Loophole alert! How do you define "non-profit"? How about we set up Elsevier Non-Profit Home for Orphans and Kittens, which signs an exclusive license agreement with ... publications that make "philanthropic" donations.
If we did this policy right, there wouldn't be enough money scientific publishing to make it worth the scam. Journals used to barely scrape by and go out of business all the time; I think that's the natural order of things, and so our goal should be to stop artificially propping up demand.
I've been in charge of grant programs with hundreds of millions of dollars in total funding capacity. My funding recipients have been all over the board: nonprofits, for-profits, universities, municipalities, special districts. Hell, I might've funded some of the university grants that keep Adam up at night.
The primary difference between a non-profit and a for-profit? Non-profits can't take their surplus home as a "profit" (although some of them skirt this rule by paying their executive directors and Board members exorbitant salaries).
Aside from that key rule, the operation of a nonprofit looks nearly identical to how for-profits treat their retained earnings.
• The surplus can be reinvested to expand the organization's reach.
• The surplus can be invested into the organization's endowment (equivalent to a "war chest" in for-profits).
• The surplus can be used for power-tripping executives to beat their egos off by slapping the organizational logo on a very expensive building.
The business practices of non-profits and universities use different lingo, but you'll see a ton of overlap between their financial reports and the 10-K of a publicly-traded company.
In my opinion, the diversity among nonprofits and the diversity among for-profits are both greater than the difference between the two groups.
Thank you for explaining what I've long wondered about for many years. I once had an improv teacher who blogged about a public museum that became more for profit than when it was privately owned.
Maybe there needs to be a third category of that is neither not for profit nor for profit. I'd call it capped profit.
Just a lil' proofreading note: you started with a loose lion in your zoo analogy, then moved to a tiger for the rest of the piece. Love your work, and your dad's photos!
Thanks for writing about this topic, although I think there's also a fair amount of academic - or at least institutional - culpability as well. You've described really well how publishers were able to transform publishing into an incredibly profitable venture, with academics often locked out of the scholarship they produce (along with everyone else), but the *why* is also critical.
The digitalisation of publishing and the rise of cable company subscription models ('Want that one journal? Please pay us for 10 others as well') are part of the story, but so is the rise of systems of academic audit in the 1990s. In this environment, publication venues became a proxy for academic quality, creating a kind of ratcheting effect. And, of course, while academics weren't interested in financial capital, publishing was (and remains) their main form of cultural capital, so the two systems fed off each other, with academics turning a blind eye (sometimes wilfully, often not) to the bigger picture.
The only ones raising the alarm in the late 1990s were the poor librarians, caught between a rock (demanding academics just wanting access to their journals) and a hard place (publishers with a captive market charging a premium for the privilege). I was a PhD student in Australia at this time, and we were outraged when my university started trying to cut journals. 'How dare they!' we cried ('they' being our university administrations).
If someone had sat us all down then and explained the situation, perhaps things would have gone differently, but I think we’ve now come so far down this road it’s difficult to see how to change course, because it requires radical transformations not just to academic publishing but academia itself. Not for nothing has Martin Paul Eve called this a 'zombified' system!
As you say, open access tried to solve the problems, but my own view – as someone who’s been involved in the scene for a number of years in various capacities – is that, on balance, it has made the situation worse. This is primarily because people weren’t focusing on the overall model of open access but the end product. (Folk like Radical Open Access and John Willinsky have been banging this drum for a long time.)
I’m not convinced any of it’s really fixable at this point, but agree 100% that funders supporting non-profit publishing is definitely a needed step. I see some awareness of this in organisations like CoalitionS, but sadly no real change to date.
>As you say, open access tried to solve the problems, but my own view – as someone who’s been involved in the scene for a number of years in various capacities – is that, on balance, it has made the situation worse. This is primarily because people weren’t focusing on the overall model of open access but the end product.
Exactly. It's because open access journals failed to replicate the service that for-profit publishers are currently offering.
Namely: high traffic (more eyeballs), many citations, more prestige.
The problem with prestige is that when you make it too accessible, no one wants it anymore. It's only prestigious when it's gatekept behind a very, very high barrier to entry.
Academia has turned scientific publishing into a competitive sport. The for-profit publishers basically operate the Olympics. Open-access journals operate the local tournaments.
Yes! A very good analogy. The flood of publishers ironically made the prestigious ones even more important as proxy indicators of quality. In fact, my own view is that this is pretty much all journals are now. Most don't seem to usher communities of scholars around them anymore because almost no one reads journals. I mean, you used to have to at least flick through various articles when they were in hard copy, so you had a sense of a kind of intellectual project and community, but thanks to Google Scholar and the like, everyone approaches everything at the article level, so the only role the journal plays is to artificially (and often arbitrarily) vet quality.
