com · 1d

Uhh,,, Figure 1 shows you... what exactly? Trying to understand Medical fryrmbial, runctitional features and mum's legs going through concrete.

This whole article is a bit of a disaster. And it's very difficult to find other published work for the author. Strange! 🧪

(via @smutclyde.bsky.social)

Text says: This section provides a comprehensive description of the methodology employed in this study to develop an explainable XAI framework for ASD diagnosis and parental support. The proposed framework integrates the TabPFNMix regressor, a state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) model for tabular data, with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to ensure both high predictive accuracy and interpretability. The methodology is structured into five subsections: (1) Dataset Description, (2) TabPFNMix Overview, (3) SHAP for Explainability, (4) Framework Design, and (5) Evaluation Metrics. Figure 1 shows the overall methodology. Informed consent was obtained from all participants involved in the study, and, where applicable, consent was obtained from legal guardians for minor participants as approved by the IRB.

And then Figure 1 is shown with lots of AI errors on the image.

An absolutely totally fine this can be published in a science journal image that purports to show how the study was carried out but instead is just AI slop.

Reposted by Dorothy Bishop, Paolo Crosetto

Jack Ryan 🙏🧪 @jacksonwryan.com · 1d

Reposted by Suresh Venkatasubramanian, Magnus Johansson, Paolo Crosetto , and 4 more Suresh Venkatasubramanian, Magnus Johansson, Paolo Crosetto, Tom van der Meer, Alessandro Nai, Brian Weatherson, Greg Linden

Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 1d

Fifteen Years

xkcd.com/3172/

Reposted by Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto

Stefanie Haustein @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca · 1d

Yay, our first podcast citation @danbrockington.bsky.social @paolocrosetto.bsky.social et al.
They discuss The Drain starting at minute 33:20 in the context of a protein science journal published by Wiley and also mention @elife.bsky.social. It's introduced as "almost an economics paper" :D

Stephanie Wankowicz @stephanieaw.bsky.social · 3d

Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

Episode 9: I Can Do It With a Broken Grant Cycle

Podcast Episode · The Tortured Proteins Department · 11/23/2025 · 1h 1m

podcasts.apple.com

Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 1d

Do you feel that scientific publishing is failing you - it is increasingly expensive, asking ever more, giving back less?

It's because the system is built to *drain* resources - money, time, trust and control - away from scientists, to generate a huge rent.

Time to stop it: doi.org/10.48550/arx...

Reposted by Paolo Crosetto, Dolly Jørgensen, Aileen Fyfe

LSE Impact Blog @lseimpactblog.bsky.social · 1d

👀ICYMI: "if the drain has a particular history and geography, it means that it is not inevitable. It can be resisted."

#AcademicSky #HigherEd #ScholComm

Money, Time, Trust, Control – How commercial publishers drain science - Impact of Social Sciences

Have the interests of commercial publishers now become antithetical to the pursuit of knowledge?

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Reposted by American Library Association, Paolo Crosetto

Internet Archive @archive.org · 2d

📢 Upcoming #booktalk! 📖
Join Samuel Moore & Heather Joseph for PUBLISHING BEYOND THE MARKET, reimagining open access through scholar-led, non-commercial publishing.

📆 Thurs Dec 4th
🕙 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET
📍 Online
🎟️ www.eventbrite.com/e/1839631951...

@SamuelMoore.org @HJoseph.bsky.social

A promotional graphic titled “Publishing Beyond the Market.” The top half has a gray textured background with the event title in large white text and a vertical label reading “Book Talk.” To the right is an illustration of a tall, uneven stack of books. The bottom half shows two headshots: on the left, Samuel Moore; on the right, Heather Joseph. Text below reads “with Samuel Moore & Heather Joseph.”

Reposted by Paolo Crosetto

Stephanie Wankowicz @stephanieaw.bsky.social · 3d

Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

Episode 9: I Can Do It With a Broken Grant Cycle

Podcast Episode · The Tortured Proteins Department · 11/23/2025 · 1h 1m

podcasts.apple.com

Reposted by Paolo Crosetto

Stefanie Haustein @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca · 7d

We summarized the Drain paper in an LSE Impact blog post this week. Please share in your networks, ideally with those we are calling to action: research funders and university leadership
blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci... #AcademicSky #AcademicPublishing #OpenAccess #ScholComm

Reposted by Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto

Ted Meissner @tedmeissner.bsky.social · 7d

"The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science..."

arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04820

#science #peerreview #scientificmethod #scientificpublishing

arxiv.org

Reposted by Paolo Crosetto

Samuel Moore @samuelmoore.org · 8d

"In addition to a captive market, academic publishers also enjoy a sizable cost savings particular to their industry. Publishers have various operational costs, but they don’t pay researchers who write the papers, editors who revise them [...], and academic peer-reviewers."

