The Scientific publishing scam
Academic publishers, like Elsevier, keep more of what they earn compared to other publishers.
Elsevier keeping around 40% of the money it earns. Compared to typical magazine profits of about 10-20%.
USA today about 10%, the New York Times about 10%, Penguin Random House about 15%.
Average book publishers, about 10%.
The scam is how they do it.
Profit Margins
A few main publishers make up most of the market.
Reed-Elsevier
Springer
Wiley-Blackwell
Taylor & Francis
Sage
Publishers share scientific journals, which are made up of articles for people to read.
In 2022 Elsevier earned about £2.5 billion, up from about £2.1 billion in 2021.
Profits nearing £1 billion for the year.
Most of the money coming from universities.
Governments pay universities. But University employees write articles to get more money for their university.
Other university employees review those articles, often without pay.
Then universities buy the articles off the publishers.
So the government pays universities to write articles given to publishers, which they also buy from the publishers.
Publishers like Elsevier working as a middle man.
Some calling this a "triple-pay" system.
An article from 2003 said:
"costs of publication, subscription and access charges are now a perverse and needless obstacle"
And another article in 2015 said:
Publisher numbers
Academic institutions need money for salaries, equipment, facilities and much more.
Universities receive grants from governments, private companies, and non-profit organizations.
However, grant success is heavily influenced by faculty publication and citation numbers. Their H-index.
The H-index is often used to measure an author’s impact, output and performance.
An author with a higher H-index will likely get more grants.
But more publications aren't always better.
The maximum H-index, is total publications, but only if each paper has that amount, or more, of citations.
100 papers with 1 citation is 1.
1 paper with 100 citations is also 1.
But authors can cite themselves, and as part of the peer review process, they could also influence other authors for citations.
There is a problem with scientific integrity.
But each publisher needs to track the publication and citation numbers, to calculate the H-index.
This means publishers can show different H-index values for the same author.
Comparing authors across research fields is unfair, as some fields may get more citations, due to more or less publications in that field.
And then a similar calculation is done for journals. The impact factor being used to measure frequency of average article citations in a year.
This could use data from the past 5 years, but it often uses the last 2 years.
Number of citations divided by publications for the years considered.
Higher impact factor journals, potentially suggesting more influence.
So those authors looking for higher citation numbers likely aiming for higher impact journals, so they can increase their H-index.
All controlled by the publishers.
Publisher Business
Some argue publishers help with vetting sharing and explaining science.
However, the vetting process has misconduct issues, with 77% of reviewers wanting further peer review training.
Sharing in the digital age is often done through pre-prints, social media platforms like ResearchGate, websites like Academia.edu, and contacting authors directly.
And arguments for explaining science are often combated with comments like:
"it is often the writing rather than the science that makes these articles difficult to read".
With the publisher’s only impact on writing quality, the editors. Many of which are volunteers.
Yet, publishers add paywalls totalling global revenues of more than £19 billion a year.
Many publishers, share resources to help with peer review topics like:
Integrity
Ethics
Fairness
Usefulness
Timeliness
But that doesn't help the issue of hiding science.
Science relies on sharing.
But if sharing with others costs authors thousands to publish it for everyone to read without paying.
Researchers may find other solutions.
However, University employees need research access to do their jobs.
Teach about science, contribute to research, and publish articles.
So universities pay publisher subscription fees for access. Harvard quoting $500 000 for a year.
With university costs increasing, they need to increase income somehow which could impact things like tuition fees, books, rooms and food for students.
Impacting universities, authors, current and future students alongside the public.
So publishers get articles for free, edited with low or no cost, reviewed with low or no cost, then sold.
Or, publishers get paid, quite a lot of money, for the same editing and review, to publish articles with free access.
Their expenses being editing, producing, marketing, and sharing articles, most of which could seemingly be done online for low or no cost.
Digital media challenging perceived value or purpose of publishers.
The H-Index and Impact Factor being of unique value for scientific publishers, alongside upholding standards through editors and peer review.
Open science
Science that is free for readers costs more for authors. Because publishers can't charge for people to read the articles.
Alexandra, created an illegal library of scientific articles, because she didn’t like that.
Her work was community supported before Elsevier lobbied to shut that down.
Apart from videos and word of mouth, the library is hidden due to legal sanctions.
Publishers lobbied for a bill preventing private research sharing without going through publishers.
But, the American Chemical Society (ACS) filed and won a lawsuit for copyright infringement and trademark violation, adding legal sanctions demanding:
So promoting or supporting the library can have legal consequences.
James Milne, a spokesperson for Elsevier, argues it is convenience.
And Elsevier doesn’t oppose Open Access.
“I can say with confidence that all the members of the Coalition (Elsevier included) embrace open access,” Milne says.
What they want is copyright laws to be followed, and the money that goes with that.
However, maybe there are other solutions to sharing science online…
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