I think the model might be starting to break, though, because author-pays models have meant that even high-prestige journals are heavily incentivised to accept more publications, thus undermining their exclusivity and prestige. However, the main way they seem to have responded is to create branded sister OA journals (author pays, of course) to keep authors part of their eco-system while simultaneously enabling them to maintain product differentiation within their 'portfolio'. Elsewhere, I've compared this to the car company model, where you have your luxury, mid-tier and entry-level brands.
Unfortunately, I don't see almost anyone calling out this kind of behaviour in the way they should. Instead, academics seem to mostly see this as increasing efficiency in getting published, which merely compounds my pessimism about the current state of academia and academic publishing.
Okay, rant over. (I can rant about this topic for hours - and frequently do!)
> Unfortunately, I don't see almost anyone calling out this kind of behaviour in the way they should. Instead, academics seem to mostly see this as increasing efficiency in getting published, which merely compounds my pessimism about the current state of academia and academic publishing.
I can't say I'm surprised. What kinds of people are likely to become academics?
Those who did well in school. Who does well in school?
The kids who pay by the rules, except they play harder than other kids.
We start 'em early. The people who become successful academics are the ones who were thrived on the fiery crucible of competition. Competition is all they know, so they don't have much time to take a step back and think about it from the ecosystem level.
It's people like you and me, who hang out on Substack, who are willing to see this for what it is: an arms race. Only in an arms race will you notice that an "efficiency tool" is not a benefit, but something you're forced to adopt unless you're willing to fall behind.
In physics, my field, it is the society journals which are the most prestigious physics-specific journals (so, setting Science and Nature aside). But also, publications account for 3/4 of the revenue of the society and are the only profitable part: meetings just about break even, membership dues only cover about 2/3 of the membership services, and public affairs work only pulls in (presumably through grants and so forth) about half of its costs. And realistically, it's only university and e.g. national laboratory libraries that are going to be subscribing to these journals in the first place. So in effect, all sorts of physics outreach is subsidized by college and university library budgets. Better than subsidizing yachts for Elsevier executives, of course, but sort of a roundabout way to pay for it.
A few thoughts: (i) this is a problem from law journals too; (ii) this system is a problem for a non-academic like me who occasionally it wants to look at an article to see if the headlines about it are really correct; (iii) I would think someone like Google would be thrilled to act as a repository for articles for free (if they risked billions of dollars in copyright fines, copying books, I would think they would be thrilled to get articles into their database for free); (iv) as a donor to academic institutions, I'm inclined to bring this up whenever I receive calls from the development office.
THIS IS ONE MILLION PER CENT TRUE. I worked (as a lowly M.A.-holding tech) in medical research labs for ten years, and the current system just sucks. There are millions of sincere, creative, brilliant researchers out there but they're forced to compete like gladiators for every penny. This not only does all the bad things you detail, but also leads to horrendous waste. In one lab I worked in, there was a $100,000 automated machine to analyze hundreds of tissue/chemical samples - that was never taken out from under its shipping tarp - because at the end of one funding year, the researcher had not used up all of his grant. I was told that if you do that, then the next time you apply for a grant, they see you under-spent last time, so they don't give you the amount you apply for. Result: you find the big complicated and unnecessary piece of science equipment that matches your gap amount, buy it, and let it sit in the corner of your lab until the heat death of the universe, never used. It is insane. That's not all! The "publish or perish" culture pressures good researchers into dubious, at best, to worst, downright fraudulent practices like simply omitting outlier results. Why? Because the culture only wants positive results: "This medicine has the effect on this tissue that we hypothesized." Sure, unless you include the outliers in your equations. Then the effect might be zero. Nobody wants to publish a "failed" experiment. This is undermining the very bedrock of scientific research - total honesty. Sorry this is so long. I have no doubt that many many techs and researchers could list even greater horrors.
Curiously, I experienced a similar experience as a federal employee. I had an idea that would lower costs through allocating overtime staffing to a variable demand. Overtime was the agency’s method of covering requirements that were sparse or scattered, which was more efficient than employing full-time staff for a shift that might require 1, 2, 3, or no coverage. In like way, holidays were covered with full shifts.
It was rejected because lowering costs would result in less money the next year. This was not evil empire building; the allocated amount, but not a reduced amount, allowed for rational spending of man-hours in order to respond to unanticipated crises or changes in demand. High level management didn’t trust their subordinates to act rationally.
