Exploiting the Academy: Commercial Capture in Scholarly Publishing

Over the past five years conversations about commercial capture in scholarly publishing have intensified, with ongoing concerns about exploitation and the entrenched for-profit publishing oligopoly.  

The underpinnings of the idea for scholarly publishing initially rose in part from the postwar vision of Vannevar Bush an MIT inventor and researcher who wrote "Science, the Endless Frontier." Bush's report  promoted the idea indirectly that there should be a permanent public/private infrastructure in support of research. During WWII Bush oversaw the development of a superior radar system used to help defeat the Germans, along with participating in the Manhattan Project. With these successes in hand, his concept of public/private partnering in research got a strong start. The idea of an ongoing partnership of some sort was viewed as a public good, and the development of a vast public research infrastructure and extensive library system followed. This allowed universities to obtain access to almost all peer-reviewed journals because of the government-granted overhead funding. But commercial academic publishers began to eat away at this model starting in the 1970s, and by the 1990s paywalls became standard. The academic sector's emphasis on research productivity and tenure metrics created an opportunity for profit-driven businesses to entrench themselves. Research publication became a dependable profit source, and publishers began imposing increasingly excessive subscription costs and restricted access through paywalls.

The result? Libraries now face budget crises, and many independent researchers are shut out of publishing options due to the high cost of entry. The promise of an open democratic knowledge exchange faces obstruction because of imposed profit margins. On the academy side of the challenge, a dilution of lazy research has produced a preponderance of highly similar literature reviews and a restatement of existing issues, coupled with a lack of any strategies to help solve for the issues in the real-world marketplace.

In the quest for improved patient-provider relationships, narrative medicine is just one example of a research area fraught with iterative assessments of the issue. Why are academic journals so satisfied to take payment and print virtual retreads of previously distributed observations and literature reviews? The answer in part seems to lie with academic institutions' stipulation for department heads and other tenure track employees to churn out ever more papers, in affirmation of their institution's standing and maintaining ongoing federal funding support.

A potential model is the Internet, which emerged in part with federal research funding. It is based on an open system architecture with a mandate to allow improvements and knowledge to be treated as a shared resource instead of something held within siloed knowledge profit centers.  As a consumer, I wonder if such a reversion to a government-partnering, university-driven publishing model, with low barrier and shared model costs, may serve us best. We need to rethink the research publication model and to determine which groups should have access to research findings and which entities should benefit from controlling their availability. What do you think? 

What RFK Jr. Got Right About Academic Publishing

Afew weeks ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, made a bold proclamation during a podcast appearance: “We’re probably going to stop publishing in The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and those other journals because they’re all corrupt.” Instead, the federal government would launch its own publishing platforms. The reaction was swift — thousands expressed disbelief and outrage.

Although Kennedy has no experience with academic publishing, his comments echoed concerns voiced by the former New England Journal of Medicine editors Marcia Angell and Jerome Kassirer. Richard Horton, editor in chief of The Lancet, went further, calling the pharma-journal relationship “parasitic.” It was in that context that Kennedy floated — almost offhandedly — the idea of the government starting its own journals.

Kennedy’s proposal — government-run publishing — would be both impractical and risky, given the threat of political interference in academic speech. Still, his criticism highlights a deeper truth: The current model, dominated by for-profit publishers, is riddled with inefficiencies, inequities, and excessive profiteering. It’s time to reimagine scholarly publishing around the needs of science, not shareholders.

For decades, scholars have navigated a system that no longer serves them. To advance professionally, they must publish in peer-reviewed journals — most of which are controlled by commercial publishers whose profits depend on restricted access and high fees. Nature’s flagship journal charges authors up to $12,000 for an article to be freely accessible, while other Springer Nature journals charge between about $2,000 and $5,000. Similar fees are levied by Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and Sage.

In short, commercial academic publishing is built on exploitation. It wasn’t always this way. Up until the mid-20th century, scholarly communication happened through society meetings, personal correspondence, and journals published by professional organizations or university presses. After World War II, Vannevar Bush helped build the modern research university, advocating generous federal support for shared infrastructure like laboratories and libraries from his perch at the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. For many years, overhead on federal grants allowed university libraries to acquire nearly every relevant journal.

That changed in the 1960s, when entrepreneurs like Robert Maxwell began launching for-profit journals across countless academic niches. Over time, subscription costs ballooned beyond what libraries could afford. Poorer institutions canceled subscriptions while publishers enjoyed enormous profits by selling to wealthier universities. In 2023, Elsevier’s business group posted a 38-percent profit margin for its parent company — a figure higher than that of Apple or Alphabet. This is rent-seeking at its purest: extracting profit from work they neither fund nor meaningfully enhance.

