Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that | Arash Abizadeh | The Guardian

"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, a not-for-profit publisher funded by a 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?...

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 to the big five to secure 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, 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, 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? ...

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, 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?

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."