What I Want People to Know About the Academic Publishing Industry

Note: Academic research and the academic publishing industry are very different things, at least ideally. Research involves asking questions and searching for the answers in a methodical way, like enrolling people in a study. You analyze the results and then type them up and share what you did (methods), what you found (results), and what it means (discussion). After the writeup, or manuscript, gets vetted by other researchers for scientific accuracy, the journal editor - also a researcher - decides whether to publish it. That's part one of the research process. Part two involves (ideally) getting those results out into the world  and publishing companies entering the picture. It's this industrial aspect of publishing, with publishers, revenues and business models, that I'll talk about today.

What many people don’t know is that the academic publishing industry is incredibly lucrative, at least for the publishers. How can that be? The biggest companies - Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer - are not exactly household names. The same goes for the thousands of journals that they publish, which often cater to a very niche readership. For instance, how does Wiley, which is the parent publishing company for journals such as Neurourology and Urodynamics, Contact Dermatitis, and the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles, make one billion US dollars in revenue every year? (These are important topics - for instance, I think we would all like to know how to treat contact dermatitis, or eczema - I just wouldn’t expect billion dollar revenues.)

Wiley isn't even the highest-earning academic publisher - that distinction goes to Elsevier, which publishes titles such as AI Thermal Fluids, Dental Clinics of North America, and Focus on Powder Coatings and rakes in around $3 billion in earnings. The lowest earner, Sage, still makes upwards of $400 million a year. How is this possible? From a purely financial perspective, the answers lie in subscriptions, open access fees, and fees charged to members of the public to access the latest research findings.

Paywalls put up by publishing companies are not like those that you encounter reading news articles. They are far higher. Subscription bundles cost libraries millions. (Want Alzheimer’s & Dementia? You’ll have to pay for the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles too.) Open access fees cost authors thousands. Paywalls for individual readers can cost anywhere from $15 to view one article for 24 hours to $50 to download the article as a PDF. It doesn't matter if you're a patient or an author of the paper or simply want to learn more - you have to pay up. (Most articles in the US are available for free on PubMed Central, but until recently there was a 1-year blackout period imposed by publishers.) Given all this, it’s not hard to see how companies rake in the revenues they do. 

But how profitable is this? Staggeringly so, in the words of journalist Stephen Buranyi. He unpacks this topic in the excellent article, “Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?”. Elsevier’s profit margin - the amount of each dollar earned that is a profit - is similar to that of Google, at over 35%, and other major publishing companies have similar amounts.

Given that a lot of the publishing process involves unpaid labor, it’s an easier way to turn a profit than operating a tech company. Authors are not paid to write or publish research articles, and they may even pay the aforementioned open access fees to the publishers. Their research is typically either funded by government entities - which they and other taxpayers pay into - or private nonprofit foundations. Peer reviewers - scientists, statisticians and other professionals with expertise in the article topic - are not paid for their work vetting articles for scientific accuracy. Editors, who decide whether to accept or reject journal articles and make stylistic changes, are not paid in most cases. If they are, it is usually not enough to be the sole source of income. Publishers operate at a profit at every step of the way, and authors, reviewers and editors operate at net zero or at a loss. The public loses out the most, as they are all too often denied access to the results of the research that they helped pay for.

There is, however, a plot twist courtesy of the National Institutes of Health. All new papers for NIH-funded studies - which constitute most medical research papers from the US - are required to be available to the public for free as soon as they are published.  This went into effect on July 1 of this year and means that in theory, paywalls for most medical research articles, at least in the US, should be a thing of the past. Unsurprisingly, most major publishers are not a fan of this. Elsevier even took down its webpage on how to comply with NIH public access requirements. 

So where do we go from here? I personally decided not to publish with Elsevier if I can help it. I realize that's not possible for everyone, so no matter what, read the terms and conditions. It's not just me who's saying this - copyright lawyers and librarians all exhort this too. In addition, find journals whose publishers are willing to comply with the NIH public access policy and let you keep the rights to your work for free. Penn State's librarians have compiled a list here (many thanks to Ashley Gordon from the organization SPARC for sending it in an email).

Last but not least, educate yourself about the industry, from which publishing companies ultimately own the journals that you submit research articles to, to the history and current landscape. Authors Alliance and SPARC provide comprehensive and easy-to-understand articles and webinars with panel discussions (disclaimer: I am a member of Authors Alliance). There are many great resources available from universities as well.

For a dose of satire, Dr. Glaucomflecken’s videos on YouTube shed light on the issues (and absurdities) in the publishing industry with humor and eloquence, all in less than 2 minutes. For a primer, check out "Academic Publishing", "Big News in Academic Publishing" and "Academic Journals Do Crime". In terms of general information, I'd also highly recommend the Guardian article by Stephen Buranyi, which delves beneath the surface far more than I can in this blog post and explores historical reasons as to how the academic publishing industry got to be the way it is.  In many ways, Mr. Buranyi and Dr. Glaucomflecken inspired me to learn more and ultimately share my learnings with my colleagues and now with the Internet - proof that one article or 90-second video can make a world of difference.