My radical solution that will never get implemented is this: get rid of journals entirely. Every research institute/university maintains a public-facing server on which they put all the publications their researchers do. Peer review can be done by people within the institute or outside, as works best. Instead of referencing papers in JPSP, wr reference "John, J. (2020). Title of paper. University of Chicago. DOI".
These databases are free for everyone to view, maybe make it a law that any research institute that takes public money has to make all research that money supports has to be published in this public database.
If a research institute wants to allow others, say independent researchers, to get their work on the database, they can charge or whatever.
Managing the database will be massively cheaper than even one journal subscription every year, research will by default be publicly viewable, and we can stop worrying about journal impact factors and such. Because we don't care about, say, JPSP itself, we care about the specific articles.
Yes, the journals themselves will need to be kept around for archival purposes for a bit, I'd imagine, but that's a transitory stage which should become less burdensome as time goes on.
As a researcher from Southeast Asia, I think another issue is the system that they have built around these publishing practices. Universities from developing countries try really hard to achieve the prestigious status, and the only way to do it is compete in the University Ranking system, by publishing a lot of papers in indexed journals as one of the requirements.
Publishing on PLOS solves this problem, but you have to convince the authors that their articles will carry as much prestige on PLOS as they do in Science or Nature. I am starting to see more buy in on PLOS but old habits die hard.
the problem is, they won't. If you want a promotion in the institution that decides whether you get one, a publication in Science or Nature is a ticket and a publication in PLOS is not.
I think the solution here is to produce a new James Bond movie, where the evil world-destroying villain is a for-profit Scientific journal publisher. Haven't really gotten beyond the "concept" mode on this. I think the problem is there are already too many real candidates for the global villain as is.
Loophole alert! How do you define "non-profit"? How about we set up Elsevier Non-Profit Home for Orphans and Kittens, which signs an exclusive license agreement with ... publications that make "philanthropic" donations.
If we did this policy right, there wouldn't be enough money scientific publishing to make it worth the scam. Journals used to barely scrape by and go out of business all the time; I think that's the natural order of things, and so our goal should be to stop artificially propping up demand.
I've been in charge of grant programs with hundreds of millions of dollars in total funding capacity. My funding recipients have been all over the board: nonprofits, for-profits, universities, municipalities, special districts. Hell, I might've funded some of the university grants that keep Adam up at night.
The primary difference between a non-profit and a for-profit? Non-profits can't take their surplus home as a "profit" (although some of them skirt this rule by paying their executive directors and Board members exorbitant salaries).
Aside from that key rule, the operation of a nonprofit looks nearly identical to how for-profits treat their retained earnings.
• The surplus can be reinvested to expand the organization's reach.
• The surplus can be invested into the organization's endowment (equivalent to a "war chest" in for-profits).
• The surplus can be used for power-tripping executives to beat their egos off by slapping the organizational logo on a very expensive building.
The business practices of non-profits and universities use different lingo, but you'll see a ton of overlap between their financial reports and the 10-K of a publicly-traded company.
In my opinion, the diversity among nonprofits and the diversity among for-profits are both greater than the difference between the two groups.
Thank you for explaining what I've long wondered about for many years. I once had an improv teacher who blogged about a public museum that became more for profit than when it was privately owned.
Maybe there needs to be a third category of that is neither not for profit nor for profit. I'd call it capped profit.
> I'd call it capped profit.
Those exist. We call them utilities.
Typically, a utility only needs to be regulated (i.e. its profit needs to be capped) when it possesses a natural monopoly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
In the absence of a natural monopoly, market forces automatically set the ceiling on how much profit can be made.
Just a lil' proofreading note: you started with a loose lion in your zoo analogy, then moved to a tiger for the rest of the piece. Love your work, and your dad's photos!
Oops! Thanks for catching.
Thanks for writing about this topic, although I think there's also a fair amount of academic - or at least institutional - culpability as well. You've described really well how publishers were able to transform publishing into an incredibly profitable venture, with academics often locked out of the scholarship they produce (along with everyone else), but the *why* is also critical.
The digitalisation of publishing and the rise of cable company subscription models ('Want that one journal? Please pay us for 10 others as well') are part of the story, but so is the rise of systems of academic audit in the 1990s. In this environment, publication venues became a proxy for academic quality, creating a kind of ratcheting effect. And, of course, while academics weren't interested in financial capital, publishing was (and remains) their main form of cultural capital, so the two systems fed off each other, with academics turning a blind eye (sometimes wilfully, often not) to the bigger picture.
