Jan 20, 2021

Double Dipping 😛

By Mustafa Sultan • Issue #39 • View online

Friends,

You know what shocked me?

Those delicious Dominos Pizza dips. A large one has 675 calories (~an hour of jogging).

Sometimes I share this dip with a friend. Each pizza slice requires 3–4 dippings. So we both eat and our arteries are only half as bunged up 👍

You know what else shocked me?

Apparently this is really disgusting — and is called double dipping. Something about saliva being transferred between bites.

A friend told me a story about his friend. He was sharing a pizza with a friend who made the error of double dipping. So angered was this friend — that he flipped the whole pizza + box onto the floor.

Why are you emailing me about pizza?

It’s a Tuesday. Professor Mariska Leeflang will receive 67 emails. Three of these will be requests from publishers to peer review (read: legit check) a paper for free.

She may choose to accept one of these requests — feeling a duty to contribute to science. Many of her public-spirited colleagues will do the same.

Wrists cocked back with open palms — they forget to mention something in their email. The tidy profit they’re going to make off of her and other scientists’ hard work (Elsevier: £982M in 2019).

Scientific publishers have tactfully mastered the Double Dip. Take research publicly funded by governments and carried out by scientists — and then sell it back to them.

What about McDonalds?

In Business School, I learn about the value chain. This is the things a company does to bring value to a customer.

For McDonalds, this starts with importing beef from New Zealand all the way to serving it to you in the Drive-Thru (a McDonald’s invention FYI).

Trying to make a value chain for a medical journal is easy. It’s a really short list.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to send you a really average mini-thesis on what I think is broken with scientific publishing and how to fix it.

If that sounds boring to you — it probably is. I appreciate your support anyway.

Hit <reply> if you’d double dip with me.

Podcast

‎#045 Former Special Advisor to the Health Secretary — Richard Sloggett

‎So it’s your first day as Health Secretary — what do you do!?

Richard Sloggett was former Special Advisor to the Health Secretary (Matt Hancock) during which he worked across public health, the NHS and social care. He’s also Senior Fellow at the think tank Policy Exchange and has been named one of…

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Warmest wishes,

Musty

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By Mustafa Sultan

Thoughts on healthcare, human optimisation and productivity. A little taste of what I'm thinking and reading about.

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