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Around ~10-12 years ago, Nature tried to “disrupt” the publication market & flooded it with journals without providing resources to ensure long-term success nor thinking about the impact it would have… this has led to sustained mediocrity, dwindling integrity, & disingenuous “high impact” publications that they profit off of — another Great disservice to the already awful publication landscape that scientists face today. nature.com/articles/s41561-023

This article starts off with “One clear benefit of the increasing number of Nature-titled journals is that there is a destination for many more excellent papers than used to be possible, with the ability to transfer a manuscript to another title if the author’s first choice doesn’t work out.” — at what price have you we bought into this “clear benefit” 🫠

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@kau Proliferating journals under the same corporate umbrella always struck me as having your cake and eating it too. “No, we don’t want your paper in your journal of choice, but we don’t want publishing fees or prestige to go to a competitor so here’s another less-relevant/crappier/catch-all journal for your consideration.”

Ok @kau, when are you going to launch a diamond open access climate journal? Have seen quite a few cooking in geo side, like Seismica, Tektonika, Sedimentologika, Volcanica, Geomorphica... We even just launched one on disaster risk, @JournalCRR.

But no climate, somehow... I smell a project ;)

@hereidk *I will not be tempted* *I will not be tempted* *I will not be tempted* *I will not be tempted* *I will not be tempted*…

@kau Happy to be a bad influence. See you at AGU this year?

@kau I’ve never experienced worse editorial handling than at Nature brand journals - we had a paper at Nat Comms (which did eventually come out there) where the editor rejected it after multiple rounds of review because one of the reviewers (who we’d already flagged as problematic) sent in a review for a completely different manuscript and the editor didn’t realise and rejected it. They then proceeded to ignore all of our emails until we got their senior editor involved. Crazy

@kau between this and another experience with Nature/Nature Geoscience where the review process dragged on indefinitely with new reviewers constantly being bought in I’ve come to think these journals really aren’t helpful/constructive for our science

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