About F%$#ing Time

The University of California has just severed all ties with Elsevier because they were demanding too much money, and insisting on too many restrictions on the distribution of research:

The mammoth University of California (UC) system announced today it will stop paying to subscribe to journals published by Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher, headquartered in Amsterdam. Talks to renew a collective contract broke down, the university said, because Elsevier refused to strike a package deal that would provide a break on subscription fees and make all articles published by UC authors immediately free for readers worldwide.

The stand by UC, which followed 8 months of negotiations, could have significant impacts on scientific communication and the direction of the so-called open-access movement, in the United States and beyond. The 10-campus system accounts for nearly 10% of all U.S. publishing output and is among the first U.S. institutions, and by far the largest, to boycott Elsevier over costs. Many administrators and librarians at U.S. universities and elsewhere have complained about what they view as excessively high journal subscription fees charged by commercial publishers.

………

Indeed, UC’s move could ratchet up pressure on additional negotiations facing Elsevier and other commercial publishers; consortia of universities and labs in Germany and Sweden had already reached an impasse last year with Elsevier in their efforts to lower subscription fees.

………

Jeff MacKie-Mason, who heads UC Berkeley’s library and is also co-chair of the negotiation task force, says Elsevier just didn’t move far enough to UC’s position. The publisher’s final offer “was closer to what we wanted in terms of open access” but nevertheless included a price increase, he says.

………

UC published about 50,000 articles last year, and a substantial share, about 10,000, appeared in Elsevier journals. For subscriptions and article fees, UC paid about $11 million, the Los Angeles Times reported recently. (UC says the information is confidential under a nondisclosure agreement.)

………

UC also noted that some of Elsevier’s newer content is already freely available through open-access publishing, open-access repositories, interlibrary loans, and “other legitimate forms of scholarly sharing.”

That last bit is actually the folks at the University of California system in talking in code.

What they are really saying is that, not withstanding the multi-million dollar judgement that Elsevier got against it, the Russian based Sci-Hub has is the future:

Little more than three years ago, Elsevier, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, took Sci-Hub to court.

It was a mismatched battle from the start. With a net income of more than $2.4 billion per year, the publisher could fund a proper case, while its nemesis relied on donations.

Elsevier won the case, including millions of dollars in damages. However, the site remained online and grew bigger. Ironically, the academic publisher itself appears to be one of the main drivers of this growth.
………

Several universities from Germany, Hungary, and Sweden previously let their Elsevier subscriptions expire, which means that tens of thousands of researchers don’t have access to research that is critical to their work.

This is where Sci-Hub comes into play.

The “Pirate Bay of Science” might just quietly play a major role in this conflict. Would the universities cancel their subscriptions so easily if their researchers couldn’t use Sci-Hub to get free copies?

Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has always been forthcoming about her goals. Sci-Hub wants to remove all barriers in the way of science. She also made that crystal clear when we interviewed her back in 2015.

“Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal. Also, the idea that knowledge can be a private property of some commercial company sounds absolutely weird to me,” she said at the time.

I feel nothing but glee at the misfortunes of Elsivier.

They are a bunch of contemptible parasites.

That's Gonna Leave a Mark

The Sith lord of academic journal publishing is Elsevier.

They charge thousands of dollars a year for subscriptions, jacked their prices in a way that makes Martin Shkreli salivate, and they have threated lawsuits to keep researchers from publishing their own research.

They are widely loathed in their field, and now the entire staff of one of their journals has resigned to start up and independent open access journal:

It's really somewhat astounding just how absolutely hated journal publishing giant Elsevier has become in certain academic circles. The company seems to have perfected its role of being about as evil as possible in trying to lock up knowledge and making it expensive and difficult to access. A few years ago, we noted that a bunch of academics were banding together to boycott journals published by the company, as more and more people were looking at open access journals, allowing them to more freely share their research, rather than locking it up. Elsevier's response has been to basically crack down on efforts to share knowledge. The company has been known to charge for open access research -- sometimes even buying up journals and ignoring the open licenses on the works. The company has also been demanding professors takedown copies of their own research. Because how dare anyone actually benefit from knowledge without paying Elsevier its toll. And that's not even mentioning Elsevier's history of publishing fake journals as a way to help giant pharmaceutical companies pretend their treatments were effective.

