Paolo Crosetto
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paolocrosetto.bsky.social
Paolo Crosetto
@paolocrosetto.bsky.social
2.8K followers 1.3K following 540 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
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paolocrosetto.bsky.social
Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 10d
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
stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca
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
November 20, 2025 at 6:14 PM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
samuelmoore.org
"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
November 20, 2025 at 9:59 AM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
hansonmark.bsky.social
Thanks to the LSE blog for the highlight!

The one constant of all publishing reform efforts has been ludicrous publisher profit margins. We specifically highlight a need for funders to act.

Find out more
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: bit.ly/StrainQSS
Oligopoly: bit.ly/OligSciPub
November 19, 2025 at 2:21 PM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
lseimpactblog.bsky.social
💥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
November 19, 2025 at 11:13 AM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
datacolada.bsky.social
[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
November 18, 2025 at 2:57 PM
paolocrosetto.bsky.social
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.
joshmccrain.bsky.social Josh McCrain @joshmccrain.bsky.social · 3d
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
November 18, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
nclairis.bsky.social
In case you missed it, here is a related thread on the recent Drain on scientific publishing paper explaining why things need to change:
bsky.app/profile/hans...
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 10d
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. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section 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. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 18, 2025 at 2:34 PM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
heimbergecon.bsky.social
"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."
November 18, 2025 at 6:48 AM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
cosmik.network
“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
November 18, 2025 at 1:21 AM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
ottolilllebo.bsky.social
Ganske sykt å se på profittmarginen til selskapene. Kanskje Norge bør fase ut oljen og heller kjøpe Elsevier 😂

Bakgrunn: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
November 17, 2025 at 11:58 AM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
samuelmoore.org
You can now download the book on the publisher's website: press.umich.edu/Books/P/Publ... (open access of course)
September 1, 2025 at 8:46 AM
paolocrosetto.bsky.social
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.
November 17, 2025 at 2:19 PM
paolocrosetto.bsky.social
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.
November 17, 2025 at 2:12 PM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
sinandrei.bsky.social
We released a pretty cool dataset/preprint today looking at video game play, cognition, time-use and a ton of self-reported psych measures at osf.io/preprints/ps... with @nballou.bsky.social @matti.vuorre.com @thomashakman.bsky.social @rpsychologist.com and @shuhbillskee.bsky.social RRs coming soon
Survey administration schedule across the 12-week study period. Participants completed biweekly surveys (orange) every two weeks, with US participants additionally completing daily surveys (blue) for the first 30 days. Cognitive tests (green) were administered during biweekly surveys at weeks 1, 5, and 9. Gray circles indicate days with no scheduled surveys. Retention percentages show the proportion of baseline participants (N=1978) who were still active at each measurement week (defined as having completed either a daily or biweekly survey at any time after that week) Diurnal play across Xbox, Nintendo, Steam. Sample of daily gaming patterns and mental wellbeing for three representative participants. Stacked bars represent total daily playtime across platforms. Orange line shows biweekly mental wellbeing scores (short WEMWBS) measured at six study waves. Participants were selected from those closest to the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of total playtime, prioritizing those with the most varied multi-platform gaming behavior. Participant IDs: p9009984081 (25th percentile), p8809196928 (50th percentile), p7162729307 (75th percentile)
November 14, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
dsquintana.bsky.social
Our paper on improving statistical reporting in psychology is now online 🎉

As a part of this paper, we also created the Transparent Statistical Reporting in Psychology checklist, which researchers can use to improve their statistical reporting practices

www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Transparent and comprehensive statistical reporting is critical for ensuring the credibility, reproducibility, and interpretability of psychological research. This paper offers a structured set of guidelines for reporting statistical analyses in quantitative psychology, emphasizing clarity at both the planning and results stages. Drawing on established recommendations and emerging best practices, we outline key decisions related to hypothesis formulation, sample size justification, preregistration, outlier and missing data handling, statistical model specification, and the interpretation of inferential outcomes. We address considerations across frequentist and Bayesian frameworks and fixed as well as sequential research designs, including guidance on effect size reporting, equivalence testing, and the appropriate treatment of null results. To facilitate implementation of these recommendations, we provide the Transparent Statistical Reporting in Psychology (TSRP) Checklist that researchers can use to systematically evaluate and improve their statistical reporting practices (https://osf.io/t2zpq/). In addition, we provide a curated list of freely available tools, packages, and functions that researchers can use to implement transparent reporting practices in their own analyses to bridge the gap between theory and practice. To illustrate the practical application of these principles, we provide a side-by-side comparison of insufficient versus best-practice reporting using a hypothetical cognitive psychology study. By adopting transparent reporting standards, researchers can improve the robustness of individual studies and facilitate cumulative scientific progress through more reliable meta-analyses and research syntheses.
November 14, 2025 at 8:43 PM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
xkcd.com
Car Size

