Profits from scientific publishing are eye-watering, extracting billions in ways that harm science. This blog summarises some of the key arguments that came out in a pre-print just out this week: The Drain of Scientific Publishing’. It builds on ‘The Strain of Scientific Publishing’, but with a rather more august authorship, and in it we show how commercial publishing is harmful to science – and unnecessary.  

We identify a four-fold drain due to commercial publishing. We lose Money that could be far better spent. We lose Time, and our priorities are distorted, diverting attention from good science. We lose Trust, from the poor science resulting. And Control, over quality and our publishing data.

The profits for scientific publishing are extraordinary – consistently over 30% per year, much higher than other sectors. In 2024 just two publishers earned revenues of over $2.2 bn, whereas government research funding was just over $9 billion. This is a significant drain as the table shows.

But this is not mere parasitism. Commercial publishers are intimately intertwined with the academia – in the way they harvest data about us, and the way they are integrated into academic evaluation. Lai Ma’s work shows how extensively Elsevier has done it. Commercial pubishing has wormed its way into our decision-making.

And this is damaging to science. Commercial publishing is feeding a proliferation of papers, focussed on prestige, which strains the machinery of publication. It also discourages the slow, careful interdisciplinary thought which is foundational to the best work. Ultimately it contributes to a weakening of quality, and thus also a weakening in public trust. And yet, bizarrely, some of the most trusted scientific brands are now copying publishing models which are most problematic.

And it need not be thus. Aileen Fyfe’s work shows how this mess has resulted from deliberate choices taken decades ago. They are policy decisions with a particular history. They can be undone. And there multiple alternatives. Scientific publishing outside the global north thrives on community-owned and governed platforms like SciELO, Redalyc, Latindex or African Journals Online without commercial publishing.

It is clear what we need: It is to re-communalise academic publishing. Its costs funding are met by learned societies and their funders; profits go back to research, as do the data it generates. Researchers repeatedly call for this. And how do we get there? First, stop working with commercial publishers to reform the system. We have had decades of failed attempts at reform in which the only constancy is publishers’ profits. We cannot continually try to reform a broken system. Second, when you are up against big and powerful organisations you need big and powerful friends. But we have those in our funders, government funders, foundations, Universities collectively could dictate where moneys on publishing findings go and what incentives drive researchers.

Funders can act – without even having to co-ordinate – in ways which will cascade through the research ecosystem to break this dysfunctional system apart and create something which serves their interests, and researchers’ far better. This thread summarises a joint paper created with the amazing Fernanda Beigel, Paolo Crosetto6, Gemma Derrick, Aileen Fyfe, Pablo Gomez Barreiro, Mark A. Hanson, Stefanie Haustein, Vincent Larivière, Christine Noe, Stephen Pinfield and James Wilsdon. My thanks to them all.