The only ones raising the alarm in the late 1990s were the poor librarians, caught between a rock (demanding academics just wanting access to their journals) and a hard place (publishers with a captive market charging a premium for the privilege). I was a PhD student in Australia at this time, and we were outraged when my university started trying to cut journals. 'How dare they!' we cried ('they' being our university administrations).
If someone had sat us all down then and explained the situation, perhaps things would have gone differently, but I think we’ve now come so far down this road it’s difficult to see how to change course, because it requires radical transformations not just to academic publishing but academia itself. Not for nothing has Martin Paul Eve called this a 'zombified' system!
As you say, open access tried to solve the problems, but my own view – as someone who’s been involved in the scene for a number of years in various capacities – is that, on balance, it has made the situation worse. This is primarily because people weren’t focusing on the overall model of open access but the end product. (Folk like Radical Open Access and John Willinsky have been banging this drum for a long time.)
I’m not convinced any of it’s really fixable at this point, but agree 100% that funders supporting non-profit publishing is definitely a needed step. I see some awareness of this in organisations like CoalitionS, but sadly no real change to date.
>As you say, open access tried to solve the problems, but my own view – as someone who’s been involved in the scene for a number of years in various capacities – is that, on balance, it has made the situation worse. This is primarily because people weren’t focusing on the overall model of open access but the end product.
Exactly. It's because open access journals failed to replicate the service that for-profit publishers are currently offering.
Namely: high traffic (more eyeballs), many citations, more prestige.
The problem with prestige is that when you make it too accessible, no one wants it anymore. It's only prestigious when it's gatekept behind a very, very high barrier to entry.
Academia has turned scientific publishing into a competitive sport. The for-profit publishers basically operate the Olympics. Open-access journals operate the local tournaments.
Yes! A very good analogy. The flood of publishers ironically made the prestigious ones even more important as proxy indicators of quality. In fact, my own view is that this is pretty much all journals are now. Most don't seem to usher communities of scholars around them anymore because almost no one reads journals. I mean, you used to have to at least flick through various articles when they were in hard copy, so you had a sense of a kind of intellectual project and community, but thanks to Google Scholar and the like, everyone approaches everything at the article level, so the only role the journal plays is to artificially (and often arbitrarily) vet quality.
I think the model might be starting to break, though, because author-pays models have meant that even high-prestige journals are heavily incentivised to accept more publications, thus undermining their exclusivity and prestige. However, the main way they seem to have responded is to create branded sister OA journals (author pays, of course) to keep authors part of their eco-system while simultaneously enabling them to maintain product differentiation within their 'portfolio'. Elsewhere, I've compared this to the car company model, where you have your luxury, mid-tier and entry-level brands.
Unfortunately, I don't see almost anyone calling out this kind of behaviour in the way they should. Instead, academics seem to mostly see this as increasing efficiency in getting published, which merely compounds my pessimism about the current state of academia and academic publishing.
Okay, rant over. (I can rant about this topic for hours - and frequently do!)
> Unfortunately, I don't see almost anyone calling out this kind of behaviour in the way they should. Instead, academics seem to mostly see this as increasing efficiency in getting published, which merely compounds my pessimism about the current state of academia and academic publishing.
I can't say I'm surprised. What kinds of people are likely to become academics?
Those who did well in school. Who does well in school?
The kids who pay by the rules, except they play harder than other kids.
We start 'em early. The people who become successful academics are the ones who were thrived on the fiery crucible of competition. Competition is all they know, so they don't have much time to take a step back and think about it from the ecosystem level.
It's people like you and me, who hang out on Substack, who are willing to see this for what it is: an arms race. Only in an arms race will you notice that an "efficiency tool" is not a benefit, but something you're forced to adopt unless you're willing to fall behind.
sorry, i'm still reeling from the link between academic publishing extortion and ghislaine maxwell
it's a big club
In physics, my field, it is the society journals which are the most prestigious physics-specific journals (so, setting Science and Nature aside). But also, publications account for 3/4 of the revenue of the society and are the only profitable part: meetings just about break even, membership dues only cover about 2/3 of the membership services, and public affairs work only pulls in (presumably through grants and so forth) about half of its costs. And realistically, it's only university and e.g. national laboratory libraries that are going to be subscribing to these journals in the first place. So in effect, all sorts of physics outreach is subsidized by college and university library budgets. Better than subsidizing yachts for Elsevier executives, of course, but sort of a roundabout way to pay for it.
