It is unusual for the national press to dedicate several articles on how researchers publish, how scientific production is evaluated, and how the peer review process is carried out. Yes, it is weird. It is because society is not very interested in these topics. Or maybe yes. After all, it is public money that nourishes the booming business of the large publishers of scientific content.

elDiario.es has published in the interval of 2 months 5 journalistic articles of scientific interest. Not by describing great scientific advances, but by uncovering the ins and outs of scientific publishing, who does the “dirty” work without charging a penny, simply out of sheer altruism, and who receives the rich dividends of the multimillion-dollar scientific publishing business. Spoiler is not necessary, right?

The five pieces (in Spanish) are the following, newest on top:

Las revisiones por pares, un negocio milmillonario alimentado con el trabajo gratuito de científicos
2 February 2023

Peer-review is basic to science, but it is based on the selfless work of hundreds of thousands of researchers, who are beginning to raise their voices against a system exploited by large publishers to earn money

Los 45 millones que las universidades pagan cada año a las editoriales científicas dejan fuera el 90% de los artículos
31 January 2023

These transformative agreements include less than 10% of the published papers (12,000) of the annual scientific production in Spain in 2021 (almost 140,000); scaling the agreements to all annual production would cost 300 million euros more

Cuatro editoriales cobran 170 millones en cuatro años a las universidades españolas y el CSIC por leer y publicar artículos científicos
29 January 2023

The transformative agreements signed include Elsevier, Wiley, Springer and the American Chemical Society, which publish approximately half of the research articles in Spain each year.

Ni ‘Science’ ni ‘Nature’: los investigadores españoles dejan las revistas tradicionales por dos editoriales cuestionadas
13 January 2023

The continuous requirement to publish leads scientists to do so more and more in groups such as MDPI and Frontiers, criticized by the scientific community for the laxity of their editorial processes: since 2015 the Spanish studies appearing in these headers have grown by between 600 and 1,800%

Comportamientos paradójicos en el proceso de producción y publicación del conocimiento científico
1 December 2022

The scientific knowledge market has become a profitable business, especially for those publishers that have become large multinational companies and control the bulk of publications.