As I read in the Wiki, “Researchers have criticized Elsevier for its high profit margins and copyright practices. The company had a reported profit before tax of £2.295 billion with an adjusted operating margin of 33.1% in 2023. Much of the research that Elsevier publishes is publicly funded; its high costs have led to accusations of rent-seeking, boycotts against them, and the rise of alternate avenues for publication and access, such as preprint servers and shadow libraries.”
Are there other high-score but more ethical publishers? Is Springer Nature better in this sense? I mean the subscription publishing options, not a paid open-access.
I mean, if you are doing actual science, I assume you will want access to all the other science that has been done, so you will still want to read the science published in Elsevier journals. So no, there is no alternative.
Short answer, no. Nature charges thousands for open access and years ago stopped retracting fraudulent papers, because they published so many.
The problem is your query: high score. Those numbers are highly gamed by journals. There is NO correlation between quality and JIF. And some of these journals can hold up publication for YEARS while “leaders” in the field gate keep.
Publishing is broken, and should not be private. We should all publish in one digital resource with transparent peer reviews visible. One step beyond BioRxiv. Currently, this industry sucks $4B out of Biomedical research and relies entirely on unchecked free labor.
PLOS is a misnomer. It is not public, and it’s just more cronyism. Then there are hundreds of predatory journals, including Science journals.
