Walled Culture has just written about the possibility that recent AI breakthroughs might accelerate a move to open access, at least in the field of mathematics. It would be particularly welcome against a backdrop of relatively slow progress in the open access world. That is not because the need for different business models that provide free access for all to published research is less, but simply because the obstacles and difficulties faced by researchers remain largely unknown to the wider public, and therefore removing them is not a priority.
To the outsider, the world of academic publishing seems to be flourishing; and it is, for publishers, but it remains a source of friction and frustration for the people actually writing the papers that are published. The wider dynamics within the world of academic publishing remain opaque, particularly concerning the costs and benefits. Two new independent studies from the University of Sydney Business School may help to change that. The first, entitled “The Cost Of Knowledge” notes a remarkable omission in the discussions about academic publishing and the move to open access:
Debates about the economics of scholarly publishing typically focus on subscription prices, article processing charges, publisher revenues, and profit margins. Much less attention is paid to the costs incurred in producing the research that makes scholarly publishing possible.
Publishers love to talk about how much it costs to produce academic journals, and why the charges for publishing have to be so high, but they gloss over the fact that publication is merely the end stage in the much longer and more complex process of conducting and reporting research. The new University of Sydney Business School research seeks to estimate how much that work before publication typically costs, in order to provide context for the publication fees. The researchers identified eight key stages of article production where costs could be estimated:
ideation and conception; grant seeking and approval, where applicable; ethics approval; performance of the study and data analysis; writing and manuscript preparation, up to first submission; peer and conferencing feedback; journal editorial work; and peer review and revision cycles. Rather than costing these stages as discrete, sequential blocks, we represent them within a single integrated estimation record that recognises the overlaps between them, the resources they share, principally researcher time, but also institutional infrastructure and administrative support, and the cumulative effect of revising as a manuscript moves iteratively between stages.
The final result of applying that methodology is striking:
Drawing on the ingredients method, this paper attempts to construct a fuller account of that process, tracing the resources and associated costs consumed from ideation through to acceptance. While our estimate of approximately US$70,000 is necessarily conservative and open to refinement, it points to a substantial investment of labour, infrastructure, governance arrangements, and public resources that are essential [for] the production of a published article long before publication itself becomes possible.
To place that figure in context:
Grossman and Brembs (2021) put the cost of [the service provide by academic publishers] at around US$400 per article. Set against our estimate of approximately US$70,000 to produce a social science article, the publishing function appears to represent less than 1% of the total resources invested in creating the research. Even using Grossman and Brembs’ upper estimate of approximately US$1,000 per article, publication costs account for only around 1.4% of total production costs. This comparison highlights a central tension in contemporary scholarly communication given that after substantial public and institutional investment in producing research, access to the resulting knowledge is frequently restricted through subscription-based publishing models.
The implications of that relatively small figure are important:
Viewed in this way, the estimate draws attention to a structural asymmetry within contemporary scholarly communication where the production of knowledge depends heavily upon publicly funded institutions, publicly supported research, and academic labour, and this provides a largely unaccounted for subsidy to private sector publishers, underwriting at least some of the financial returns they enjoy
That is, with every paper that appears in their titles, academic publishers are generating significant profits not only thanks to free academic labor in the form of peer review, but also thanks to long-term and massive levels of public funding. Their ability to free ride on such invisible subsidies is never acknowledged by publishers, which like to claim all the credit for making papers available, as if they were benefactors underpinning the entire system of research. In fact, by imposing high and unjustified publication costs on academic institutions and their funders, publishers act as a serious obstacle to the dissemination of publicly-funded research, denying people their right to access the academic work they pay for.
The results of that “structural asymmetry” are explored in the second piece of research from the University of Sydney Business School, with the self-explanatory title “How Profitable are the Big Four Publishers” – the “Big Four” being RELX (Elsevier), Informa (Taylor & Francis), Springer Nature and Wiley:
The evidence shows that academic publishing has been an exceptionally resilient and profitable business. Despite periods of major economic disruption, including the global financial crisis (2008) and the Covid-19 pandemic (2020-2022), all four publishers remained profitable throughout the period examined. For the diversified firms, academic publishing consistently generated the highest profit margins within their business portfolios.
…
Taken together, the findings suggest that the Big Four are not only securing significant financial returns from scholarly communication but are also extending their influence across the wider research ecosystem. The report raises questions about the distribution of economic value, control of research infrastructure and the governance of publicly funded knowledge.
The two new reports are unlikely to change the state of open access quickly or dramatically. But their value lies in the fact that they confirm – with data – that the current academic publishing system is a terrible deal not just for researchers and institutions, but also for the governments and public which fund it.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published to Walled Culture.
