IIf you’ve ever read an academic article, chances are you’ve unwittingly paid homage to a huge profit-generating machine that exploits the free labor of researchers and siphons off public funds.
The annual revenues of the “big five” commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature and SAGE – are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, which even the love google. Meanwhile, academics do virtually all the substantive work to produce these articles for free: we do the research, write the articles, vet them for quality, and edit the journals.
Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to these journals to the same universities and institutions that fund the research and editorial labor in the first place. Universities need access to journals because this is where most cutting-edge research is disseminated. But the cost of subscribing to these magazines has become so prohibitively expensive that some universities struggle to afford them. As a result, many researchers (not to mention the general public) remain blocked by paywalls, unable to access the information they need. If your university or library does not subscribe to the main journals, download a single paywall article on philosophy or politics can cost between £30 and £40.
The commercial stranglehold about academic publishing is doing considerable damage to our intellectual and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda are freely disseminated online, genuine research and scholarship remain fenced off and prohibitively expensive. For the past few years I have worked as an editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, one of the leading journals in political philosophy. Founded in 1972, it has published research from well-known philosophers such as John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Peter Singer. Many of the most influential ideas in our field, on topics from abortion and democracy to famine and colonialism, began in the pages of this magazine.. But earlier this year, my co-editors and our editors decided we had had enough, and resigned en masse.
We were tired of academic publishing and decided to try something different. We wanted to launch a journal that would be real open access, which ensures that anyone can read our articles. It will be published by the Open Library for Humanities, a non-profit publisher funded by a consortium of libraries and other institutions. When academic publishing is run on a non-profit basis, it works quite well. These publishers provide a real service and usually sell the final product at a fair price to their own community. So why aren’t there more of them?
To answer this, we have to go back a few decades, when commercial publishers started buy up journals from university presses. Exploiting their monopoly position, they then sharply raised prices. Today, a library subscription to a single journal in the humanities or social sciences usually costs more than £1,000 a year. Worse, publishers often “bundle” journals together, forcing libraries to buy the ones they don’t want in order to access the ones they do have. Between 2010 and 2019, British universities paid over £1 billion in journal subscriptions and other publication costs. Over 90% of these fees went to the big five commercial publishers (UCL and Manchester pocketed over £4m each). It is worth remembering that the universities funded this research, paid the salaries of the academics who produced it and then had to pay millions of pounds to commercial publishers to gain access to the end product.
Even more amazing is the fact that these publishers often charge authors for the privilege of publishing in their journals. In recent years, major publishers have started offering so-called “open access” articles that are free to read. On the face of it, this might sound like a welcome improvement. But for-profit publishers provide open access to readers only by charging authors, often thousands of pounds, to publish their own articles. Who ultimately pays these substantial author fees? Again, universities. In 2022 alone, UK institutions paid for higher education over £112m to the big five to ensure open access publishing for their authors.
This tendency has an insidious impact on knowledge production. Commercial publishers are incentivized to try to publish as many articles and journals as possible, because each additional article brings more profit. This has led to a proliferation of junk journals that publish bogus research, and increased pressure on rigorous journals to weaken their quality controls. It has never been more clear that publishing for profit is simply incompatible with the aims of scientific inquiry.
There is an obvious alternative: universities, libraries and academic funding agencies can cut out the middleman and fund journals themselves directly, at a much lower cost. This will remove commercial pressure from the editorial process, preserve editorial integrity and make research accessible to all. The term for this is “diamond” open access, which means that the publishers do not charge authors, editors or readers (this is how our new journal will function). Librarians have been pushing for this for years. So why haven’t academics already migrated to diamond journals?
The reason is that such journals need alternative sources of funding, and even if such funding were in place, academics still face a massive collective action problem: we want a new arrangement, but each of us, individually, is strongly incentivized to stick to the status quo. . Career advancement depends largely on publishing in journals with established name recognition and prestige, and these journals are often owned by commercial publishers. Many academics – especially early-career researchers trying to find long-term employment in an extremely difficult job market – cannot afford to take a chance on new, untested journals on their own.
That’s why we, as editors of one of our field’s leading journals, feel a strong responsibility to help build collective momentum for a better arrangement: a publishing model that no longer wastes massive amounts of public resources for profits to private corporations to conduct, ensures editorial independence against the pressure of profit making and makes research freely available to all. This is not just an academic problem. A revolution in the publishing landscape could also help stem the tide of disinformation and propaganda in the public sphere. Such an alternative is available, but it is difficult to get there. We want to change that.
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Arash Abizadeh is a philosopher and the Angus Professor of Politics Science at McGill University, Canada
