Ethical Academic Publishing: How to Make Academic Publishing Fairer, More Open and Less Wasteful

By Dan Major-Smith

You find yourself on holiday in the strange and distant island of ‘El Seeveeyor’. As you walk through the narrow cobbled streets you chance upon a bustling market. At first glance all appears normal – farmers, traders and customers exchanging goods and gossiping about the humdrum of everyday life. But on closer inspection you notice something strange. The traders receive goods from the farmers, who in turn pass these over to customers; but both the farmers and customers ‘pay’ the traders for this service! “How could such a system exist?”, you think to yourself, “What do the farmers gain from this? And if the traders receive money from the farmers, why are the customers also paying? Is this an extortion racket?!”

We don’t need to travel to El Seeveeyor to witness this strange inversion in market logic – The same thing happens every day in academia. Researchers, funders and universities (‘farmers’, in the above scenario) – and ultimately the general public via taxes – pay for research to be conducted, while academic publishers (‘traders’) charge huge sums of money to both researchers to publish their research and readers (‘customers’) to access it.

Sure, the rather hackneyed analogy isn’t perfect, but nonetheless it hopefully gets across the fundamental strangeness of our academic publishing system. The point of this blog is not merely to point out its strangeness, but to demonstrate how it is fundamentally wasteful, needlessly expensive and discriminatory. In other words, it is unethical.

We should not blindly support this system, and should actively seek alternatives which are fairer, less costly and more inclusive. That is, we need a more ethical academic publishing system.

This blog is set out in three parts:

Part 1: The problem – describes the issues with the current academic publishing system;

Part 2: The cause – explores why the academic publishing system is structured this way; and

Part 3: The solution – discusses ways in which the academic publishing system can be altered to make it more ethical.

Part 1: The Problem 

There are numerous issues with the current academic publishing system, two of the biggest being: 

i) It is incredibly wasteful and does not represent value for money

The estimated profit margins of traditional ‘for-profit’ academic publishers (Elsevier, Springer, etc.) are enormous, at 30-50% (https://doi.org/10.1038/495426a). As an example, in 2010 Elsevier had approximately $2 (~£1.5) billion in revenue, of which $724 (~£550) million was profit – a profit margin of 36% (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science; things have not changed much in the decade or so since then: https://www.ft.com/content/575f72a8-4eb2-4538-87a8-7652d67d499e). For reference, these profit margins rival other perceived ‘unethical’ businesses such as Apple, Google and Amazon, and are much higher than ‘standard’ business profit margins of around 10% (https://www.danielnettle.org.uk/2023/06/14/the-political-economy-of-scientific-publishing-and-the-promise-of-diamond-open-access/). Assuming a 30% profit margin, in 2017 the global revenue from academic publishing was ~$19 (~£14.5) billion, of which ~$6 (~£4.5) billion was pure profit which did not benefit science in any way (and presumably just filled shareholders’ pockets).

It has been estimated that it costs traditional publishers around £2,500 to publish a paper, on average. However, even after taking the extortionate profit margins into account, this likely exaggerates the costs, as it is realistically possible to publish a paper (and all associated costs such as journal maintenance) for approximately £300 (https://peercommunityin.org/2024/01/18/2023-finances-article-costs/; https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27809v1). While costs will of course vary by journal depending on various factors (e.g., dedicated/paid editors, proof-readers, production staff, etc.), essentially publishers convert a document to PDF, slap on some journal branding and upload it to a website. This should not cost nearly £10,000, to give a particularly egregious example (here’s looking at you, Nature Human Behaviour). Research has also found that published work is almost identical to pre-printed versions (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-018-0234-1), further questioning the ‘added value’ of these traditional academic publishers.

Large amounts of research funding money are therefore funnelled to academic publishers for seemingly little obvious benefit. A case study of Social Science disciplines in Austria, for instance, found that an estimated 25% of all publicly-funded research money ends up with academic publishers (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253226).

Rather than paying considerable sums of money – which, it bears repeating, greatly exceed the true costs of publishing – to simply publish and access research, this public money could be better spent funding more research, more permanent academic positions (especially for early-career researchers) or more support staff. Or this money could simply be spent elsewhere, such as addressing societal issues and supporting funding vital public services like the National Health Service.

 ii) It results in discrimination and bias

Most forms of academic publishing result in bias and inequitable outcomes one way or another. Under the traditional ‘pay-to-read’ system (where publishing research is free but readers pay to access content) small institutions, charities, researchers unaffiliated with institutions and much of the global south are excluded from reading – and building on – research. 

