Alain Queffelec
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alainqueffelec.bsky.social
Alain Queffelec
@alainqueffelec.bsky.social
1.2K followers 120 following 180 posts
Ingénieur de recherche CNRS, PhD in Caribbean archaeology (lithic beads and pendants). Archaeometry, spectroscopy, minerals and so on.
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Reposted by Alain Queffelec
pciarchaeology.bsky.social
To stop the drain, do not hesitate to engage with #free #openscience, #preprints, @peercommunityin.bsky.social, #diamondOA journals, academia-friendly journals (dafnee.isem-evolution.fr) etc.

THERE ARE SOLUTIONS !
November 12, 2025 at 7:46 AM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
infodocket.bsky.social
Media Coverage: Retraction Watch "Bug in Springer Nature #Metadata May Be Causing ‘Significant, Systemic’ Citation Inflation" retractionwatch.com/2025/11/11/b...
@retractionwatch.com
Bug in Springer Nature metadata may be causing ‘significant, systemic’ citation inflation
Millions of researchers could be affected by a “dramatic distortion of citation counts” likely caused by flaws in how the academic publishing giant Springer Nature handles article metadata, accordi…
retractionwatch.com
November 11, 2025 at 8:47 PM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
pacea.bsky.social
The IRN Bipedal Equilibrium team is running an international survey on hominin bipedalism. They aim to better understand how scholars think about bipedalism.

Perspectives from all fields are welcome!

👉 Here is the survey link: questions.huma-num.fr/v4/s/dv57r1 (10 min)

Please share it widely! 🏺🧪🦣
questions.huma-num.fr
November 3, 2025 at 3:24 PM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
psmaldino.bsky.social
As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...
Author-Paid PublicationFees Corrupt Science and Should Be Abandoned Thomas J. H Morgan & Paul E. Smaldino
May 9, 2025 at 5:26 PM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
peercommunityin.bsky.social
Many thanks to Karlstad University for becoming a supporter of PCI this year (www.kau.se/en)%F0%9F%98...!
August 22, 2025 at 7:08 AM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
pciarchaeology.bsky.social
⬇️⬇️⬇️
Also worth reading for other domains than health sciences! 👏
matthieuboisgontier.com Matthieu Boisgontier @matthieuboisgontier.com · Aug 20
Rethinking where and how we publish in health sciences doi.org/10.51224/SRX...
August 21, 2025 at 7:53 AM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
pciarchaeology.bsky.social
1/3 New recommendation: Zachary Batist‬ (2025) Locating Creative Agency in Archaeological Data Work. ver.2 recommended by @pciarchaeology.bsky.social doi.org/10.17613/8eq... @zackbatist.archaeo.social.ap.brid.gy 🏺🧪🦣
Figure 5 from the manuscript: Two photographs of fieldwork with arrows pointing at details and text in boxes explaining the details of how spatial information is recorded in the field. First photograph depicts a system that measures distance in relation to trench entities. Second photograph depicts a geospatial specialist and a fieldworker determining an object’s position using a digital theodolite.
August 9, 2025 at 8:28 AM
alainqueffelec.bsky.social
Come join us with this new post-doctoral position in the Quanta project: emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U... (2 years in Bordeaux)

If you love artifacts (especially bones), notches, microscopes, and exploring the big question of the origin of quantification systems in human lineage, this is for you!
Portail Emploi CNRS - Offre d'emploi - Postdoctoral contract on the origin of quantification systems M/F
emploi.cnrs.fr
August 6, 2025 at 9:50 AM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
paastacommunity.bsky.social
Delighted to be bringing you the following PAASTA community-led paper outlining our recommendations for best practices and open science in palaeoproteomics! Congratulations to the authors and for anyone keen to read the paper, it can be found #OpenAccess here: doi.org/10.24072/pcj...
August 6, 2025 at 7:57 AM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
isoarch.bsky.social
New look, same mission 🔬🌍

The IsoArcH initiative just launched its brand-new website: isoarch.org

Check it out and dive into the world’s largest isotope database!
July 25, 2025 at 1:34 PM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
pciarchaeology.bsky.social
1/3 New recommendation: Cardillo, Marcelo & Carranza, Eugenia ‬ (2025) Applying statistical and causal modeling to interpret thermal alteration in observational lithic data. doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 🧪🏺
Figure 2 from the manuscript. Top panel: effects of fire on the landscape observed in 2021 and 2022. Bottom panel: burned surface lithic scatters showing effects such as fractures and color changes. Figure 3 from the manuscript: Causal model for mechanical alterations of pebbles under the effect of fire. Red, direct and mediation effects (Fire -unmeasured-, Fissures, Rock_Type and Shape). Gray, latent unobserved variables (Biomass, Knapping and Trampling). Green, outcome variable (Mech_Alt).
July 22, 2025 at 9:15 AM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
nicolasgaltier.bsky.social
Needless to say, the Peer Community In outperforms all of the major publishers on this criterion, despite a budget many orders of magnitude smaller - again illustrating that the big money we pay for publishing is not used for the good of science. (5/5)