xkcd.com/3167/
4-panel vertical comic. (1) 100 Years Ago [two people standing next to bicycle with small car nearby] PERSON 1: It’s too dangerous riding a bike with these cars around. I should get a car, too. (2) 50 Years Ago [two people between smaller car and bigger car] PERSON 2 with short hair: Small cars are less safe in collisions with larger vehicles, so I should get a bigger one. (3) Today [two people between big car and even bigger car] PERSON 1: Everyone has huge SUVs now. If I don’t get the biggest one, I’m putting my family at risk. (4) Soon [two people next to large armored car with spiked clubs attached] PERSON 2: If I don’t install more whirling spike clubs, I’ll be destroyed by all the other drivers who...
November 14, 2025 at 9:15 PM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
paolocrosetto.bsky.social
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 👇
November 12, 2025 at 10:31 AM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
katymilkman.bsky.social
Great talk from Stefano Della Vigna at @pennchibe.bsky.social conference about forecasts of social science experiments’ effects. We expect effects that are roughly 2x as big as we get.
November 14, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
p-hunermund.com
According to signaling theory, some signals must be costly just to be costly—that's how you get a separating equilibrium. Think peacocks and their oversized feathers. So even if AI removes one costly signal, it doesn't mean we should stop technological progress — we'll just find new ones.
sarahoconnorft.ft.com Sarah O'Connor @sarahoconnorft.ft.com · 8d
Is AI making job recruitment less meritocratic? We're getting some v interesting research studies on this question now, and the news is... not good. @jburnmurdoch.ft.com & I dive in, in the latest edition of our newsletter The AI Shift www.ft.com/content/e5b7...
November 14, 2025 at 11:52 AM
paolocrosetto.bsky.social
Gentle request that @altmetric.com and @linkedin.com resume contact to be able to track academic LinkedIn activity on AltMetric.

More and more scientific discourse is happening on BlueSky (tracked) and LinkedIn (not tracked).

@linkedin.com let AltMetric use your API and include you! NOW!
November 14, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
lakril.bsky.social
We're happy to see that Altmetric is now counting Bluesky as a data source. If only they and LinkedIn could figure out a relationship as Altmetric tells us nothing without LinkedIn references.
www.altmetric.com/about-us/our...
Bluesky
Bluesky is now available in Altmetric as an attention source. Analyze social engagement with a comprehensive view of your research influence.
www.altmetric.com
January 31, 2025 at 5:00 PM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
danbrockington.bsky.social
This brilliant graphic from @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca captures really clearly the challenge of the drain, and the hope of alternatives that can free us from it.
stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca Stefanie Haustein @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca · 8d
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk 🎤

If you’ve read this far and still need convincing, please check out our preprint arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 and this infographic: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
10/10
The four-fold drain of scientific publishing: Money, Time, Trust, and Control.
November 14, 2025 at 8:52 AM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
dgbassani.bsky.social
A timely thread… as I recover from this shocker. What level of insanity is this? This is the publication fee for one paper in a journal that publishes a few hundred papers each year. 10,400 USD, but *only* 8,360 USD after the discounts…
Screen shot of the invoice for the article processing charges of one scientific manuscript. The total price is 10,400 USD. After the university discount and subvention the invoice balance is still 8,360 USD
November 14, 2025 at 3:05 AM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
xphilosopher.bsky.social
The new journal EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY will soon be accepting submissions!
xphijournal.bsky.social Experimental Philosophy Journal @xphijournal.bsky.social · 8d
The journal's homepage is now live: journals.ub.uni-koeln.de/index.php/xphi

We will soon also be found under xphi.eu.

Accepting submissions in about 2 weeks.
Experimental Philosophy
journals.ub.uni-koeln.de
November 13, 2025 at 7:43 PM
Reposted by Paolo Crosetto
stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca
Over the past months (and at least 11 versions!), I was lucky to work with 11 amazing colleagues on a call to action to reform academic publishing.

Not another declaration, but an appeal to our powerful friends, research funders & institutions, to Stop the Drain of Scientific Publishing. 1/n
November 13, 2025 at 8:17 PM