Reviewers and writers actually do get a stipend, but it’s a token amount like 200 bucks a year. This industry is the most ass backward incentive structure we could possibly create, the only reason writers would provide articles to a journal is literally for the clout.
Clout and also many academic focused universities expect some set minimum of publications from their staff
Publishing and winning grants are the lifeblood of most academic careers
To fund your research, you have to win grants - and to win grants, you have to have a proven history of publishing research and winning grants! Bonus points if you provide unpaid labor for granting and publishing agencies by reviewing applications and submissions.
I’ve never gotten a stipend or heard of someone getting a stipend for publishing or reviewing manuscripts. The only thing I’ve been offered is access to the journal.
Really? I’ve reviewed and published a good chunk of papers and never received any financial compensation.
but wait…
where meme part ?
Didn’t you know? Screenshots of social media posts are memes now 🙃
!politicalmemes@lemmy.world suffers from this but it’s 1000% worse there.
Why are we looking at revenue? We don’t know the operating costs. What are the profit margins?
According to Wikipedia, in 2022 Elsevier’s revenue was 2.909 billion pounds and their net income was 2.021 billion pounds.
Not going to bother looking up the rest.
Alright but look at how much they pay the authors. What other business pays ZERO dollars for their core product?
None, but science isn’t a business. Treating it so creates perverse incentives where an articles is reviewed by merit of its financial gain and not its content. Some people already do this by prestige alone, but adding money to the mix won’t improve this imo
So it’s acceptable for Elselvier et al to milk academics blind? At the minimum, authors should not be charged.
Okay, but what are the profits? That’s what actually matters here.
As much as I’m against parasitic practices, I wonder how the inevitable corruption of money would (further) skew research if academia was well paid for their papers.
And I wonder how, not having the pressure to “succeed” research (to gain further grants), would increase the quality of said research.