@peercommunityin.bsky.social
July 17, 2025 at 7:19 AM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
nicolasgaltier.bsky.social
Non-profit publishers (PLoS, Oxford, Cambridge) and publishers partnering a lot with academia (Wiley) are much more committed to open science than the others - MDPI being the worst by large. (4/5)
figure showing nine data points (each for a distinct publisher) in a graph where Y-axis is our open science index and X-axis is academia friendliness (=proportion of published journals co-owned by an academic entity); strong positive relationship
July 17, 2025 at 7:18 AM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
nicolasgaltier.bsky.social
New preprint about open science in eco-evo!
We sampled 110 journals, 550 articles, and assessed whether data and code are accessible: (1/5)
ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

#ScientificPublishing #OpenScience #ecology #conservation #EvolutionaryBiology #paleobio #systematics #archeology
An overview of open science in eco-evo research and the publisher effect.
ecoevorxiv.org
July 17, 2025 at 7:14 AM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
flintdibble.bsky.social
An Introduction to Bioarchaeology

New video available for channel supporters on Patreon or YT memberships

Check it out here, and sign up for additional teaching videos and behind-the-scenes perks

www.patreon.com/posts/134346...
Video: An Introduction to Bioarchaeology | Flint Dibble
Get more from Flint Dibble on Patreon
www.patreon.com
July 17, 2025 at 4:33 PM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
pacea.bsky.social
1/3 Super interview de notre doctorante Lisa Richelmi avec Benjamin Brillaud de Nota Bene ! 🐞🧑‍🔬
www.twitch.tv/videos/25139...
Elle y présente sa thèse en archéoentomologique @univbordeaux.bsky.social @cnrsecologie.bsky.social
LinkedIn
This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn
lnkd.in
July 16, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
deadneanderthals.bsky.social
The 'Bioengineered' story was mentioned in @theguardian.com today!

Read here
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

More background on Bioengineered here: www.science.org/content/arti...

CC: @elisabethbik.bsky.social @mortenoxe.bsky.social @smutclyde.bsky.social @thatsregrettab1.bsky.social
July 13, 2025 at 7:05 PM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
blellashaw.bsky.social
How we use game mechanics to explore and educate about archaeology in our board game Cultivaria- a thread.

#archaeology #boardgame
July 10, 2025 at 4:16 AM
alainqueffelec.bsky.social
Why I quit itsmoreofacomment.com/2022/10/28/w... (and it is the same for Researchgate...)
I may instead orient you towards @orcid.org instead, HAL in France, Zenodo etc.
Thank you @archaeobasti.bsky.social for this post few years ago but still very relevant.
July 10, 2025 at 6:32 PM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
kevinsalesse.bsky.social
IsoArcH is organizing its first Addithon, a 10-day virtual community event! This event will bring volunteers together from all over the world, to add to this ever-growing open data repository for isotopes from archaeological research.

bit.ly/IsoArcH2025
IsoArcH Addithon 2025
This form is used to sign up for the IsoArcH Addithon to be run from 11-20 August 2025.
bit.ly
July 10, 2025 at 3:34 PM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
pacea.bsky.social
The Digital Archaeo Summer School concluded with a visit to La Chaise (Middle Paleo), excavated by our postdocs Diego López Onaindia & @kimgenuite.bsky.social 45 early-career researchers from 6 countries joined us, thank you all! See you in 2026! @cnrsecologie.bsky.social @univbordeaux.bsky.social
July 9, 2025 at 1:42 PM
alainqueffelec.bsky.social
Yes it is much more work and more difficult for non-native English speakers! It's great to remind this!
antiquity.ac.uk Antiquity Journal @antiquity.ac.uk · Jul 8
Should English be the lingua franca of #archaeology? Can language be a form of imperialism? Should we embrace linguistic diversity in academia? 🏺

Robin Skeates explores all this and more in his latest #AntiquityEditorial on the theme of languages.

Read it 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...
Linguistic imperialism? Statues and inscription over the neoclassical entrance to Bush House, London dedicated to “The Friendship of English Speaking Peoples”. Constructed in 1925–1935 as an Anglo-American trade centre, the building later served as the headquarters of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) World Service (credit: R. Skeates).
July 8, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Reposted by Alain Queffelec
icarehb.bsky.social
Postdoc in Geochronology / Plio-Pleistocene Geology
Join the ERC WRAP project at ICArEHB!
Apply now 👉 www.icarehb.com/research-pos...
July 7, 2025 at 3:32 PM
alainqueffelec.bsky.social
Et une proposition dans l'article est bel et bien de passer par @peercommunityin.bsky.social and @peercomjournal.bsky.social ! :)
July 8, 2025 at 5:08 PM