Basically on the list of companies which really are pushing to get themselves declared "evil," Elsevier has a prime spot.

And now even its employees are revolting. The editorial staff of an Elsevier journal have all resigned to go start an open access journal instead:

All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier's policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. As soon as January, when the departing editors' noncompete contracts expire, they plan to start a new open-access journal to be called Glossa.

The editors and editorial board members quit, they say, after telling Elsevier of the frustrations of libraries reporting that they could not afford to subscribe to the journal and in some cases couldn't even figure out what it would cost to subscribe. Prices quoted on the Elsevier website suggest that an academic library in the United States with a total student and faculty full-time equivalent number of around 10,000 would pay $2,211 for shared online access, and $1,966 for a print copy.

One of the editors who quit notes that he'd "be better off going to flip burgers" in the time he spent working for the journal, rather than accepting the tiny amount Elsevier pays him.

Note that the authors of these papers are not paid to publish.

In fact, in a number of cases, they pay to offset the cost of publishing.

And Elsevier is determined to suck the marrow out of learning, and dance on its bones.

A Good Start

For profit academic research publishers are firmly in the category of, "Mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

A particularly nasty player in this sphere is Elsevier, the publisher of such items as The Lancet and Cell, and Gray's Anatomy, and it is particularly aggressive in its charges, and in its aggressive use of copyright to enforce its charges.

All for publications where the content providers, and the editors work for volunteers.

It has now engendered a boycott in its home base of the Netherlands:

A long running dispute between Dutch universities and Elsevier has taken an interesting turn. Last week Koen Becking, chairman of the Executive Board of Tilburg University who has been negotiating with scientific publishers about an open access policy on behalf of Dutch universities with his colleague Gerard Meijer, announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier.

As a first step in boycotting the publisher, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has asked all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier to give up their post. If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals.

The Netherlands has a clear position on Open Access. Sander Dekker, the State Secretary of Education has taken a strong position on Open Access, stating at the opening of the 2014 academic year in Leiden that ‘Science is not a goal in itself. Just as art is only art once it is seen, knowledge only becomes knowledge once it is shared.’

Dekker has set two Open Access targets: 40% of scientific publications should be made available through Open Access by 2016, and 100% by 2024. The preferred route is through gold Open Access – where the work is ‘born Open Access’. This means there is no cost for readers – and no subscriptions.

However Gerard Meijer, who handles the negotiations with Elsevier, says that the parties have not been able to come close to an agreement.

 ………

The 2015 Dutch boycott is significant. Typically negotiations with publishers occur at an institutional level and with representatives from the university libraries. This makes sense as libraries have long standing relationships with publishers and understand the minutiae of the licencing processes . However the Dutch negotiations have been led by the Vice Chancellors of the universities.  It is a country-wide negotiation at the highest level. And Vice Chancellors have the ability to request behaviour change of their research communities.

This boycott has the potential to be a significant game changer in the relationship between the research community and the world’s largest academic publisher. The remainder of this blog looks at some of the facts and figures relating to expenditure on Open Access in the UK. It underlines the importance of the Dutch position.The 2015 Dutch boycott is significant. Typically negotiations with publishers occur at an institutional level and with representatives from the university libraries. This makes sense as libraries have long standing relationships with publishers and understand the minutiae of the licencing processes . However the Dutch negotiations have been led by the Vice Chancellors of the universities.  It is a country-wide negotiation at the highest level. And Vice Chancellors have the ability to request behaviour change of their research communities.

These folks are leeches, who have made their business plan out of the free effort of academics.

I'd love to dance on their corporate grave.

What's the Difference Between a Cockroach and Science Publisher Elsevier?

As near as I can determine, it is that cockroaches are far less expensive.

The rentier capitalism of Elsevier, in which they have the articles peer reviewed, and pay the reviewers nothing or next to nothing, charge the authors to publish the articles, and then charge (a lot) so that people can read the articles, is an exercise in parasitism, and the editors at NeuroImage and Imaging Neuroscience have resigned en masse in response to their rapacious greed.

