10 Jul 2026

Land of Milk and Money

by Misha Angrist

Like anyone else, I receive spam emails from sweepstakes purveyors, princes from faraway lands, and myriad other phishermen. But occasionally there will be a real show-stopper, rising above the fray by dint of its perverse language and awkward come-ons. This one from 2023 might be my all-time favorite.

How did Grace Hopper manage to get a glimpse of my incandescent smile? How did word of my “eminence” reach her? What I really love is that she concludes with the one-two punch of a movie-villain threat (“We hope you won’t disappoint us”) and a command (“Acknowledge this email within 24 hours”). Tell Blofeld to come issue his ultimatums to me in person, Ms. Hopper!

Most anyone with a .edu address has received many emails like this one. It is from one of the so-called predatory journals: you pay them to publish your “scientific paper,” and never mind about that pesky peer review. They’d love nothing more than to provide a home for your fake study on how dark chocolate leads to weight loss. All they need is a website and a way to accept payment; all you need is a credit card and a manuscript, however rudimentary.

Remarkably, the origins of this deeply enshittified ecosystem were well-intentioned, perhaps even noble. Twenty-five years ago a group of Nobelists and other highly decorated researchers contended that too many papers were behind paywalls; “unimpeded access,” they argued, would help researchers and further the cause of science, just as the sharing of genomic data had accelerated the transformation of biology.

Great—but wouldn’t such access deny journals the subscription revenue they needed to survive? The answer (or an answer) was “open access publishing”—authors would pay a fee to the journals for peer review, editing, and distribution, and in return the journals would make their papers freely available to all. The money to pay for publication would come, in other words, not from increasingly exploitative and monopolistic publishers, but from scientist-authors’ research grants—and soon, researchers began building the cost of “article processing charges” (APCs) into their grant proposals.

The obvious problem of predation mushroomed almost instantly. Any unscrupulous bandit can start a journal and dupe unsuspecting researchers into submitting their work and publishing it, fudging the peer review and editing steps. As I write this, the anonymous volunteer-run site predatoryjournals.org lists 2,780 predatory journals produced by 1,363 predatory publishers. Earlier this year, the commercial database Cabells Predatory Reports crossed 20,000 predatory journals.