A few thoughts: (i) this is a problem from law journals too; (ii) this system is a problem for a non-academic like me who occasionally it wants to look at an article to see if the headlines about it are really correct; (iii) I would think someone like Google would be thrilled to act as a repository for articles for free (if they risked billions of dollars in copyright fines, copying books, I would think they would be thrilled to get articles into their database for free); (iv) as a donor to academic institutions, I'm inclined to bring this up whenever I receive calls from the development office.
THIS IS ONE MILLION PER CENT TRUE. I worked (as a lowly M.A.-holding tech) in medical research labs for ten years, and the current system just sucks. There are millions of sincere, creative, brilliant researchers out there but they're forced to compete like gladiators for every penny. This not only does all the bad things you detail, but also leads to horrendous waste. In one lab I worked in, there was a $100,000 automated machine to analyze hundreds of tissue/chemical samples - that was never taken out from under its shipping tarp - because at the end of one funding year, the researcher had not used up all of his grant. I was told that if you do that, then the next time you apply for a grant, they see you under-spent last time, so they don't give you the amount you apply for. Result: you find the big complicated and unnecessary piece of science equipment that matches your gap amount, buy it, and let it sit in the corner of your lab until the heat death of the universe, never used. It is insane. That's not all! The "publish or perish" culture pressures good researchers into dubious, at best, to worst, downright fraudulent practices like simply omitting outlier results. Why? Because the culture only wants positive results: "This medicine has the effect on this tissue that we hypothesized." Sure, unless you include the outliers in your equations. Then the effect might be zero. Nobody wants to publish a "failed" experiment. This is undermining the very bedrock of scientific research - total honesty. Sorry this is so long. I have no doubt that many many techs and researchers could list even greater horrors.
Curiously, I experienced a similar experience as a federal employee. I had an idea that would lower costs through allocating overtime staffing to a variable demand. Overtime was the agency’s method of covering requirements that were sparse or scattered, which was more efficient than employing full-time staff for a shift that might require 1, 2, 3, or no coverage. In like way, holidays were covered with full shifts.
It was rejected because lowering costs would result in less money the next year. This was not evil empire building; the allocated amount, but not a reduced amount, allowed for rational spending of man-hours in order to respond to unanticipated crises or changes in demand. High level management didn’t trust their subordinates to act rationally.
yikes!
"High level management didn’t trust their subordinates to act rationally." Color me shocked. SHOCKED, I say!
And that, my friends, is why I left my PhD and academic career behind 30 years ago!! So happy I did!!
My radical solution that will never get implemented is this: get rid of journals entirely. Every research institute/university maintains a public-facing server on which they put all the publications their researchers do. Peer review can be done by people within the institute or outside, as works best. Instead of referencing papers in JPSP, wr reference "John, J. (2020). Title of paper. University of Chicago. DOI".
These databases are free for everyone to view, maybe make it a law that any research institute that takes public money has to make all research that money supports has to be published in this public database.
If a research institute wants to allow others, say independent researchers, to get their work on the database, they can charge or whatever.
Managing the database will be massively cheaper than even one journal subscription every year, research will by default be publicly viewable, and we can stop worrying about journal impact factors and such. Because we don't care about, say, JPSP itself, we care about the specific articles.
Yes, the journals themselves will need to be kept around for archival purposes for a bit, I'd imagine, but that's a transitory stage which should become less burdensome as time goes on.
Thank you for listening to my TED Talk.
As a researcher from Southeast Asia, I think another issue is the system that they have built around these publishing practices. Universities from developing countries try really hard to achieve the prestigious status, and the only way to do it is compete in the University Ranking system, by publishing a lot of papers in indexed journals as one of the requirements.
Publishing on PLOS solves this problem, but you have to convince the authors that their articles will carry as much prestige on PLOS as they do in Science or Nature. I am starting to see more buy in on PLOS but old habits die hard.
the problem is, they won't. If you want a promotion in the institution that decides whether you get one, a publication in Science or Nature is a ticket and a publication in PLOS is not.
I guess one solution is just move to association and school journals which are non profit and have other public goods.
I think the solution here is to produce a new James Bond movie, where the evil world-destroying villain is a for-profit Scientific journal publisher. Haven't really gotten beyond the "concept" mode on this. I think the problem is there are already too many real candidates for the global villain as is.
thanks, Adam. Brilliant.
While we're doing zoo improvements, I'd also be interested in figuring out how the zoo lion turned into a tiger ... :)
this is why I could never be an editor. Several people noticed this and it went right past me, all mane and stripes, and I didn't bat an eye.
Such an interesting read; well said. Thank you.