Yann de Mey
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yanndemey.bsky.social
Yann de Mey
@yanndemey.bsky.social
760 followers 840 following 500 posts
Associate Professor in Agricultural Business Economics @WUR, working on agricultural risk analysis, risk management and resilience | @AgEconMeet | 🇧🇪 living in 🇳🇱 | Feminist
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yanndemey.bsky.social
Sometimes, you have to fire shots as a reviewer
#EconSky 📈📉
November 21, 2025 at 9:14 AM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
zachweinersmith.bsky.social
Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/stats-3
#smbc
November 18, 2025 at 6:57 PM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
joshmccrain.bsky.social
new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research
November 18, 2025 at 7:16 PM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
kunkakom.bsky.social
The billions of research funds channeled into the pockets of Elsevier and other commercial publisher in return for very little actual value is one of academia's big inefficiencies that will eventually be replaced by more attractive Community-run alternatives
November 14, 2025 at 9:55 AM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
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
yanndemey.bsky.social
2025 Gorilla update 👋🦍: One student found the gorilla this time around (see details in thread below). BUT, I have an AI-related update that is too good not to share ... #EconSky 📉📈
October 30, 2025 at 1:51 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
I concur that it is super insightful! I expect much more work leveraging these kinds of approaches in the future, there is a lot of untapped potential by exploring text data (which was tedious in the past)
robertfinger.bsky.social Robert Finger @robertfinger.bsky.social · 24d
Outstanding EAAE (European Association of Agricultural Economists) Masterclass by Christian Stetter on 'AI for Text Analysis in Agricultural Economics' 👏

Details on Christian's research scholar.google.com/citations?us..., and on the EAAE: eaae.org
October 30, 2025 at 10:58 AM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
andrewkostrub.bsky.social
Updating my LEGO White House
October 23, 2025 at 2:51 AM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
gwagner.com
As far as high-profile academics moving out of Trump's America goes, it doesn't get more high-profile than this.

🇺🇸 → 🇨🇭
econ.uzh.ch Department of Economics @Universität Zürich 🇨🇭 @econ.uzh.ch · Oct 10
We are thrilled to welcome Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee as the new Lemann Foundation Professors to our department, beginning in the summer of 2026.
October 10, 2025 at 10:45 AM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Exiting moment for any economist: when your kids learn about money in school 😁 #econsky
October 9, 2025 at 5:20 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Had the privilege to catch Refused on their goodbye tour yesterday. What a blast! It’s rare to see a band with such energy, style blending, and political and audience engagement 11/10 #RefusedAreReallyFckingDead
October 8, 2025 at 6:02 AM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
cjaenicke.bsky.social
Just published 🌱:
We dug into 16 million+ field records across Central Europe to find out what drives farmers’ crop rotation choices.
Turns out past cropping, agronomic advice, and legume prices matter a lot and legumes are likely to play a much bigger role in the future👉 doi.org/10.1016/j.ag...
Redirecting
doi.org
October 6, 2025 at 7:07 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
The only kind of gang activity we get to see around #Wegeningen
October 4, 2025 at 8:41 PM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
richardtol.bsky.social
All is not well at Elsevier richardtol.substack.com/p/fraud-and-...
Fraud and cover-up
Fraud and cover-up
richardtol.substack.com
September 15, 2025 at 7:54 AM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Great use case of ClaudeAI or ChatGPT: to transfer equations from a textbook to PowerPoint slides I just take a picture and ask for Latex code that can be plugged into the equation editor and converted into a perfect vector-based equation!
September 11, 2025 at 9:02 PM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
bsky.app
v1.108 is rolling out today 🚚

Now live, at long last: Bookmarks, aka Saved Posts. For all those posts you'll definitely plan to come back to!

Update the app and give it a try. The button is right down there 👇
September 8, 2025 at 6:24 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Greatly looking forward to the next AgEconMeet session with Marc Bellemare in two weeks
September 9, 2025 at 9:58 AM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
tderyugina.bsky.social
Today's ChatGPT use case: give it Stata code and have it draft a methodology section based on it. A straightforward yet somewhat time-consuming task to do manually.

Bonus: if the writeup doesn't match what you THINK you did, it may be due to an error in your code that you didn't catch.

#EconSky
September 8, 2025 at 2:15 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Just received a physical copy of the dissertation of one of my own PhD students via the internal mail system … from the other side of the building 🤣 (one elevator ride away). Gotta love bureaucracy 👏
September 8, 2025 at 1:03 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Final day of the #EAAE2025! Kicking it off with an organized session on analyzing farmers’ voices in the farmer protests. Great way to showcase the work we did in DE-FR-BE-NL in a great team led by Doris Läpple
August 29, 2025 at 8:43 AM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Very cool keynote by prof Anna Dreber about the replicability crisis and potential solutions 🙏 #EAAE2025
August 28, 2025 at 1:45 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
We had a nice session this morning about “What the EAAE can do for early career agecons”! #EAAE2025
August 28, 2025 at 1:44 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
The BEC group is well represented at the #EAAE2025, with 20 participants 🕺
August 28, 2025 at 1:43 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
FADN >> FSDN session at #EAAE2025. Nice to see the future dataset I will be using a lot ☺️ I was in particular impressed with the DIB linked database which will cover all relevant farm practices linked to policy at the farm level to FSDN!
August 27, 2025 at 2:34 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
A special moment for me at #EAAE2025, with my former MSc thesis adviser Matty Demont (IRRI) delivering the first keynote of the day! Matty is the reason I ended up doing a PhD and staying in academia 🎓. The story on his gastronomic systems research was impressive 👏
August 27, 2025 at 9:40 AM