More than 40 editors have resigned from two leading neuroscience journals in protest against what the editors say are excessively high article-processing charges (APCs) set by the publisher. They say that the fees, which publishers use to cover publishing services and in some cases make money, are unethical. The publisher, Dutch company Elsevier, says that its fees provide researchers with publishing services that are above average quality for below average price. The editors plan to start a new journal hosted by the non-profit publisher MIT Press.

The decision to resign came about after many discussions among the editors, says Stephen Smith, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and editor-in-chief of one of the journals, NeuroImage. “Everyone agreed that the APC was unethical and unsustainable,” says Smith, who will lead the editorial team of the new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, when it launches.

The 42 academics who made up the editorial teams at NeuroImage and its companion journal NeuroImage: Reports announced their resignations on 17 April. The journals are open access and require authors to pay a fee for publishing services. The APC for NeuroImage is US$3,450; NeuroImage: Reports charges $900, which will double to $1,800 from 31 May. Elsevier, based in Amsterdam, says that the APCs cover the costs associated with publishing an article in an open-access journal, including editorial and peer-review services, copy editing, typesetting, archiving, indexing, marketing and administrative costs. Andrew Davis, Elsevier’s vice-president of corporate communications, says that NeuroImage’s fee is less than that of the nearest comparable journal in its field, and that the publisher’s APCs are “set in line with our policy [of] providing above average quality for below average price”.

Lets look at the charges:

• Copy editing? For an article, well under $100.
• Typesetting?  Pennies, done automatically by computers.
• Archiving? Pennies, done automatically by computers.
• Indexing? Pennies, done automatically by computers.
• Peer review?  Most peer reviewers are not paid or a very small fee? 
• Editorial services?  That should mostly be covered peer review, so it's a bullsh%$ profit center.
• Marketing and Administration?  Again a bullsh%$ profit center.

Publishers have introduced APCs — part of a pay-to-publish model — as an alternative to pay-to-read subscriptions as journals increasingly become freely accessible, and researchers typically pay APCs from their grant funds. Journal APCs vary, typically depending on factors such as the publisher’s size, the proportion of papers sent for peer review and metrics such as impact factor, as well as whether they employ in-house editors and press officers. The Lancet Neurology, published by Elsevier, has an APC of $6,300; the fee at Nature Neuroscience, published by Springer Nature, is $11,690; and Human Brain Mapping, published by Wiley, charges $3,850. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of Nature Neuroscience and of Springer Nature.)

Pay to read has stopped working because researchers are increasingly unwilling to pay to read the journals or to put their articles behind paywalls.

Additionally, Sci-Hub, which has made millions of articles that were previously behind paywalls freely available, has made the old business model unsustainable, though the be fair, the ever increasing levies charged by the for-profit publishers likely made something like Sci-Hub inevitable.

………

The editors decided to set up an open-access journal with MIT Press, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Ted Gibson, who sits on MIT Press’s editorial board and is an editor of its cognitive-science journal Open Mind, looks forward to hosting the new title. “These editors have done it the right way. I think it’s a slow process but eventually more scientists will resign from the profit-oriented journals,” Gibson says.

The journal move echoes a 2019 case, in which the editorial board of an Elsevier scientometrics journal — the Journal of Informetrics — resigned in protest over the publisher’s open-access policies, including the journal’s APCs. The researchers launched a free-to-read journal with MIT Press called Quantitative Science Studies, with the same editorial board.

The for profit model of academic publishing is consuming itself through its own unbridled greed.

The current IP regime, particularly copyright, serves no one but the gate-keepers who contribute nothing to society.

Today in Evil, Elsivier Edition

It looks like the Ebola of the academic publishing world, Elsevier has so mismanaged one of their journals that the entire staff has resigned en masse.

They cut staff, upped the work load, removed copy editing support, and used AI to process articles, which has consistently introduced errors otherwise acceptable articles.

All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.” 

