Elliot Overton@EO_Nutrition
This man singlehandedly destroyed science as an institution
His name was Robert Maxwell, and he was the father of Ghislaine Maxwell
He turned scientific knowledge into a commodity, locked it behind a paywall, a created the system which breeds authoritarian, conformist scientists who are terrified to challenge established dogma
His system weaponized science for elite control
British jew, media tycoon, and Mossad agent
He was the first to turn scientific publishing into a ruthless commercial business, locked behind steep paywalls.
In 1951 he founded Pergamon Press, which launched hundreds of niche scientific journals - each a tiny monopoly in its field, demanding expensive subscriptions
Overnight, freely available public-domain scientific knowledge became gated behind high costs, accessible only to an “intellectually elite” class… the new “intelligentsia”
He called this setup “a perpetual financing machine.” and it became the template for the entire industry today.
This commercial monopoly on science extracts free labor from scientists, who work tirelessly to write papers, review work and edit manuscripts to further their career prospects - all at no cost,
The profit margins for scientific journals far exceed almost every other industry. The top publisher’s margins are higher than Google and Apple. Elsevier, for example, brought in ~ $1.4 billion profit in 2024 alone.
This is a huge business which artificially inflates the cost of knowledge dissemination - that is ironically funded in large part by the taxpayer.
Unfortunately the entire business model incentivises VOLUME over QUALITY: Careers, grants, and promotions tie to publication count in "prestigious" (high-fee) journals.
This means that researchers are penalized for publishing less, and are instead rewarded for pumping out high quantity with little inherent value.
In other words, there are tangible benefits to publishing junk science, manipulated data and fabrication.
This model disincentivizes and actively punishes genuine scientific curiosity, independent thinking, long-term/risky work, and controversial opinions or lines of research which challenge established dogma.
It breeds authoritarian, conformist, self-censoring scientists who are averse to risk.
Furthermore, it laid the foundation for a gated elite class of “intelligentsia”. Only those in the “club” at wealthy scientific institutions, who tow the party line, are granted access to scientific knowledge. Those who stray too far from the norm are shunned and expelled.
The ultimate result? A bloated, generic mess of low-rigor, irreproducible papers
This model, which still dominates to this day, facilitated the corporatization and weaponization of of science
What began as a relentless pursuit for truth was coopted and sacrificed for endless greed & elite control of knowledge itself