The harm extends beyond universities. Agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation spend billions on research, only for the findings to be locked behind expensive paywalls. Authors are often required to surrender copyright to publishers, losing ownership of their publicly funded work. Taxpayers fund research, universities pay faculty to conduct it — and both must pay again to access the results

This contradiction sparked a movement for reform. In the 1990s, the Nobel Prize-winning NIH director, Harold E. Varmus, was troubled that taxpayer-funded research was not freely accessible to the public. He proposed E-biomed, a digital repository for biomedical research. Although publishers strongly opposed the idea, it ultimately led to the creation of PubMed Central, a free archive of biomedical and life-sciences literature. Varmus later co-founded the Public Library of Science (PLOS) to offer high-quality, open-access publishing alternatives.

While open access made research freely available to readers, it didn’t fully solve the problem. As libraries cut subscriptions, publishers sought new revenue sources. Many turned to high open-access fees and new forms of paywalls. To offset this, the open-access model shifted costs to authors or their funders through article processing charges (APCs) — fees that typically range from $1,500 to over $10,000 per article. While meant to democratize access, APCs created new barriers for researchers and allowed commercial publishers to retain dominance, undermining the egalitarian vision Varmus had championed.

Other well-intentioned nonprofit models do not sufficiently cut costs. While JSTOR operates as a nonprofit and does not charge authors APCs, it shifts the financial burden to libraries through bundled subscription fees. Its model prioritizes access stability over cost reduction, offering no relief from the broader system of inflated publishing expenses or restricted access to research. The Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) and Project MUSE employ similar funding models and approaches to access and publication costs, but neither fully addresses the structural issues in academic publishing.

Reforming academic publishing starts with acknowledging four systemic problems. First, there is a crisis in peer review. In the past, five reviewer invitations might yield three completed reviews. Today, editors often send 20 to get just two. Reviewers are overwhelmed, unpaid, and gain little from contributing hours of invisible labor.ADVERTISEMEN

Third, the proliferation of journals has created a maze of arbitrary formatting demands. Researchers spend countless hours reworking manuscripts to fit shifting templates — in 2021, that work resulted in an estimated $230 million of lost research time in the United States alone. It’s a waste that adds nothing to the science.

Fourth, paywalls restrict access, limit readership, reduce impact, and diminish the public value of publicly funded work. Researchers want their work read and cited. Publishers profit by locking them away.

To fix this broken system, we must disentangle scholarly publishing from corporate interests. The solution is not federal control as suggested by Kennedy, but rather university-led publishing grounded in academic values and supported by modern infrastructure

This is now more feasible than ever. Peer review already relies almost entirely on volunteer labor from academics. Technical publishing tasks — copy editing, formatting, metadata tagging — can be handled by university libraries and support staff who would be supported by the savings that result from reducing journal subscriptions. Software tools now make it easy to manage submissions and publish open-access PDFs. The tasks that once justified the use of commercial publishers, such as printing, binding, warehousing, and mailing, have become obsolete with the expansion of the Internet.

A university-managed system could be built around four core principles:

This model will require investment, but the funds already exist — locked up in excessive publisher fees. Universities and research institutions currently spend hundreds of millions annually on subscriptions and APCs. Redirecting even a portion of that spending to support in-house publishing could drastically reduce costs and improve access. Commercial publishers enjoy profit margins of 30-40 percent. By eliminating those margins, a university-based system could offer high-quality publishing at far lower cost.

These ideas are intended to spark a conversation, not present a final blueprint. Implementing such a system would require a major transformation in how university libraries operate. A national or global digital library would demand significant expansion in both professional library staff and infrastructure. Not all institutions could contribute equally, raising important questions about how costs and responsibilities would be shared

One possibility is a pro rata funding model, where universities, research institutions, and professional societies contribute based on their level of usage. Discounts could be offered to under-resourced institutions or to those that take on a larger share of editorial and peer-review responsibilities. Individuals outside academe might gain access by purchasing articles at cost.

Oversight could be entrusted to a respected nonprofit body — perhaps modeled after the National Academies — ensuring that decisions are guided by a commitment to scholarly communication rather than corporate profits. The details will be complex, but with leadership rooted in academic values, the system could serve the needs of research far more effectively than today’s profit-driven model.

Kennedy’s suggestion that the government take over scientific publishing was misguided, but reflected a deeper truth: The current system no longer works for anyone except corporate publishers. Rather than replacing private publishers with a government-run platform — which raises concerns about political interference — we should empower academic institutions to reclaim control over scholarly communication.

The technology exists. The expertise resides within universities. The economic rationale is clear. What’s needed now is the collective will to build a publishing system that serves science rather than exploits it. Science thrives on openness, scrutiny, and shared knowledge. Let’s stop building walls around our most important discoveries. It’s time to tear down the paywalls — and rebuild a publishing system that serves both scholarship and the public good.