Publish or perish,$25 billion annual revenue industry is challenged

Bay to publish and to read

In 2019 the University of California dropped its subscription to the giant Dutch publisher Elsevier that belongs to RELX group. UC was paying $11 million a year as subscription fees. Elsevier is considered one the five mega publishers that owns 2,500 journals. UC wanted to reduce the costs and transfer payments for reading to only payments for publishing which had to cost UC $30 million over a three year contract. Why then Elsevier didn't accept the offer? I will keep it last.

This example may have waken your mind to hundreds of questions, but I will give you some outlines.

The publishing industry is now making $25 billion annual revenue competing music and film industry. How this money is generated?

Simply, for paywalled journals to publish scientific contents, research and technology institutions have to pay subscription fees, but still those institutions pay more if they want to make their publications publicly available, what is known as open access. Moreover, individual readers must pay to read and cite. Mega journals publish hundreds of thousands of papers per year, for example Nature communications publishes about 7,500 articles a year and demands $6,490 for each of them.

Most of the published studies are publicly funded, which means public money that used for R&D is fueling an industry that doesn't allow the public to access R&D results. For instance, the U.S FY2024 devoted $209.7 billion for R&D, this fund generates scientific contents that may goes to paywalled publishers.

It should made public

For less wealthy scholars and institutions paying about $30 to access an article is a real challenge to not only the scientific communities in developing countries but even to taxpayers whom spend billions supporting research they can't access.

Not only University of California is looking for open access, a group of science funding agencies totally spend $8.8 billion on grants have made a plan that by 2022, anyone who gets money from them must publish in journals without paywalls. Those agencies includes UK Research and Innovation and the Research Council of Norway. Private funders, like Gates foundation, which funds $4.6 billion worth of science a year, is also stipulate any papers come from their grants must be open access.

Pressure on paywalled has increased since 2011, when the Russia-based neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan founded the Sci-hub website which host more than 50 million academic papers, although it's illegal, but extremely popular. In addition to that, prepublication sites like BioRxiv and Arxiv, called preprints are increasingly attracting scientists to publish their study drafts and more for free despite being not peer-reviewed.

Qatar National Library for example has signed agreements with Wiley, Taylor and Francis, Oxford university press, Springer Nature, Cambridge and more, to pay article processing charges (APCS) to authors affiliated with Qatar non-profit institutions. Such agreements encourage more knowledge production and availability.

The challenge has started early

In 2002, Budapest Open Access Initiative signed a declaration that collected signatures of 1,775 institutions and 7,387 individuals on two main principles which are: self-archiving and open access journals. since then many initiatives emerged such cOAlition, OASPA, DORA, I40A, I40C and more, all supported the idea of open access. Now directory of open access journals (DOAJ) added over 2,000 new journals.

Now, why Elsevier refused UC proposal?

Open access would eventually mean fewer subscriptions.

But scientific communities want it open and it should be open one day.

Thank you so much for your patience.

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Muataz Hamid