hernan seoane

> I'm a managing editor at Elsevier. > I did my PhD in English literature. > I was on the job market for four years. > I got 53 rejection letters. > Then I joined the academic publishing industry as an editor. > One day my boss said we should start an open access program. > I said great idea. > How much should we charge? He asked. > $11,000 per article, I said. > Nobody would pay this much money, he said. > They will. I told him. > I'm the only person in the room with a humanities PhD. > I know what they'll pay. > We launched the tier at $11,000. > We called it Gold Open Access. > We told researchers open access papers get more citation. > As expected, researchers paid $11,000 per article. > I made Elsevier $15 million in the first year. > I got a $500,000 bonus. > I bought a flat in Stockholm. > Last week I introduced anther tier in our open accss program. > I called it Premium Gold, cost only $25,000 per article. > Elsevier CFO called it "exceptional revenue capture." > My assistant said $11,000 it too expensive for researchers from low-income countries. > I introduced the waiver program. > The waiver requires a written application with a notarized proof that researchers can't afford to pay. > Processing the application takes six weeks. > Actually, it doesn't. I reject all applications. > We mention the waiver in every panel. > A senior researcher in India sent me an angry email. > He included numbers on Indian academic salaries. > I asked him to recommend his university to buy an institutional subscription. > The university asked Education ministry for money. > Education ministry got in touch with us. > I quoted $715 million. > My bosses said India would never pay such a price. > I said they will. And they did. > Researchers from univesities that rejected me submit their papers to Elsevier. > I charge them extra $5,000 as my "grief fee." > Last week, a graduate student emailed me asking why we sued Sci-Hub. > I sent her our public statement on "sustainability." > I didn't mention we'd also sued the Internet Archive that morning. > Sci-Hub mirrors our papers for free. > We sued them in New York. > We sued them in Delhi. > We'll sue them everywhere. > The lawsuits are good for branding. > They show we're "defending scholarly publishing." > An APC is a fee. > A fee is a service. > A service has tiers. > Tiers have premiums. > Premiums signal prestige. > Prestige justifies the fee. > The fee justifies the bonus. > The bonus is the metric. > The metric is in my review. > The review gets me promoted. > I'll be Senior Vice President of Elseveir Open Access Strategy by Q3 2026. > I'm going to introduce a new open access tier, Premium Gold Plus: $50,000 per article. > We're launching three more journals this year. > All open access. > I'm speaking at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. > The panel is called "The Future of Equitable Publishing."

1/6 📢 Call for Papers | Second Workshop on Argentine Macroeconomics (BAM 2026) El 7 de agosto de 2026 se realizará en la Universidad de San Andrés (Sede Riobamba), Buenos Aires, una nueva edición de este workshop sobre macroeconomía argentina y mercados emergentes.

Impecable