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.
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.
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.
The problem is not the for-profit nature of the publishers. In domains where there is real competition, like groceries, cars, or TVs, the free market delivers products that constantly get better, and cheaper. The problem is more akin to corporate capture. In the case of scientific journals, no one stopped for-profit publishers like Maxwell from taking over ownership. Combined with journals being more like monopolies than commodities (there were only one or a few respected journals in each field), academia became beholden to the for-profit publishers rather than using them as service providers. If academics had ensured it was easy to switch publishers, and demanded that contracts serve academic values (such as low cost), the costs needn’t have spiraled out of control. Still, one can’t trust academics to not allow their scholarly societies to bloat and become very expensive (non-profits in academia can and have become very rent-seeking in some areas), so we do need some discipline enforced by the funders, even in a landscape where publishers are mere service providers.
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.
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 reviewing papers for free has always been a huge bugaboo for me. And now, retired and not publishing for years, am still contacted weekly to review. At least I've learned to just say no.
apart from hosting PDFs, journals act as filters. the 'journal of nitty-gritty specialist niche findings' is where its very specific audience finds what it's looking for. the 'proceedings of earthshaking findings' have a wider reach and everybody wants to get in there, because it has a history of delivering on its promise. that filtering function seems hard to replicate, probably because brands take time to build. elife was (is?) the attempt to build a non-profit high impact journal bottom up and i would say it has failed to achieve its ambition.
one idea i like is to have more university libraries act as publishers of diamond OA journals (i.e. provide the hosting service and software backbone for the editorial process). universities _are_ brands and the journals could piggyback on that.
one problem with the silver bullet of burning the forest down is that science publishing (and science) is an intertwined global forrest involving a gazzilion funding agencies from all over the world. but i guess someone has to make the first move...
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.
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!
And that, my friends, is why I left my PhD and academic career behind 30 years ago!! So happy I did!!
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.
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.
Sounds great. Thanks for the education.
it just occured to me, i could share this lovely article behind a paywall.
Would you mind? Fees payable in icecream vouchers?
thanks, Adam. Brilliant.
The problem is not the for-profit nature of the publishers. In domains where there is real competition, like groceries, cars, or TVs, the free market delivers products that constantly get better, and cheaper. The problem is more akin to corporate capture. In the case of scientific journals, no one stopped for-profit publishers like Maxwell from taking over ownership. Combined with journals being more like monopolies than commodities (there were only one or a few respected journals in each field), academia became beholden to the for-profit publishers rather than using them as service providers. If academics had ensured it was easy to switch publishers, and demanded that contracts serve academic values (such as low cost), the costs needn’t have spiraled out of control. Still, one can’t trust academics to not allow their scholarly societies to bloat and become very expensive (non-profits in academia can and have become very rent-seeking in some areas), so we do need some discipline enforced by the funders, even in a landscape where publishers are mere service providers.
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.
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 reviewing papers for free has always been a huge bugaboo for me. And now, retired and not publishing for years, am still contacted weekly to review. At least I've learned to just say no.
apart from hosting PDFs, journals act as filters. the 'journal of nitty-gritty specialist niche findings' is where its very specific audience finds what it's looking for. the 'proceedings of earthshaking findings' have a wider reach and everybody wants to get in there, because it has a history of delivering on its promise. that filtering function seems hard to replicate, probably because brands take time to build. elife was (is?) the attempt to build a non-profit high impact journal bottom up and i would say it has failed to achieve its ambition.
one idea i like is to have more university libraries act as publishers of diamond OA journals (i.e. provide the hosting service and software backbone for the editorial process). universities _are_ brands and the journals could piggyback on that.
one problem with the silver bullet of burning the forest down is that science publishing (and science) is an intertwined global forrest involving a gazzilion funding agencies from all over the world. but i guess someone has to make the first move...