More fundamentally, every active scientist has been brought up in a system where The Drain was already normalized.

This system hasn't always existed. For-profit publishers are a recent invention. Their value proposition has always been awful, and now they are actively eroding trust in science.

5/n

For-profit journals are supposed to improve research quality, yet they're perversely incentivized to churn out whatever they can monetize. This was happening before AI (see Strain: bit.ly/43gJPUM), and AI will make it worse.

It's insane that we volunteer our time to help them do so.

4/n

Submit your literature reviews to REL!

this might well be a good prediction, but I think if you make this prediction you should also answer the question why would the government actively contribute for months to creating the expectation of income tax rises if they are actually not going to do it?

Even setting aside judgement on whether that's a desirable regime, an integral component of that model is paying relatively high post-tax salaries (at least relative to each temporary worker's next best alternative). A Dubai model but with low wages and NHS surcharge isn't going to exactly fly...