Academic Publishing is Big Business, And How Blockchain Can Make A Difference - Nasdaq.com

"Contrary to popular belief, scientific publishing is a robust business sector. In 2015, the global STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) publishing market alone was estimated to be worth over $25 billion USD, and that represents just a portion of the market. Scientific journals are the crown jewels of this market, and global information analytics company Elsevier has asserted its position as the dominant player within the scientific publishing space, as its market share is almost equal to that of the next three companies combined - Thomson Reuters, Springer, Wiley. Science has always been the enabler of innovation, and will always be intrinsically linked to the progress of our society. It represents the most effective mechanism we have ever designed to promote new economic activity and nurture new, groundbreaking industries, which, in turn, can make the world a better place. This sentiment was captured by influential political commentator Joseph Schumpeter, an economist and professor at Harvard when he said: “science is, and always has been, at the center of our economic system.” This idea still rings true today....

Brian Nosek, a professor at the University of Virginia and Director of the Center for Open Science described how lucrative the academic publishing sector could be, calling it “the perfect business model to make a lot of money. You have the producer and consumer as the same person: the researcher. And the researcher has no idea how much anything costs.” A traditional publisher like a magazine has to cover a multitude of costs, paying writers to write articles, employing editors to structure and check articles, and paying for the distribution of the finished products to subscribers and retailers. This process is expensive, and even the most successful magazines only make 12 to 15% profit...."