As Paul Abrahams is tweeting in his capacity as "Chief Communications Officer at RELX", let's fact-check his three statements here, one by one, as an example of just how trustworthy such public statements from RELX / #Elsevier can be (1/9):

https://twitter.com/paul_abrahams/status/1635242535730970624

1. "Elsevier provides above-average quality".
Let's pretend, for now, RELX were not chiefly a surveillance platform and data broker enabling ICE mass deportations (some quality!), but instead an academic publisher with above average overall impact factor. (2/9)

New year, new insult by publishers to the intelligence of academics, nothing ever seems to change.

7 years ago, @SciReports offered expedited peer-review for a fee and heads rolled:
science.org/content/articl…
As if our memories didn't last for 7 years, now T&F offers the same: They call it "Accelerated Publication":
taylorandfrancis.com/partnership/co…
and advertise it as a way for rich institutions to beat their less well-off competitors in case they ever managed to threaten their rank.

This is a fact that cannot be repeated often enough:
"Sci-Hub's Creator Thinks Academic Publishers, Not Her Site, Are The Real Threat To Science, And Says: 'Any Law Against Knowledge Is Fundamentally Unjust'" buff.ly/3zt5p95
via @glynmoody and @petermurrayrust
1/5 Academic publishers indeed are the real threat to science:
Exhibit A: They exploit journal rank for profit, leading to less and less reliable science the higher the prestige (and hence profitability) of the journal:
frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
2/5

With Elsevier's @paul_abrahams stating a rejection rate over all Elsevier journals of ~77%,

https://twitter.com/paul_abrahams/status/1440693917872123906

we can use this figure to calculate Elsevier's publishing costs using the available market rates for publishing services:
f1000research.com/articles/10-20…
1/12 Assuming Elsevier publishes at least as efficiently as the companies that are on the record with such costs, the figure comes to lie at US$574.74 per article (in our scenario B), i.e., very close to the estimated average per-article publishing costs for the industry:

2/12

It appears the SNSI arguing that universities ought to install publisher spyware on their servers
bjoern.brembs.net/2020/10/is-the…
is just the tip of the iceberg. There seems to be a clan of publisher-initiatives and companies that reinforce each other and create a disinformation and surveillance network: PSI, LibLynx etc.

Something is brewing that the #OpenScience community doesn't seem to have on their radar, yet.

@MostlyPhysics @Dmitri145 @Protohedgehog @BMittermaier @cmplxtv_studies @petermurrayrust @waltcrawford @natesjacobs @lteytelman @marcschiltz1 @fzjuelich_zb @deal_projekt 1/ You mention an attitude that has been getting on my nerves for a number of years now.

The idea that libraries are somehow serving their faculty. They're not our service providers just as little as we are their customers! @MostlyPhysics @Dmitri145 @Protohedgehog @BMittermaier @cmplxtv_studies @petermurrayrust @waltcrawford @natesjacobs @lteytelman @marcschiltz1 @fzjuelich_zb @deal_projekt 2/ This thinking is a pernicious consequence of the economization and corporatization of universities and other institutions of research and higher education.

Every unit serves the mission of the institution, whether that is faculty or libraries. We are colleagues!