Conversely, under the newer ‘pay-to-publish’ system (where access is free but there is a cost to publishing), while those disadvantaged under the ‘pay-to-read’ system can now access research, they are unable to publish. This again leads to bias, this time in the scientific record.  

(As an aside, this shift to the ‘pay-to-publish’ Open Access system has also led to perverse incentives for academic publishers operating under this model, as their income is simply a linear function of the numbers of papers published (https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/3ez9v). This can lead to lower quality research and editorial standards – e.g., https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy3jbz/scientific-journal-frontiers-publishes-ai-generated-rat-with-gigantic-penis-in-worrying-incident and https://deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/08/guest-post-my-experience-as-reviewer.html – and an increase in ‘predatory’ publishers). 

Regardless of the publishing system, both models involve large (and, in the cause of university contracts with publishers, often undisclosed) costs to universities, funders and researchers, and prohibit the dissemination of, and access to, research; research which ought to be open and freely-available to all as it performs a public good (and, again, is largely funded by the public in the first place). 

As a personal example, I have been fortunate to work at the University of Bristol, a Russell Group university, for the past few years, which has the resources to pay for subscriptions to (most) journals and Transformative Agreements to publish Open Access for free in many journals which would otherwise have article processing fees. In contrast, my wife has worked for both a conservation charity and a small university where it can be a struggle to both access articles and publish research Open Access due to the costs charged by academic publishers. My research is not more valuable than hers, yet the current academic publishing system creates and reinforces these inequalities. 

Is this costly, wasteful and biased system really the best we can come up with as a research community? Surely we can design a fairer and more equitable publishing system which divests power from large publishers and provides more benefits for the research community? In the next section we’ll explore why this system persists. 

Part 2: The Cause 

Let’s start with two obvious premises: i) researchers need to publish; and ii) researchers respond to incentives (e.g., for jobs, promotion, funding, etc.). These factors interact and conspire to sustain the current academic publishing system. That is, researchers who publish in ‘prestigious’ or ‘high impact’ journals are more likely to be hired, promoted and receive funding. 

Because of this, researchers, universities and funders will pay exorbitant article processing charges – even if they are almost completely divorced from the actual costs involved. In the fields of behavioural science and more ‘generalist’ scientific journals, there is an almost perfect correlation between a journal’s impact factor and their article processing costs (see figure below, taken from https://bsky.app/profile/sobchuk.bsky.social/post/3kggjewhicl2y). For a more detailed exploration of the factors influencing article processing fees, which finds similar patterns, see: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00015.

Despite this clear link, impact factor (and similar metrics of journal prestige) often have little – and sometimes potentially a negative! – relationship with measures of research quality and methodological rigour (https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037).

The current system persists because of (perceived) journal prestige, which causes markets not to function as they normally would. Ordinarily a business making 40% profits would be outcompeted by a business charging less for the same product; but this ‘prestige’ effect means that markets do not work efficiently, especially as new journals – without established ‘prestige’ – are at a disadvantage.

In sum, the current system persists because we are paying for prestige, not the quality or value-for-money of the services provided (for a good historical overview of how this system emerged, see: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science).

How do we overcome this? And what changes could make the publishing system more ethical?

Part 3: The Solution

There are a number of solutions to make academic publishing more ethical, operating at a range of different levels.

At the broad cultural level, it is clear that we need to shift away from metrics such as journal prestige, impact factors and number of publications, and focus on research quality. While somewhat nebulous, this includes factors such as: methodological rigour and scientific integrity; open science practices such as preregistration/Registered Reports and sharing data/code/materials to facilitate reproducible and replicable research; and a focus on team – rather than solely individual – contributions to research (https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231182568).

This is of course easier said than done, especially with the current incentive structure still largely in place regarding academic promotions and funding. Part of this change has to be top-down. That is, institutions need to stop hiring and promoting, and funding bodies need to stop funding, academics based on perceived prestige – e.g., having Nature, Science or Cell publications – and instead focus on research quality. Many such guidelines and principles have been suggested (e.g., https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000737 and https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2004089), and are increasingly being developed and put into practice, such as the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the ‘Recognition and Rewards’ programme in the Netherlands and the ‘Open and Responsible Researcher Reward and Recognition’ (OR4) programme in the UK.

