Earlier this week I learned the baffling fact that academics have to pay to get their work published. I decided to do a little digging and this is what I found:

• There is a huge concentration of power: In 2013, a mere five academic publishers (Reed, Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis) published over half of all scholarly papers!
• Customers have to pay to read papers, but the authors also pay to submit their papers. Moreover, the research submitted isn’t paid for by the publisher either!
• This means that the publishers make an absurd amount of money. The Guardian reported that in 2010 “Elsevier [had] total global revenues of more than £19bn” (24,510,000,000 USD)!

How did all of this come about?

Well, in the 1950s there was no good way to disseminate scientific findings so the British government tried to improve this by incentivizing book publishers to publish scientific articles.  These publications turned into journals. At first, publication in these journals did not have a huge bearing on one’s academic career. However, over time, some journals were known for publishing a higher frequency of novel and influential papers. These journals gained prestige. As a result, it was desirable to publish in them. Suddenly, one’s worth as an academic depended on their publications. This resulted in the now familiar mantra of “publish or perish.” Even though publishing was an essential part of academia, some publishers were struggling financially. The larger publishers took this opportunity to acquire smaller publishers — thereby consolidating their power and creating today’s publishing landscape.

 

What happens next?

Unfortunately, its really hard to get a large enough portion of academia to forgo publishing in prestigious journals because their livelihood is on the line. Thus, the move from these closed off publishers to open access publishing has been a slow process. Moreover, many publishers have co-opted the open access movement to squeeze even more money out of academics. Now, many publishers have the option for academics to publish their work open access, but to do so is considerably more expensive than publishing not open access.  Given these factors, it is unclear what will happen next.

Sources:

The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era

Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?