this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Elsevier has a 3 billion dollar income, while most of its research is publicly funded. You are paying for the research, then paying again to access the results of the research that you already paid for. The executives can hang.
Behold nothing! >⠀<
It is so much worse than that.
I spend my time researching the literature on a topic so that I can spend my time and energy writing a grant. It probably won't get funded.
If it does, I get to do a bunch of work. It might involve travel, where I will do everything at minimum expense to save enough money for the coming lab work.
I will spend significant time getting the samples analyzed, spending most of the grant money. Then I will come up with a logical way to interpret the data.
I will spend more time sending a document around to coauthors. This may take months, or even years if the coauthors fight.
We eventually submit to a journal. It gets rejected.
We rewrite and submit again. A few months later, congratulations, you get to publish. Money please.
I work for the money to do the work, I work for the writeup, I fight for the acceptance, and I have to pay to publish.
It's a stupid system.