“Elsevier has steadily eroded the infrastructure essential to the success of the journal while simultaneously undermining the core principles and practices that have successfully guided the journal for the past 38 years,” the journal’s “joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor” said in their resignation statement posted to X/Twitter yesterday.

Among other moves, according to the statement, Elsevier “eliminated support for a copy editor and special issues editor,” which they interpreted as saying “editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.” The editors say the publisher “frequently introduces errors during production that were not present in the accepted manuscript:”

In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage. 

 Seriously, these guys make McKinsey & Company look good.

The Streisand Effect Benefits Us All

I've written a bit about the increasingly larcenous and parasitic scientific journal industry.

I have in fact said that the giant of the industry, Elsevier, "Is determined to suck the marrow out of learning, and dance on its bones."

I have on occasion (first link) noted that there is a site, Sci-Hub, based in Russia, which is making much of the previously paywalled material freely available.

Elsevier has aggressively gone after Sci-Hub in court, with the result that Sci-Hub's profile and hence access on the internet, has skyrocketed:

Techdirt has been covering the story of Sci-Hub, which provides unrestricted access to a massive (unauthorized) database of academic papers, for a while now. As several posts have emphasized, the decision by the publishing giant Elsevier to pursue the site through the courts is a classic example of the Streisand Effect: it has simply served to spread the word about a hitherto obscure service. There's a new paper exploring this and other aspects of Sci-Hub, currently available as a PeerJ preprint. Here's what one of the authors says in a related Science interview about the impact of lawsuits on Sci-Hub:

 In our paper we have a graph plotting the history of Sci-Hub against Google Trends -- each legal challenge resulted in a spike in Google searches [for the site], which suggests the challenges are basically generating free advertising for Sci-Hub. I think the suits are not going to stop Sci-Hub.

That free advertising provided by Elsevier and others through their high-profile legal assaults on Alexandra Elbakyan, the academic from Kazakhstan who created and runs Sci-Hub pretty much single-handedly, has been highly effective. The surge in searches for Sci-Hub seems to have led to its holdings becoming incredibly comprehensive, as increased numbers of visitors have requested missing articles, which are then added to the collection: 

As an FYI the Streisand effect is where an attempt to suppress information results in further publicizing and popularizing the data.

Considering the nature of peer reviewed journals, where the publishing houses neither pay the authors, the reviewers, and frequently the editors, and prices have increased largely because of industry consolidation.

If Sci-Hub and its ilk sends these publishers into bankruptcy, the world will benefit.

Linkage

• The Bulwark Site From Weekly Standard Staffers Shows Neocons Are Back (Rolling Stone) And Pierre Omidyar, publisher of The Intercept, is the one wot's funding them.
• New CalPERS Board Member Has Serious Concerns About Private Equity Plan (Chief Investment Officer) Jason Perez defeated CalPERS President Priva Mathur in the last election, and Mr. Perez is wondering why the board is hell-bent on investing in an expensive private equity scheme.
• Worse than you thought: inside the secret Fitzgerald probe the Navy doesn’t want you to read (Navy Times) That collision between the USS Fitzgerald and a freighter in the Pacific was a direct result of systemic problems with at least the 7^th fleet, and possibly the whole of the Pacific Command.
• Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal (Inside Higher Ed) Elsevier are the most repulsive people in academe, which says a lot.
• War Whores Scramble To Say Syria Attack Means Troops Must Remain (Caitlin Johnstone) Yeah, pretty much.
• Group aligned with Ocasio-Cortez prepares to take out Democrats (Politico) Justice Democrats, who got AOC to run in the first place.  Good.  Let the faux Democrats make their own party.