This top-down institutional-level change is likely to be slow, however, so bottom-up pressure directly from researchers is also needed. A number of options are available (for overviews, see https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11415.2 and https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14395):

  • Ignore (or give less weight to) journal prestige and impact factor when deciding where to publish. This strategy may be potentially risky, especially for early-career researchers, but is ultimately necessary. Given these potential risks, established academics with permanent contracts need to lead the way on this. As institutions are beginning to focus more on research quality in hiring and promotion decisions – the University of Bristol have signed up to DORA and are part of the OR4 programme, for instance – this strategy should become less risky with time.
  • Preferentially publish in Open Access ‘not-for-profit’ journals, which invest any profits back into academia. This includes Diamond Open Access journals (which are free to both publish in and access; e.g., ‘Peer Community In’, ‘PsychOpen Gold’ or ‘Open Library of Humanities’) and other ‘not-for-profit’ Open Access journals (which charge article processing fees; e.g., PLOS or eLife). For a list of Diamond Open Access journals, see: https://zenodo.org/records/4562828.
  • If you do publish in a ‘pay-to-read’ journal (or in a hybrid journal and cannot pay the Open Access Article Processing Charges), upload a preprint and/or the author-accepted manuscript to a relevant Open Access repository (e.g., OSF, arXiv, medRxiv, bioRxiv, PsyArXiv, or an institutional repository). This is known as ‘green’ Open Access).
  • Use tools such as those recently developed by Plan S (an Open Access publishing initiative) to estimate how ‘equitable’ (i.e., ethical) a scholarly communication (e.g., publishing in a given journal) is (https://www.coalition-s.org/new-tool-to-assess-equity-in-scholarly-communication-models/).
  • Avoid publishing (or publish less) in traditional ‘for-profit’ journals (e.g., those run by Elsevier, Wiley, Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Frontiers, etc.).
  • Preferentially review and act as an editor for these more ‘ethical’ not-for-profit journals to help increase support and growth of these journals (e.g., Peer Community In: Registered Reports are currently looking for editors/recommenders).
  • If on an editorial board of a for-profit journal, consider encouraging them to reduce their publication fees or threaten to resign from your position (http://corinalogan.com/journals.html). Many editorial boards have walked out en masse for these reasons (e.g., the Elsevier-owned journal ‘Neuroimage’; https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/07/too-greedy-mass-walkout-at-global-science-journal-over-unethical-fees).
  • Set up an alternative ethical journal. Again, many editorial boards have done this (see Neuroimage above, and also https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/16/academic-journal-publishers-universities-price-subscriptions). There is often infrastructure in place to do this relatively easily (e.g., setting up a ‘Peer Community In’ journal for a new discipline).
  • Lobby your institution to develop and implement clear promotion guidelines which rest on research quality.
  • University libraries can choose to help fund and support grassroots Diamond Open Access journals such as Peer Community In and Open Library of Humanities (both of which, and other similar initiatives, are supported by the University of Bristol, among numerous other institutions).
  • Libraries can also not renew – or negotiate better and more ethical – contracts with for-profit publishers, as occurred in Germany, the University of California and MIT.
  • Finally, spread the word about unethical publishing and how to overcome it to colleagues. Many researchers are aware of the issues with the current system, but there is little coordination for collective action to occur. Discussing these concerns with others is a good start.

Change will likely be slow, and traditional for-profit publishers will naturally push back on these changes (or purchase these fledgling ‘not-for-profit’ journals/publishers). But ultimately it is incumbent on researchers to be the change they want to see. For me personally, while I may still publish in traditional ‘for-profit’ journals occasionally, I try and support Diamond Open Access and not-for-profit publishers more where possible. But as an early/mid-career researcher, there is only so much impact I can have. There are many unknowns, and lots I am still learning about the academic publishing system. I should also note that my perspective is largely from a STEM background and mainly concerns journal article publishing; while there are some small differences which it comes to Arts, Humanities and Social Science disciplines (e.g., a greater focus on books, which can be more difficult to publish Open Access), the overall picture is broadly similar.

Pulling all this together, I have found the following image a useful roadmap when thinking about how to publish ethically (although whether there is a single dimension from ‘least ethical’ to ‘most ethical’ is perhaps a dubious assumption, and there will also be journal-level variation within publishers) – I hope it may help you too.

I definitely do not have all the answers, but these conversations are certainly worth having. If we can make the academic publishing system fairer, less wasteful and more ethical, then I believe we need to try.

Author:

Dan Major-Smith is a somewhat-lapsed Evolutionary Anthropologist who now spends most of his time working as an Epidemiologist. He is currently a Senior Research Associate in Population Health Sciences at the University of Bristol, and works on various topics, including selection bias, life course epidemiology and relations between religion, health and behaviour. He is also interested in meta-science/open scholarship more broadly, including the use of pre-registration/Registered Reports, synthetic data and ethical publishing. Outside of academia, he fosters cats and potters around his garden pleading with his vegetables to grow.

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