4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2022
⏱️ 50 minutes
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0:00.0 | This is the Guardian. |
0:10.3 | Hi, my name is Stephen Burrani. |
0:12.2 | I've been writing for the Longread for about five years. |
0:15.2 | And this piece about science publishing and the way that Baron named Robert Maxwell took it over |
0:21.2 | for his own profit and turned it into a multi-billion dollar empire. |
0:25.5 | It's about five years old now, it's from 2017. |
0:29.4 | And it was a piece that I really love deeply. |
0:32.4 | And it was something that I'd wanted to do for a very long time. |
0:35.2 | Because I actually used to be a scientist in a previous life. |
0:39.2 | And something that scientists are well aware of, but almost nobody else knows, is that |
0:44.5 | the business of science publishing, the business of scientists publishing their articles and journals, |
0:50.2 | is actually a massive multi-billion dollar industry with profit margins higher than Apple or Google |
0:56.4 | that extracts hundreds of millions, billions of dollars out of universities and scientists |
1:02.4 | for the profit of these massive megacorporations. |
1:06.0 | And scientists are really frustrated about this because these corporations control, |
1:11.0 | in some ways, the direction of their research and certainly the direction of their careers. |
1:15.6 | Because in order to have a career, you have to publish and you have to publish somewhere, |
1:19.8 | quite prestigious, ideally. |
1:21.7 | And so there's this entire internal world that nobody knows about, and it's very cutthroat |
1:25.8 | and scientists care a lot about it. |
1:27.5 | But we sort of struggle to find a way to make an average person care about it. |
1:32.1 | You know, this is the sort of thing that if I start ranting about it to you at a dinner party, |
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