“Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?”
“Elsevier’s business model seemed a truly puzzling thing. In order to make money, a traditional publisher — say, a magazine — first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12–15%.
The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction — funded largely by governments — and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden — checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review — is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists — who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place…
As science expanded, [Rosbaud] realised that it would need new journals to cover new areas of study. The scientific societies that had traditionally created journals were unwieldy institutions that tended to move slowly, hampered by internal debates between members about the boundaries of their field. Rosbaud had none of these constraints. All he needed to do was to convince a prominent academic that their particular field required a new journal to showcase it properly, and install that person at the helm of it. Pergamon would then begin selling subscriptions to university libraries, which suddenly had a lot of government money to spend…
“At the start of my career, nobody took much notice of where you published, and then everything changed in 1974 with Cell,” Randy Schekman, the Berkeley molecular biologist and Nobel prize winner, told me. Cell (now owned by Elsevier) was a journal started by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to showcase the newly ascendant field of molecular biology… What he created was a venue for scientific blockbusters, and scientists began shaping their work on his terms…
it was university librarians who first realised the trap in the market Maxwell had created”
Related: “Scientific Publishing Is Killing Science”; “The editors of an academic journal all quit because they couldn’t make their work available for free online”; “Scientific Utopia: II. Restructuring incentives and practices to promote truth over publishability”
