Datentracking: Die schöne neue Welt der Wissenschaftsverlage (Data Tracking: Scientific Publishers' Brave New World) | Wikimedia Deutschland Blog

English version via deepl.com

For many years now, the major international academic publishers have established an extremely lucrative business model. They profit from the fact that the public sector pays for a large part of the work: in most cases, scientists employed at public universities and research institutions not only write about their research free of charge. They also take over the quality assurance of scientific journal articles in the independent peer review process free of charge for the publishers. A recently published study estimates that the equivalent value of peer review provided by publicly paid scientists and scholars worldwide amounts to billions of euros. And in a third way, public money flows into a publication: libraries subscribe to or buy the journals and books from publishers so that members of their institutions can use them. Publishers such as Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley have now carved out an oligopoly for themselves - in Germany, more than half of the money spent by German university libraries went to them by 2015. With ever-increasing prices, they achieve profit margins of up to 30 percent, which otherwise can probably only be achieved legally in the pharmaceutical industry. At the same time, library budgets have stagnated or declined, which has led to a real journal crisis since the mid-1990s. The high subscription prices ensure that access to scientific publications is not free for more and more people. [ ... ]