In the Dark

I wish to draw your attention to an article in the Spanish newspaper El Pais. I encourage you to read the full article, which in English here, and the headline is this:

The article is about a very dodgy journal called Science of the Total Environment published by Elsevier. As far as I can tell, despite the scandal, this journal is still listed in Scopus which is meant to mean that it is a quality journal. One shouldn’t be surprised however, because Scopus is itself owned by Elsevier. Why anyone would trust Scopus for anything is completely beyond me.

As well as the huge revenues and profit margins revealed in the article, it also mentions that Erik Engstrom, CEO of RELX (the multinational that owns Elsevier), earned more than €15 million ($17.4 million) in 2024 between his salary and other compensation. Nice work if you can get it…

Here’s a quote:

The scandal exposes the windfall profits of scientific publishers, who in recent years have amassed billions of dollars in earnings from public funds earmarked for science.

Quite so. I’ve been saying as much for years, in fact, and it is the major reason for setting up the Open Journal of Astrophysics. In my opinion, however, the scandalous behaviour of publishers is only half the problem: equally to blame are the institutions that go along with it.

This entry was posted on December 3, 2025 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Open Access with tags Elsevier, Journal of the Total Environment, Open Access Publishing, SCOPUS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.