The business model of most scientific publishers is so audacious it’s hard to believe it works. Here’s the pitch: You get some of the smartest people on Earth to create your product for free. Then, you get other experts, people to quality-control that product, also for free. Finally, you sell the product back to the very people who made it (and the taxpayers who funded them) at an exorbitant markup.
If you tried to pitch this on Shark Tank, you’d be laughed out of the room. But in the world of scientific publishing, this is just regular business.
A damning new analysis, “The Drain of Scientific Publishing,” suggests that the science publishing system has become a major problem for science. Far more than just annoying paywalls, this is a systemic drain that’s actively damaging humanity’s ability to solve problems.
Welcome to the Machine
Why do academics put up with this? Because they have to.
Academics need to constantly prove their worth, and that usually means publishing studies, preferably in top journals. This is the infamous “publish or perish” doctrine. If you don’t have a steady stream of papers appearing in “high-impact” journals, you don’t get the grant, you don’t get tenure, and you effectively cease to exist as a viable scientist.
Publishers have weaponized this anxiety. They know that researchers are desperate to publish to climb the career ladder, so they have turned the system into a volume business.
“In their early days, journals served small, dedicated communities of readers and often survived on philanthropy, altruism or institutional support,” write the authors of the new review. “However, since the 1950s publications have become key tokens in the increasingly fierce competition for prestige. The number of publications worldwide increased exponentially. During the same period, commercial publishers took over from older non-profits as the dominant forces in what had, by the late twentieth century, become a highly profitable industry.”
Scientific publishing is now dominated by an “oligopoly” of commercial giants including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis. For the last five years, these companies have consistently maintained profit margins over 30%. Elsevier, the heavyweight champion of this group, consistently boasts margins over 37%.
To put that in perspective, compare it to the cutthroat world of Big Oil or the automotive sector. Toyota runs at a 10% margin; ExxonMobil is also around 10%. Even Apple, the darling of tech profitability, sits around 23%. Academic publishers are out-profiting Big Tech and Big Oil by selling documents they didn’t even write.
Between 2019 and 2024, these four companies alone raked in over $14 billion in profits. To put it into perspective, in 2024, the National Science Foundation, the bedrock of American scientific innovation, had a budget of roughly $9.1 billion. Meanwhile, North American researchers alone paid publishers over $2.27 billion that same year.
The Double Dip: Paying to Work
It gets worse. In the past, the cost was hidden in library subscriptions. Now, under the guise of “Open Access”, where papers are free for the public to read, the cost has shifted directly to the scientists.
Now, if you try to read a recent study, there’s a good chance there won’t be a paywall at all. Great news, right? Finally, science is open.
But researchers don’t just submit their content for free. They now pay “Article Processing Charges” (APCs) to have their work published. These fees generated nearly $9 billion for top publishers between 2019 and 2023.
“Commercial publishers have managed to monetize funder mandates for Open Access. Author publication fees have become new revenue streams. Rather than democratizing scientific publishing, Open Access has helped commercial publishers generate more profits. More stringent reforms are required to tackle the misaligned drivers of scientific publishing,” the researchers wrote.
The Drain Goes Deeper
“It’s clear that publishers are making a lot of money out of researchers’ work, and they’re actually not doing much,” says Lonni Besançon, an Assistant Professor of Visualization at Linköping University. Besançon, who has been vocal about the need for reform, points out another critical flaw: accountability.
“We see a big effect in how science is corrected. There are no incentives for anyone to chime in and do the work [of correction]. Why would publishers do the work? They don’t get paid for it. No one is responsible… there’s no ownership or agency in correcting science.”
This insatiable demand for “content” relies on the unpaid labor of peer reviewers. In 2020 alone, researchers donated an estimated 130 million hours to peer review. That is time not spent in the lab, not spent teaching, and not spent solving actual problems.
There’s nothing wrong with peer-review per se. It’s still the best way we have to enforce a standard quality. But this is unpaid labor performed by experts in their field.
Worse, this volume obsession is breaking the machinery of truth itself. To keep the profits flowing, publishers need speed. This has led to “ossification,” where the sheer volume of papers actually slows down progress because no one has time to read, reflect, or take risks. We’ve commodified science like fast food. And, increasingly, a lot of papers are starting to look like fast food.
This, of course, has led to the industrialization of fraud. “Paper mills” — fake organizations that churn out bogus studies for a fee — are clogging the scientific record. We are also seeing a surge of AI-generated nonsense and peer review rings. Entire journal brands have collapsed under the weight of this garbage.
“Commercial publishers are intimately entwined with academia, both in the way they collect data about us and in how they are integrated into academic evaluation,” notes Dan Brockington, ICTA-UAB and ICREA professor and co-author of the study.
Can We Fix It?
The authors of the analysis are blunt: We cannot work with commercial publishers to fix this. It’s a bit like expecting oil companies to fix climate change — their interests are fundamentally misaligned.
They propose “re-communalization.” This means universities, funders, and governments need to stop feeding the beast. They suggest models like “Diamond Open Access,” where journals are sustained by universities and are free to read and free to publish.
Besançon agrees in principle — he even helps run a journal that operates on this exact model. “I agree that we need drastic change.” But he thinks it’s wishful thinking to expect this to happen overnight. The main reason, he says, is prestige. Big journals have a lot of prestige, and they’re preferred by researchers.
“It’s a naive take to think that this will actually happen overnight,” Besançon admits. “If you ask a researcher if they want a paper in our journal or in a Nature journal, of course, they will go for the Nature journal. Because currently, researchers are evaluated based on the prestige of their publication.”
We have the technology to change the system (Diamond Open Access platforms exist), but we lack the cultural alignment. As long as a paper in a for-profit journal gets you a job and a paper in a community-run journal doesn’t, the billions will keep flowing to those publishers.
“I see so many obstacles to this happening,” Besançon says. “It is very hard to align the necessities and opinions of all the countries in the world… I agree, overall, but I don’t see the change happening anytime soon.”
Ultimately, however, the current system is a choice. It prioritizes the stock portfolios of a few multinational corporations over the integrity of the scientific record. It wastes time and resources from research institutes.
The status quo has become a drain on science, and we can do so much better.