Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel

It doesn't surprise me it happens within the Elsevier ecosystem. Elsevier has a long tradition of scientific misconduct and scientifically immoral behavior (see Wikipedia).

The operating margin of Elsevier is around 40% which is huge! At the end mostly paid by tax-payer money.

Personally, I never review or publish with Elsevier.

One cartel gone, incentive structure intact. Academic prestige is entirely mediated through journal placement, so whoever controls prestige journals can extract rents indefinitely. Elsevier did not invent this, they just ran it more aggressively.

The fix is not enforcement. It is tenure committees that stop treating impact factors as proxies for researcher quality. Until that changes, any successor recreates the same behavior. The cartel is a symptom.

I've heard of Chris but not too well. This guy does not f*c$ around, don't get on his bad side.

The state of research is dire at the moment. The whole ecosystem is cooked. Reproducibility is non-existent. This obvious cartel is a symptom and there should be exemplary punishment.

Publishers are commercially incentivized to simply maximize profit and engagement. The main actors are academics and most of them try to uphold the high standards and ethics. Yes there is free-riding, backstabbing and a lot of politics but there is also reputation and honesty.

A few academics give academia a bad name, at the worst possible time and when society needs honest, reliable, reproducible and targetted research the most.

Elsevier is certainly evil, but I would say the root issue is the practices of the institutions where these "authors" are employed. This kind of thing is academic misconduct and should result in them losing their jobs.

Elsevier had no reason to stop this. Inflated citations mean higher impact factors, and higher impact factors justify higher subscription prices. Lucey published 56 papers in one year, the publisher got better metrics to sell. Hard to call that a rogue actor..

The detection lag is telling -- this only got caught because an external journalist spotted the pattern. Elsevier had every incentive to keep looking the other way (higher impact factors = higher subscription prices). Self-regulation won't fix this. The publisher's quality control function and its profit motive point in opposite directions.

We need open publishing. This is why Elsevier etc... use an outdated business model.

That Elsevier now also runs more into fake-articles and fake-research, all fueled by the money-addiction, just adds to the problem (and also invalidates Elsevier's model, by the way - why do we now have to deal with fake science that is costly? That is Elsevier's business model). I fail to see why taxpayers money has to go into private companies for research already financed by the taxpayers. We are paying twice here, Elsevier.

https://retractionwatch.com/2026/01/08/finance-professor-bri...

I've boycotted reviewing for Elsevier for years, but it's easy for me - I'm in CS, where ACM, USENIX and IEEE offer higher-status publication venues and Elsevier journals are decidedly second-tier.

The folks at Elsevier turned a blind eye for as long as they could because it was profitable. It's such a common story that no one even feigns to be surprised.

Being an extractive business seeking to maintain a chokehold on scientists and their institutions is the least of Elsevier's problems.

More problematic for Elsevier is that the current system of "peer review" may turn out be a failed experiment in the history of science:

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...

Mid-way I realized this was AI writing (took me a while), then I read a quote in the text about a comment that "The tragedy isn’t that they cheated; it’s that the system was designed to let them thrive for a decade before anyone bothered to look at the data." I didn't find this comment in EJMR, or anywhere on the internet except the OP post, for that matter.

reminds me of of the El Naschie controversy: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/11/25/elsevier-math...

fraud here is real, but

> a good journal—it has an 18% acceptance rate

is this supposed to be read as sarcasm?

amusing when the quality of a journal is measured by denying papers. kind of reminds me of one of the last People I (Mostly) Admire interviews, with Michael Crow of Arizona State https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-new-kind-of-university where he critiques elite universities as measuring their value on how many students they reject, which ultimately makes them infeasible as institutions to distribute knowledge as much as possible

aaronsw would be proud

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This is the academic industrial complex.

Much like the military industrial complex and the healthcare industrial complex they exist to fleece people via cartel.

> On Christmas Eve, 9 “peer-reviewed” economics papers were quietly retracted by Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher.

It is becoming clearer and clearer that peer review is a systematized band wagon fallacy.

It relies on the belief that one’s peers in a competitive field, presented with new ideas and evidence, will simply accept it.

And yet, “science progresses one funeral at a time” is an old joke.

“Peer review” is an indication an idea is safe for granting agency bureaucrats to fund, not an indication of its truth, validity, or utility.

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Almost hoped for an analysis about what, how, and why happened, but it turns out that Elsevier has little to do with the story and the author had a Twitter spat with someone years ago and is now celebrating the fact that the other side has been shown to do what? for which some of their papers had been retracted. Yes, I'm as confused.