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@mariemoinet.bsky.social
7 followers 34 following 15 posts
Molecular epidemiologist - Pathogen genomics
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Our latest Covid-19 update, the last for 2025, is now online www.phfscience.nz/digital-libr...
COVID-19 Genomics Insights Dashboard #66 - December 2025
www.phfscience.nz
December 22, 2025 at 4:30 AM
Reposted
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
update on CovSpectrum
November 13, 2025 at 12:09 AM
Reposted
ryanhisner.bsky.social
Can't emphasize how damaging this is. A single non-scientist—Peter Bogner—holds all power & makes all decisions at GISAID & provides no justifications for any of them, except blatantly false ones.

He has that power because he conned rich & powerful people into giving it to him. Enough.
firefoxx66.bsky.social Dr Emma Hodcroft @firefoxx66.bsky.social · Nov 7
I want to spell this out in case the implications aren't clear:

This means all public tools/webapps of GISAID data (all the ones you've been used to seeing thru the pandemic, as far as we can tell) are prohibited.

The file allowed this. Cut that - cut off all tools the public & others were using.
nextstrain.org Nextstrain @nextstrain.org · Nov 6
On Oct 1, 2025, GISAID informed us that they had ended updates to the flat file of SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences and associated metadata that we had used to update Nextstrain analyses since Feb 2020. GISAID's stated rationale was that their "resources are limited". 1/5
November 10, 2025 at 2:46 AM
Reposted
elisabethbik.bsky.social
Trump Administration Lays Off Dozens of C.D.C. Officials
“Disease detectives,” high-ranking scientists, the entire Washington office and the staff of a weekly public health journal were among those who learned late Friday that they would lose their jobs.
#GiftLink

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/u...
Trump Administration Lays Off Dozens of C.D.C. Officials
www.nytimes.com
October 11, 2025 at 6:14 AM
Reposted
cidrap.bsky.social
17,000 abstracts. 1,400 studies reviewed. 500+ papers extracted.

We’ve turned it all into an interactive tool + infographic so clinicians & families can see the COVID, flu, RSV vaccine evidence for this fall/winter.

www.cidrap.umn.edu/v...
October 3, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Reposted
solidevidence.bsky.social
We finally launched our cryptic lineage dashboard.

It isn’t perfect, but ya gotta start somewhere.

Here’s a brief tutorial.
1/
lungfish-science.github.io/wastewater-d...
September 19, 2025 at 9:26 PM
Reposted
altcdc.altgov.info
2/
#MMWR 1: How bad was last year's flu season for kids?
Pretty bad: dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmw...
280 kids in the US died due to flu-related illness 💔
That's the most for any non-pandemic season since 2004 (1st year of required reporting of pediatric flu deaths)
Influenza-Associated Pediatric Deaths ...
This report describes pediatric deaths during the 2024–25 influenza season.
dx.doi.org
September 25, 2025 at 11:03 PM
"I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people"
September 2, 2025 at 9:16 AM