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ACADEMIC JOURNALS ARE A LUCRATIVE SCAM  
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Arash Abizadeh
July 16, 2024
Guardian
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_ Giant publishers are bleeding universities dry, with profit margins
that rival Google’s. So we decided to do something about it. We
started our own. _

"Open source textbooks a 'threat' to Texas education?", by
opensourceway (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

If you’ve ever read an academic article, the chances are that you
were unwittingly paying tribute to a vast profit-generating machine
that exploits the free labour 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%, surpassing even the likes of Google
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Meanwhile, academics do almost all of the substantive work to produce
these articles free of charge: 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 very same universities and
institutions that fund the research and editorial labour in the first
place. Universities need access to journals because these are where
most cutting-edge research is disseminated. But the cost of
subscribing to these journals has become so exorbitantly expensive
that some universities are struggling
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afford them. Consequently, many researchers (not to mention the
general public) remain blocked by paywalls, unable to access the
information they need. If your university or library doesn’t
subscribe to the main journals, downloading a single paywalled article
on philosophy or politics can cost
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£30 and £40.

The commercial stranglehold
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academic publishing is doing considerable damage to our intellectual
and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda spread freely
online, genuine research and scholarship remains gated and
prohibitively expensive. For the past couple of years, I worked as an
editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, one of the leading journals in
political philosophy_. _It was founded in 1972, and it has published
research from renowned philosophers such as John Rawls
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ideas in our field, on topics from abortion and democracy to famine
and colonialism, started out in the pages of this journal_. _But
earlier this year, my co-editors and I and our editorial board decided
we’d had enough, and resigned en masse
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Is it the beginning of the end for scientific publishing? – podcast
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We were sick of the academic publishing racket and had decided to try
something different. We wanted to launch a journal that would be
truly open access, ensuring anyone could read our articles. This will
be published by the Open Library of Humanities
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consortium of libraries and other institutions. When academic
publishing is run on a not-for-profit basis, it works reasonably well.
These publishers provide a real service and typically sell the final
product at a reasonable 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 began buying up
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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 typically costs more than
£1,000 a year. Worse still, publishers often “bundle
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together, forcing libraries to buy ones they don’t want in order to
have access to ones they do. Between 2010 and 2019, UK universities
paid more than £1bn
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journal subscriptions and other publishing charges. More than 90% of
these fees went to the big five commercial publishers (UCL and
Manchester shelled out over £4m each). It’s 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 in order to access the end product.

Even more astonishing is the fact these publishers often charge
authors for the privilege of publishing in their journals. In recent
years, large publishers have begun offering so-called “open
access” articles that are free to read. On the surface, 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 ends up paying these
substantial author fees? Once again, universities. In 2022 alone, UK
institutions of higher education paid more than £112m
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open-access publication for their authors.

This trend is having an insidious impact on knowledge production.
Commercial publishers are incentivised to try to publish as many
articles and journals as possible, because each additional article
brings in more profit. This has led to a proliferation of junk
journals that publish fake research
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and has increased the pressure on rigorous journals to weaken their
quality controls. It’s never been more evident that for-profit
publishing simply does not align with the aims of scholarly inquiry.

There is an obvious alternative: universities, libraries, and academic
funding agencies can cut out the intermediary and directly fund
journals themselves, at a far lower cost. This would remove commercial
pressures from the editorial process, preserve editorial integrity and
make research accessible to all. The term for this is “diamond”
open access
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which means the publishers charge neither authors, editors, nor
readers (this is how our new journal will operate). Librarians have
been urging this for years. So why haven’t academics already
migrated to diamond journals?

‘Too greedy’: mass walkout at global science journal over
‘unethical’ fees
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The reason is that such journals require alternative funding sources,
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 incentivised to stick with the status quo.
Career advancement depends heavily on publishing in journals with
established name recognition and prestige, and these journals are
often owned by commercial publishers. Many academics – particularly
early-career researchers trying to secure long-term employment in an
extremely difficult job market – cannot afford to take a chance on
new, untested journals on their own.

This is why, as editors of one of our field’s leading journals, we
feel a strong responsibility to help build collective momentum towards
a better arrangement: a publishing model that no longer wastes massive
amounts of public resources feeding profits to private corporations,
secures editorial independence against the pressures of profit-making
and makes research available to everyone, free of charge. This isn’t
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’s hard to
get there. We want to change that.

_Arash Abizadeh is a philosopher and the Angus Professor of
Political Science [[link removed]] at
McGill University, Canada_

_The Guardian is globally renowned for its coverage of politics, the
environment, science, social justice, sport and culture. Scroll less
and understand more about the subjects you care about with the
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