It Was Quite a Year — 2024

2024 was a year with so many big stories, it’s hard to remember them all. Here’s a refresher for you as we sail into 2025 — a year where the “broligarchs” will likely make real efforts to take over more aspects of our lives.

• Frontiers Slashes Its Workforce by 1/3 — In the first of what would become many signs that Gold OA is not working, Frontiers cut 600 employees from its workforce in January — which began a litany of rumors about other unannounced layoffs elsewhere
• An NSF Public Access Advisor Pushes a Grant to a Friend — In another sign of corruption associated with OA, two old friends seemed to collude to get a government grant quickly — with more evidence emerging later, as well
• Cureus Retractions of Papers Reviewed in One Day or Less — In what would foreshadow an indexing halt, Cureus — acquired last year by Springer Nature — has to retract 56 papers reviewed and accepted in one day or less, and then failed the PR test by obviously stonewalling
• Ratatestes Makes Scientific Publishing a Laughingstock — An AI image of a bizarrely endowed rat in a Frontiers journal breaks through on late night shows and makes us look like idiots
  • In a related story, LLM-generated cut-and-paste language is found repeatedly in published articles around the same time
• Governments Want Your IP — Sans Compensation — In both the US and UK, OA advocates pushed proposals to unilaterally strip individuals of their rights to their intellectual property, all in service of “public access”
• Gates Drops Support for APCs — In a change that may be a harbinger of funder fatigue, the Gates Foundation announced it would be dropping support for APCs in 2025 — proving many things at once
• Anti-abortion Activists and Retractions — Anti-abortion activists used retracted articles to argue before the Supreme Court, and they lost
• We Don’t Buy the BS — A survey shows that we’re skeptical of AI, don’t think OA has improved things, and that preprint servers need to change, findings echoed in a separate survey of researchers
• SPARC Has Been Influencing OA Policy Directly for Years — More evidence emerged that SPARC — a project of a “dark money” lobbying firm — has had deep and direct involvement in US public access and OA policymaking, including the formulation of the OSTP Public Access policy
  • Despite this, OSTP failed to respond well to Congressional inquiries, imperiling its policy as a new administration with an eye on cutting costs and thwarting DEI-related policies takes over
• Spotify, AI Music, and Profiteering — In a story that keeps growing in scope, Spotify appears to be using AI to goose profits, rip off artists and consumers, and distort the music landscape
• “Taxpayer-funded” Bites Back — Right-wing politicians begin deploying the “taxpayer-funded” argument to assert government control over what is taught, purchased, and published
• eLife’s Bad Model Leads to Problems of All Kinds — By legitimizing bad science for a Netflix documentary, privileging authors over editors, and failing to act as disinterested gatekeepers, eLife embarrasses everyone and risks its indexing status
• Optica Leader Departs After Secret Funding from China Revealed — The CEO of Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America) departs under a cloud as secret funding of an awards program by China, in violation of US laws, comes to light
• PLOS Gets More Bail Out Grants — In a sign that its mixed OA portfolio isn’t cutting it anymore, PLOS received more grants, ostensibly to find a new way to fund itself
  • How weird is this? Most businesses self-fund changes like this, so it seems like a bad habit specific to the OA space to go crying to funders every time there’s much uncertainty
• Springer Nature Finally Gets Its IPO — After a few tries, Springer Nature finally has the APC volume to look good in a limited IPO on the Frankfurt exchange
  • The stock is performing well so far, too
• An MDPI Employee Dies at Work — In a story hinting at sweatshop conditions and a ruthless employer, a young MDPI employee in Romania dies, despite asking for medical help
• Calculators Beat LLMs at Math — In a revealing comparison, the probability models of LLMs failed to accurately do math as well as a calculator
• Plan S Isn’t Working Very Well — Even a report from cOAlition S can’t polish the turd that is Plan S
• UK Society Publishers Are Poorer, Weaker Now — A report finds that OA has cut revenues and weakened influence for UK society publishers
• Infowars Goes to The Onion and a Masshole — In one delightful story, Alex Jones’ InfoWars gets liquidated to the young Masshole running The Onion
• India’s “One Nation, One Subscription” — In what may prove a unique solution to enabling access while subtly repudiating OA, India strikes a deal with dozens of publishers for a national, multi-year license
• Saudis, Payola, and Papers — An investigation shows that the Saudis are paying authors to add fake attributions to Saudi institutions to their papers, in an effort to bolster the kingdom’s perceived scientific stature

It was quite a year, with a few major themes in my view:

• OA is in trouble, both financially and conceptually, as fraud, funding woes, and favoritism all come to light
• Funders are getting tired of paying for publishing (Gates), and going back to the well (PLOS) isn’t going to reassure them that they are providing seed funding grants rather than dependency
  • The issues around how/why publishers attached themselves to funders is unsavory enough to occupy a long pause of reflection
• OA is risky as it enables the “broligarchs” and may feed fascism

There’s already a lot to talk about for 2025. See you there!

BONUS

Three Favorite Science Insights from 2025

I like surprising science facts, which for me are often explanations for things we take for granted. Here are three from this year that raise questions most people can’t easily answer, even though the questions are pretty pedestrian.

1 — Why does toast takes so long to brown?

Why does toast brown in the last ~20 seconds? Because the water in the bread has to boil off before the maillard reaction can begin.

2 — Why is “clockwise” clockwise?

Because we have a northern hemisphere bias. The sun is always to the south of people north of the equator, so sundial and other timekeeping shadows travel from west to east as the sun travels from east to west (perceptually). We’ve baked this bias into our analog clocks, and from them into language.

3 — Why do we have REM sleep?

This one is more speculative currently, but I like it. Neuroscientist David Eagleman has posed a “defensive activation” hypothesis to explain REM sleep. The logic is that the visual cortex is the brain’s most plastic — i.e., repurposeable — area. When people are visually impaired, it quickly reshapes to compensate with echolocation, superior hearing and tactile senses, and other compensatory activities. Eagleman believes REM sleep is this area’s defense mechanism, preventing other areas from imposing themselves during sleep in a visually capable person. He also claims to have found a correlation with overall brain plasticity across species and their amount of REM sleep. It’s an interesting hypothesis, and he seems to have the receipts.