What exactly is the problem with Elsevier and co? May 9, 2017

For a long while, there has been a lot of anger among researchers and academic librarians towards the legacy publishers: the big corporations that control access to most of the world’s scholarly output. But what exactly is the problem? Let’s briefly consider several possibilities, and see if we can figure out which ones really matter.

Is it the publishers’ profit margins? As we’ve discussed before, the Big Four publishers all make profits in the region of 35% of revenue, which is more than Google (25%) or Apple (29%) make. Essentially every time you buy something from Elsevier, a third of the money goes straight into shareholders’ pockets.

But as I have previously argued, I don’t think this, in isolation, is a big problem. A company that could make a car for $500, if it sold that car for $1000, would be making a 50% profit: but that wouldn’t matter, because what we actually care about is the price we pay, not whether the price goes on costs or profits.

So is the problem with legacy publishers the sheer cost of their products (whether made up of profit or internal costs)? This is definitely an issue, and has been for a long time: the serials crisis goes back several decades. It certainly seems to be true that publishers are collecting exploitative rent on research outputs that they own, hiking up prices much faster than inflation and using underhand tactics to force renegotiation in their favour. This is underhand and destructive — but not the core of the issue.

Perhaps we get closer to the heart when we consider the provision of free labour by the authors, peer-reviewers and editors who donate their time, effort and professional expertise to enrich the publishers. No-one disputes that publishers add some value to the published work; but clearly 90% of the value is in the author’s submission, and 90% of the remainder in the volunteer-run editorial process. It sticks in the craw that the only people who benefit financially from all this are the ones who contribute least.

All of this so far has been to do with how scholarship is generated and how it then generates revenue. But maybe the real issue is what happens once it’s become a product: almost nobody can actually read the papers. To me, this is a much more fundamental issue. Whatever the academic community spends on subscriptions, the opportunity cost of all the papers we can’t read is far greater — and that is true on an enormously greater scale when we take into account the trifling matter of the world outside academia. (Bonus points: even when you can read the papers you are often limited in what you can do with them due to restrictive licences. Content-mining, data-reuse, lecture preparation, Wikipedia edits and much more are impeded by such limitations.)

But maybe even more fundamental than this is the problem that legacy publishers own and control the scholarly literature. That is the foundational truth that underlies all the other bad things I’ve listed here. They own the copyright because researchers give it to them. And so can we honestly be surprised when corporations, given a resource, then exploit it for financial gain?

—

The solution in the end is very, very simple: we have to stop giving them our good stuff. Just don’t. Don’t give your work to subscription-based journals. Don’t review for them. And don’t act as an editor for them. Scholarship belongs to the world, not to publishers who do the opposite of publishing. Publish your work where it benefits the world.