Marginalium

The cracks in Open Access Research, or ‘For-Profit Academic Publishers Love LLM Garbage’. To publish a paper open-access (i.e. anyone can read it for free—no paywalls), you as a researcher pay an ‘article processing charge’:

Under the old model, academic libraries paid for printed academic journals to be delivered so that professors and grad students could read them. This was a high-margin business, but there was still a verifiable service being rendered by the publishers: someone had to format, archive and deliver the physical pieces of paper. With the internet, the dead trees became vestigial; the subscriptions were to the online versions of these journals, but they were sold as a package: the libraries had to subscribe to an entire publishers’ catalogue in order for their academic institution to remain competitive.

But this model wasn’t incentive-compatible. Once an academic has published an article, they want it to be read by as many people as possible. And the internet makes it very easy for these pdfs to slip through paywalls. Just like streaming music allowed the big labels to maintain market dominance, the publishing corporations figured out a new model: Open Access. Who could possibly be against Open Access!

This new model is extremely profitable for journals, especially since they usually get academics to do the hard work of reviewing and ensuring formatting etc. It’s also, in theory, entirely unnecessary. The growing popularity of pre-publication and pre-print sites like arxiv.org demonstrate that academics could just do it all themselves.

But, because these journals are for profit, then they are incentivised to encourage as many article processing fees as possible:

But the APC model means that academic journals are aiming for a future in which we’re swimming in LLM garbage. Which actors want more pdfs in circulation? The ones getting paid $1,500 or $3,450 or $12,290 a pop.

Nature is the 12K figure. So it’s not surprising that we’re seeing them forced to retract literally hundreds of papers again and again.