How the Avalanche of Academic Papers Threatens Scientific Research

This is the third part of a series on academic publishing. Read part one here and part two here. For many years, the prestigious journal Philosophy & Public Affairs published about

www.realclearinvestigations.com

Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 8d

If this argument was actually credible the Elsevier journal would have rejected us!

Reposted by Dan Brockington, Elizabeth Stokoe, Paolo Crosetto , and 2 more Dan Brockington, Elizabeth Stokoe, Paolo Crosetto, Margot C. Finn, Aileen Fyfe

LSE Impact Blog @lseimpactblog.bsky.social · 8d

💥New: Money, Time, Trust, Control – How commercial publishers drain science

✍️ @danbrockington.bsky.social @aileenfyfe.bsky.social @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca

#AcademicSky #ScholComm #AcademicPublishing

Money, Time, Trust, Control – How commercial publishers drain science - Impact of Social Sciences

Have the interests of commercial publishers now become antithetical to the pursuit of knowledge?

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 9d

We do -- classifica -- but it's unfortunately very fashionable to use English words for lots of stuff to make it sound, depending on the context, cooler or more professional or newer or all the things together.

Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 9d

Ahah thank you! That would be more than enough ❤️

Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 9d

Profits plot is my own representation of the data we present in table form in this paper arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820

Data from the table in supplementary material, also here

Reposted by Jörg Oechssler

Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 9d

So it's back to the lab! And we are ready in Grenoble since we did not dismantle them, we rather invested in better subject pool recruitment and management.

Josh McCrain @joshmccrain.bsky.social · 9d

new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

Reposted by Marc Lynch, Simon Hix, Ben H. Ansell , and 45 more Marc Lynch, Simon Hix, Ben H. Ansell, David Lazer, Sander van der Linden, Will Jennings, Gordon Pennycook, Brendan Nyhan, Carl T. Bergstrom, John De Vos, Olivier Klein, Scott L. Greer, Steven Van de Walle, Michael A. Clemens, Victor Asal, Steven S. Smith, Maarten Vink, Jeffrey Ian Ross, Jon Green, Rebecca Sear, Calvin K. Lai, Juan Cole, Benjamin Braun, Mary Corcoran, Dorothea Kübler, Karen Benjamin Guzzo, Jane Suiter, Paolo Crosetto, Rebecca Tushnet, David R. Miller, Silvia Secchi, Julia Lynch, Margot C. Finn, Andreas De Block, Matthijs Rooduijn, Sebastian Karcher, Jutta Haider, Michael Jones‐Correa, Fabrizio Bernardi, Guy J. Curtis, Johannes Breuer, Georg Weizsäcker, Tom Louwerse, Juan Ramón, Tim Stephens, Pepper D. Culpepper, Dana Howard, Evan Roberts

Josh McCrain @joshmccrain.bsky.social · 9d

Reposted by Paolo Crosetto, Matti Vuorre

Data Colada @datacolada.bsky.social · 9d

[130] Researchbox: Even easier to use than before. More transparently permanent.
datacolada.org/130

[130] ResearchBox: Even Easier to Use and More Transparently Permanent than Before - Data Colada

Over the past 10 years or so, posting data, code, and materials for published papers has gone from eccentric to mundane. There are a few platforms that enable sharing research files, including Researc...

datacolada.org

Reposted by Robbert Sanderman, Mikael Ehn, Seema Jayachandran , and 12 more Robbert Sanderman, Mikael Ehn, Seema Jayachandran, Alexander Wuttke, Marno Verbeek, Cathy N. Davidson, Jennifer Clark, Ingo Rohlfing, Paolo Crosetto, Bessma Momani, David J. Berri, Dolly Jørgensen, Larry W. Hunter, Kathleen Kennedy, Giulio Mattioli

Philipp Heimberger @heimbergecon.bsky.social · 10d

"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 collectively generated... $12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024."

Reposted by Paolo Crosetto

Cosmik Network @cosmik.network · 10d

“We propose that scholarly publishing needs to be re-communalized. Universities, libraries, funders ... need to build a system that is community-led and managed, and which works to further research... This should involve active support for federated open infrastructures”

arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820

The Drain of Scientific Publishing

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 ...

arxiv.org

Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 10d

Pension-salary growth gap in Europe. source Pablo Garcia Guzman pablogguz.github.io

Pensions have grown much more than salaries in most countries. And there are more and more pensioner per active worker. And they vote.

You get the picture of what an insolvable f***ing mess we're in.

Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 10d

I am giving a course on Behavioral and Experimental approaches to public policy of food consumption in Milan this week.

We will talk methods, experiments, colors, numbers, perception, labels, taxes, nutriscore, and more.

This is an open hybrid event, over MS Teams. Reach out to get the link.