The marvelously profane Simon Pie on Brexit:

Linkage

• Carbon Market Faces Upheaval as 32% of All Credits Fail Test (Bloomberg) That's because carbon credits are a scam. Always has been.
• Noah Lyles’ collapse with Covid: How not to manage health at the Olympics (STAT) Lots of Covid, and countries whose Olympic teams tried to protect their athletes from the disease outperformed those that did not.
• Maybe Murder and Humiliation is the Whole Point (Alon Mizrahi) The thesis is that colonialism is driven more by the desires of  people to exert power oven another.  Colonialism as sadism.  Money quote, "What I think is: it may be very possible (and intuitively I feel strongly that this is the case) that the greatest temptation in colonialism, as in capitalism, is not the expected profit, but the sadistic joy of crushing people in a system that does not punish but rewards such behavior." (Archive.is link here)
• The low-tax countries wooing the world’s wealthy (Financial Times) It's called a race to the bottom, and only the hyper-wealthy benefit from this.
• ​The National Endowment for Democracy:What It Is and What It Does (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China) Short version, as I have noted before, the NED is a cutout for the US State Security Apparatus to destabilize and overthrow governments that it does not like.,
• Pluralistic: MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier (16 Aug 2024) (Cory Doctorow) Not a surprise.  Human intestines thrive without tapeworms as well.  Elsevier are a bunch of parasites.
• ‘Monument to history’ battle between US and China over future of Mao’s secretary’s diary (The Guardian) Senior Chinese official Li Rui kept extensive diaries, and his daughter sent copies of them to the Hoover Institution in the US.  Li's widow is trying to get them back, claiming ownership.  It is believed that the lawsuit is being promulgated by the leadership of the PRC.
• Inside Boeing’s factory lapses that led to the Alaska Air blowout (The Seattle Times) This is a complete horror show.  If it's Boeing, I ain't going.

My mind is blown. I will never look at Looney Toons the same way again:

Yes

Is the Staggeringly Profitable Business of Scientific Publishing Bad for Science?

This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.

The story is, of course, about ferociously corrupt scientific journal publisher Elsevier, which interestingly enough was founded by the ferociously corrupt media baron Robert Maxwell, who is ironically enough the father of Ghislane Maxwell, who is alleged to have some serious ethical issues as well.

The reveal here is that monster that is Elsevier was nurtured by British intelligence.

About Bloody Time

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) will start requiring all that all publications receiving federal funding make their research immediately available to the public free of charge, which means that the good folks at Elsevier will no longer be able to extract the enormous rents that they currently do for their "Services."

Basically, the author of the study (generally) pays for publication, unpaid volunteers do peer review, and then the academic publishing giant charges thousands of dollars a year for subscriptions to their magazines.

Given that the US government is the largest source of funding for research in the world, this is a big f%$#ing deal.

Publicly funding research should be available to the public:

Many federal policy changes are well known before they are announced. Hints in speeches, leaks, and early access to reporters at major publications all pave the way for the eventual confirmation. But on Thursday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) dropped a big one that seemed to take everyone by surprise. Starting in 2026, any scientific publication that receives federal funding will need to be openly accessible on the day it's published.

The move has the potential to further shake up the scientific publishing industry, which has already adopted preprint archives, similar mandates from other funding organizations, and greatly expanded access to publications during the pandemic.

The change was announced by Alondra Nelson, acting head of the OSTP (a permanent director is in the process of Senate confirmation). The formal policy is laid out in an accompanying memorandum.

The US government is likely to be the world's largest funder of scientific research. For medical research, the US National Institutes of Health spends more than the rest of the top 20 organizations combined. Yet, for decades, the scientific publishing system was set up so that the government (much less the people it represented) didn't necessarily have access to the research it was funding. Instead, access was predicated on paid subscriptions to the journals the work was published in.

Two trends have undercut that limitation. One is the rise of open-access journals, which charge an up-front fee to the researchers and then provide anyone with Internet service access to the final research publication. The second is the trend toward "preprints." Preprint servers, pioneered by researchers in physics and astronomy, provide access to manuscripts submitted to publishers for peer review. Their use in the biological sciences expanded considerably during the COVID-19 pandemic.

No mention here of Sci-Hub, the Russia based library website that has been making millions of papers available free of charge for more than a decade.

That organization, under legal siege across the world, has shown what is possible in the world or academic research without parasites erecting paywalls.

This is arguably the greatest step forward in science in decades.

