Scientific Publishing Exposed By Brian Simpson
I was interested to read a report from the great free thinking site Real Clear Science.com, on the politics of academic publishing. The Covid issue has really shown that conventional publishing is not the way to go in getting out controversial truths. The peer review cult means that many who are ideologues and financed by those one may criticise, review your paper, and naturally reject anything they see as threatening to their financial and grant interests. We saw with the question of the origins of Covid, when the lab hypothesis was raised back in 2020, scientist with conflicts of interest, slam anything that might implicate communist China, while many were at the same sceptical of the bat soup hypothesis. Really, many of us have lost faith in mainstream science and all it represents.
“It may surprise you to know that there has been an embargo against scientists with UK grants publishing in Britain’s premier scientific journal, Nature. At root was a dispute about the cost of publishing scientific papers, who has the rights to see them, and at what price. In the case of Nature, that price was €9,500, about $11,300.
The episode reveals more than just a haggle over price, however. Deep troubles are roiling the seemingly calm surface of scientific publishing. The dustup over Nature is newsworthy because it brought those troubles to the surface, for all to see. Beneath the surface, though, the culture and practice of science and scientific discourse has been being transformed – radically. It's a complicated story, with a complicated history.
Historically, science journals were the bailiwick of science “guilds”, associations of like-minded scholars that managed communication among its members. I offer an example close to my professional heart. When I was a graduate student, forty years ago, an American biologist interested in animals would become a dues-paying member of the venerable (founded in 1902) American Society of Zoologists (ASZ). The ASZ was the first professional society I joined. My annual dues were $28, which got me a subscription to a quarterly periodical, American Zoologist, and the right to submit abstracts for the ASZ’s annual meeting. I recall that the ASZ was particularly friendly to graduate students like myself.
In 1996, the ASZ went belly-up, and took American Zoologist with it. The defunct ASZ then reinvented itself as the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), and American Zoologist re-emerged as the Journal of Integrative and Comparative Biology. The JICB was not simply a retread of American Zoologist. Where American Zoologist had been humbly published out of the ASZ’s offices in Sherman Oaks, California, the JICB was slicker, more professional-looking, with a new editorial board, and now was an imprint of Oxford University Press (OUP). A new subscription price came with all this other glamour. Subscription rates were now $460 to libraries, $230 to individuals.
OUP is more than an academic publisher: it is one of a group of four mega-publishing houses which together dominate scientific journals. The others include Elsevier, Nature Springer (the publisher and owner of Nature), and Taylor Francis. One of these, Elsevier, manages about 2,500 scientific journals. It is a very profitable business: in FY 2018, Elsevier raked in about $3.3 billion in revenue, at remarkable profit margins (35%-50%). The revenues come largely from page charges that are assessed for a paper to appear in one of Elsevier’s journals. These range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending upon the journal. Authors do not pay out of pocket, but usually from a research grant to one of the authors.
Page charges constitute an enormous revenue stream for academic publishers. If a research project publishes, say, ten articles in a year, page charges will run into the tens of thousands of dollars annually. Multiply this by the approximately 450,000 journal articles published by US scientists in 2018, and, to paraphrase the apocryphal Everett Dirkson, “you’re talking real money.” Note that this figure is just for US scientists. World-wide, the 2018 count was 2.6 million journal articles in one year, generating a revenue stream of roughly $8 billion annually.
There is fierce competition among the scientific publishing firms to capture as much of that revenue stream as possible. Like a war of competing cartels, there are casualties, and these have been piling up. My American Zoologist was one, but its demise was part of a larger trend of driving traditional guild-based scientific publications out of the market. The academic publishing firms have done this through various forms of market manipulation. For example, subscriptions to scientific journals are no longer sold to individuals, as American Zoologist was. Rather, subscriptions are priced to sell solely to institutional libraries, at exorbitant rates that put them out of reach of individuals. By 2021, the subscription rate for JICB, the successor to American Zoologist, had risen to $1,213. The revenues are raised further by the practice of bundling many journals into a package, a tactic learned, no doubt, from the cable television industry. The high subscription rates for these bundles can eat up as much as 90% of a university library’s budget. This crowds out guild-based journals as librarians are increasingly forced to make painful budget decisions on what journals to host, and which to cut.
