The Exploitative Economics Of Academic Publishing

Taxpayers in the United States spend $139 billion a year on scientific research, yet much of this research is inaccessible not only to the public, but also to other scientists.(a) This is the consequence of an exploitative scientific journal system that rewards academic publishers while punishing taxpayers, scientists, and universities. Fortunately, cheap open-access alternatives are not only possible, but already beginning to take root, suggesting a way forward to a more open and equitable system for sharing research ... Like many scientists, I provide access to my research papers on my website. I view this as a commonsense way to disseminate knowledge, but not everyone shares this view. A few months ago, I received an email from an official at Princeton University, where I attended graduate school, informing me that a lawyer representing the publishing giant Elsevier had demanded the removal of these papers from my website.(b) When I published these papers in Elsevier journals, I was required to hand over the copyrights. Therefore, I had no choice but to remove the papers.  The vast majority of academic papers are published by corporations like Elsevier, and these corporations are thriving: In 2011, Elsevier made $1.1 billion in profit, at a profit margin of 36% (by comparison, Apple’s 2012 profit margin was 35%). This impressive profitability is due in large part to the fact that the content sold by Elsevier is produced, reviewed, and edited on a volunteer basis by academics like me. We consent to this system because our careers depend on publishing in prestigious journals, almost all of which are owned by Elsevier and a small number of other publishers.  What value is added by academic publishers? In my opinion: very little. Elsevier claims that they add value as they 'coordinate the review, consideration, addition of text and references, and other production and distribution mechanisms.' In fact, all of these contributions are or could be obtained at almost no cost.(c) First, reviews are typically coordinated by a combination of volunteer editors (academics) and an automated email system. The cost of setting up and maintaining such an automated system is negligible (a point I will return to later). Elsevier does not add text and references to research papers – academics do. In my experience, corroborated by anecdotes from other scientists, publisher-employed copy editors are mostly superfluous and in some cases even introduce errors into papers or cause substantial publication delays.  It is true that Elsevier formats and produces the final versions of papers, but this is hardly necessary, since new technologies allow authors to typeset their own work. In fields like computer science, physics, and mathematics, where articles incorporate complex equations, most papers are written using the word processing software LaTeX, which allows academic authors to format papers following set templates. As for distribution, dissemination costs are essentially zero in the age of the internet and electronic communication, apart from the relatively small cost of hosting papers on a webserver (a point I address below).  The 'free' labor upon which publishers base their business model is not really free: most academic research is funded by the federal government. However, the taxpayers who are effectively bankrolling the publishers have no access to most of the published content, which sits behind paywalls. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), recognizing this problem, mandated a public access policy in 2005, according to which digital copies of all NIH-funded research papers must be deposited in a freely accessible online database known as PubMed Central.(d) PubMed Central costs taxpayers $4.5 million annually, part of the more than $30 million a year in NIH funding that goes toward page charges, submission fees, and other subsidies to publishers. The program also only covers a relatively small proportion of published research: 70,000 full-text articles are deposited into PubMed Central annually, compared to 250,000 articles published each year by Elsevier alone.(e) While the public is often blocked from ac