Linkage

• Scientists Slowly Reintroducing Small Group Of Normal, Well-Adjusted Humans Into Society (The Onion) It's nice that an endangered species is given another chance.
• F%$# Nuance (Kieran Healey) "We are glutted with nuance.  I say, f%$# it."
• Sherpa: Norbu Tenzing on the Everest 'circus' and the inevitability of another disaster (The Guardian) Tenzing Norgay's son talks about how the Everest climbing industry is a disaster waiting to happen (again).
• Welcome to Iceland, Where Bad Bankers Go to Prison (Bloomberg) We should do the same.
• 33 state Democratic parties launder $26M from millionaires for Hillary (Boing Boing) Why the party establishment is in the tank for Clinton
• A spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz is angering publishers all over again (Ars Technica) Alexandra Elbakyan runs Sci-Hub, which makes research papers freely available, which has led to much litigation, primarily from Elsevier, the evil empire of scientific publications.  See also the wiki.
• STUDY: Nation's Largest Public Schools Have More Police Than Counselors (Colorlines) The school to prison pipeline appears to be a feature, not a bug.

Have an Avocado:

Linkage

• 5 Times Charter School Founders Used Shady Real Estate Deals to Shamelessly Enrich Themselves (naked capitalism) More evidence that much of the charter school movement is looting.
• Inside the Academic Journal That Corporations Love (Pacific Standard) It's Elsevier, of course, the Borg of the for-profit academic journal world.
• Look: Oregon police respond to report of cat armed with gun-shaped stick (UPI) Cat terrorists.
• Report: Facebook helped advertisers target teens who feel “worthless” (Ars Technica) So, Zuckerberg and Co. determine when children are feeling "worthless, insecure, defeated, anxious, silly, useless, stupid, overwhelmed, stressed, and a failure," they allow advertisers to prey on them. And Zuckerberg is mulling a Presidential run.
• A 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern California, USA (Nature) Humans in the Americas about 100,000 years earlier than previously thought.
• How Vestager took a bite out of Apple (Politico) A nice blow by blow of how the EU went after Irish subsidies via tax evasion with Apple. When do they go after Luxemberg?
• the three hot trends in Silicon Valley horsesh%$ (Medium) Freddie deBoer notes that much of what is "Hot" in the valley is basically snake oil.
• A Modest Proposal To Fix The World (Ian Welsh) It's not meant to be taken seriously, but taxing the hyper-rich back to merely very well off is a great idea.

I am so going to see the Kingsman Sequel:

Linkage

• Redditors Launch A 'Rescue Mission' For Embattled Sci-Hub, With The Ultimate Aim Of Building A Decentralized Version (Techdirt) Good move.  If Elsevier gets its claws into the Russian government, it's game over for open science publications.
• Facial Recognition Technology: How to Opt Out at the Airport (Condé Nast Traveler) News you can use.
  
• Biden admin wants to bring sexy back with dating app vaccination statuses (Ars Technica) Filed under, "Not The Onion."
  
• Desire paths: the illicit trails that defy the urban planners (The Guardian) "When cities lack the paths pedestrians need, people vote with their feet."
  
• It Is Unconscionable That The Gay Community Has Ostracized Me Simply Because I Was Born A Cop (Defector) This is both world class snark, and an accurate description of the snowflakes in the "Blue Lives Matter" movement.
  
• De-Ratting Rat Island Brought Silent Ecosystem Back to Life (Scientific American) Removing rats from Alaskan islands completely restored the ecosystem over a decade.
  
• Employers court metro Atlanta workers with higher wages, hiring bonuses. (Atlanta Journal and Constitution) Imagine that.
• In Nod to Dystopian Fiction, Citizen Wants to Send Private Security Teams to Your Neighborhood (Gizmodo) These are the folks who put out a bounty on an innocent homeless man for a fire in California. Not Good
  

Microwaves Reanimate Hamsters: 

Yes

The Guardian asks, "Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?"

Why yes, yes it is.

With reasonable regulation and antitrust enforcement, parasites like Elsevier have plundered publicly funded knowledge.

The end of this business model has been predicted for years, but with great profits comes the resources to engage aggressive rent seeking, which mitigates against this.

I don't think that we will see any change in this until the government mandates another model for research that it funds.