To solidify their hold, the scientific publishers tightly restrict access to the content of their journals. Employees of an institution, like faculty, might have ready access to the journals through their campus libraries, provided their libraries subscribe. But a member of the public wanting to read the same journal article is blocked by a paywall, which typically demands $35-$50 for the privilege. Finally, the authors of publications must surrender their copyrights. This restricts them from sharing even their own work with colleagues at other institutions.
You might expect scientists would oppose monopolistic behaviors like this, but scientists have been totally sucked into the publishers’ games. Why? The modern profession of science has come to be dominated by an ethic of production: advancement and rewards are assessed, not by discovery, but by how “productive” a scientist is. This enforces a kind of social credit scheme, built around publication. A publication in a so-called “high impact” journal will earn a scientist more social credits toward promotion and tenure compared to publishing in journals not considered high impact. Scientists are therefore strongly motivated to place their work in high impact journals.
The scientific publishers rig impact figures as well. Elsevier, for example, is a subsidiary of the RELX Group, which also owns two of the major databases and search engines for the scientific literature, Scopus and ScienceDirect, which set the impact factors! This is classic vertical integration of a monopolistic industry, and to the same effect: driving out low-cost competitors.
Open Access (OA) publishing emerged in the early 2000s as a reaction to these trends. At first, the concern was fairness. Why should the public, who largely pays for the research, face obstacles in seeing the results of public largesse? There was also a general discontent that scientists, by being forced to surrender their copyrights, were losing control over the discourse of science.
Open Access was supposed to solve that, by making content freely available to the public, and allowing authors to retain their copyrights. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) became the principal repository for Open Access publications. There were still page charges to authors, which ran typically $3,000-$5,000 per publication. This began to cut into the revenue streams of the science publishing houses, leading them to begin offering their own Open Access options to authors. This would bring papers out from behind the publishers’ paywalls, as long as authors were willing to pay higher page charges. All good and virtuous, but the main outcome was to add to the scientific publishers’ already enormous revenue streams, at the expense of repositories like PLoS.
At this point, national funding agencies began to step in, with good intentions naturally, and with the predictable result that the road to perdition was not blocked but graded and smoothed. Several government research organizations formulated a plan to bring order to the Open Access publishing marketplace. The result was Plan S, which mandated that any researcher funded by their research bodies could only publish in journals that offered Open Access. Thus were the big scientific publishers brought fully into the Big Science cartel, organized no longer around the pursuit of discovery, but around the relentless pursuit of government research money, that is to say, by productivity.
The money flowing through the Big Science cartel to support productivity is already immense, and it is growing exponentially. The result has been a commensurably increasing number of scientific publications, which bear only a tenuous relationship to discovery; the whole point of the enterprise, really. This money-driven transformation of the culture of science is the cause of various well-publicized problems with the scientific literature – the “irreproducibility crisis” being one, and the disturbing claim that a substantial proportion of the published scientific literature is never read.
Which brings us back to that Nature embargo. Nature was one of the few holdout journals against Plan S. They charged for publishing papers, like every other journal did, but preferred to keep all their content behind paywalls. The grace period for the Plan S mandates was running out, though, hence the embargo against EU and British scientists publishing in Nature. This would have dealt a blow to the revenue stream of Nature Springer (Nature’s owner), so Nature yielded: the journal would henceforth offer authors an Open Access option. As always, virtue carries a price: in Nature’s case, it was $11,300. That amount, roughly double the already inflated Open Access charges scientists already were paying, jerked everyone to attention.
This raises the question no one wants to ask: Of what use is the scientific literature anymore? Is it to promote intellectual conversation among like-minded peers? Is it to benefit science, and the society that so generously supports it? The episode of the Nature embargo makes scientific publishing look more and more like an expensive scheme to hoover up taxpayers’ money. More grants means more papers, which means more page charges, which are inflated by Open Access rules. Thus, the public is forced to pay even more for the privilege of reading what their taxes are supporting.
Which raises the other question no one wants to ask. The Big Science cartel feeds on massive government outlays for science, $50 billion dollars from the US alone in 2019, and doubling every seven years. The domineering and anti-competitive practices of the scientific publishing industry are only possible through capturing this immense revenue stream.
So, the question: would science be better off if government got out of the science game altogether? In so many ways, their support has proven to be a poison pill. Perhaps we should strive to return the science ecosystem to what it was before governments decided to “help?” It’s worth considering.
Scientists are waking up to this scam, and are turning more frequently to independent platforms, like arXiv for disseminating their findings to their colleagues. Originally intended as a repository for “preprints”, that is to say papers working their way to being ready for submission to a high-impact journal, arXiv has evolved into a kind of SubStack for scientists, shifting scientific conversations away from the monopolistic and avaricious science publishers.
Maybe arXiv will restore the scientific literature to what it once was – a medium for direct communication among peers. Or maybe it, too, will be captured by the Big Science cartel. Time will tell, but there’s a lot of money and power at stake which can corrupt even the purest of intentions.
The money flowing through the Big Science cartel to support productivity is already immense, and it is growing exponentially. The result has been a commensurably increasing number of scientific publications, which bear only a tenuous relationship to discovery; the whole point of the enterprise, really. This money-driven transformation of the culture of science is the cause of various well-publicized problems with the scientific literature – the “irreproducibility crisis” being one, and the disturbing claim that a substantial proportion of the published scientific literature is never read.
Which brings us back to that Nature embargo. Nature was one of the few holdout journals against Plan S. They charged for publishing papers, like every other journal did, but preferred to keep all their content behind paywalls. The grace period for the Plan S mandates was running out, though, hence the embargo against EU and British scientists publishing in Nature. This would have dealt a blow to the revenue stream of Nature Springer (Nature’s owner), so Nature yielded: the journal would henceforth offer authors an Open Access option. As always, virtue carries a price: in Nature’s case, it was $11,300. That amount, roughly double the already inflated Open Access charges scientists already were paying, jerked everyone to attention.
This raises the question no one wants to ask: Of what use is the scientific literature anymore? Is it to promote intellectual conversation among like-minded peers? Is it to benefit science, and the society that so generously supports it? The episode of the Nature embargo makes scientific publishing look more and more like an expensive scheme to hoover up taxpayers’ money. More grants means more papers, which means more page charges, which are inflated by Open Access rules. Thus, the public is forced to pay even more for the privilege of reading what their taxes are supporting.
Which raises the other question no one wants to ask. The Big Science cartel feeds on massive government outlays for science, $50 billion dollars from the US alone in 2019, and doubling every seven years. The domineering and anti-competitive practices of the scientific publishing industry are only possible through capturing this immense revenue stream.
So, the question: would science be better off if government got out of the science game altogether? In so many ways, their support has proven to be a poison pill. Perhaps we should strive to return the science ecosystem to what it was before governments decided to “help?” It’s worth considering.
Scientists are waking up to this scam, and are turning more frequently to independent platforms, like arXiv for disseminating their findings to their colleagues. Originally intended as a repository for “preprints”, that is to say papers working their way to being ready for submission to a high-impact journal, arXiv has evolved into a kind of SubStack for scientists, shifting scientific conversations away from the monopolistic and avaricious science publishers.
Maybe arXiv will restore the scientific literature to what it once was – a medium for direct communication among peers. Or maybe it, too, will be captured by the Big Science cartel. Time will tell, but there’s a lot of money and power at stake which can corrupt even the purest of intentions.”
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