How greed fuels scholarly publishing - Featured

How Greed Fuels Scholarly Publishing

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Academic publishing is an industry built on paradoxes. At its heart lies a curious contradiction: the world’s smartest people, backed by billions in public research funding, give away their work for free to publishers who then charge exorbitantly to access it. Meanwhile, those same researchers review each other’s work, edit journals, and scramble for prestige, all without financial compensation. The profits? They land squarely in the pockets of a handful of publishing conglomerates who have turned knowledge into capital and curiosity into control.

The scholarly publishing industry, long touted as the steward of scientific progress, now more closely resembles a cartel than a public service. With profit margins rivaling the biggest tech companies, academic publishers are some of the most lucrative businesses on the planet. This wealth is not generated through innovation or risk-taking but through gatekeeping: controlling access to knowledge and monetizing academia’s insecurities.

This article explores how greed fuels scholarly publishing. From subscription bundles and article processing charges (APCs) to data monopolies and career incentives, the system has evolved into one that thrives on inequity. And make no mistake—it’s not broken. It’s working exactly as designed.

A Billion-Dollar Empire Built on Free Labor

The core business model of scholarly publishing is at the center of its moral dilemma: publishers make money from content they don’t pay to produce. Researchers write papers for free, driven by career imperatives. They peer-review other researchers’ work for free, out of a sense of duty and community. Editorial boards are mostly unpaid, even as their names lend credibility to journals. The labor ecosystem of academic publishing is fueled by volunteerism.

Yet the financial rewards are anything but philanthropic. Elsevier, one of the most prominent players in the market, reported over $3.8 billion in revenue in 2023, with operating profit margins exceeding 30%. Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis aren’t far behind. These are not small academic outfits—they’re industrial-scale profit machines.

What other industry benefits from such a setup? Academics hand over their manuscripts, and publishers slap on a DOI, format the text, and lock it behind a paywall. The authors don’t see a cent. Meanwhile, publishers resell this content to the same institutions that funded the original research. Taxpayer money funds the research, and taxpayer-funded universities must pay again to access it. It’s the equivalent of baking your own bread, giving it away, and then having to buy a slice of it at an inflated price.

The Paywall Wall Street

The scholarly publishing paywall is not just a barrier to access—it’s a business model. Most of the major journals sit behind paywalls, protected by subscription fees that universities and libraries must pay to provide access to faculty and students. These aren’t Netflix-style monthly fees. They are multi-million-dollar contracts negotiated annually, usually with minimal transparency.

The “Big Deal” model bundles journals together in subscription packages. Universities often cannot choose to subscribe only to the journals their scholars use. Instead, they’re forced into take-it-or-leave-it deals. For instance, the cost of canceling access to Elsevier’s journals often involves a near-total blackout of critical scientific literature.

In 2019, the University of California made headlines by refusing to renew its subscription deal with Elsevier, a contract worth $11 million yearly. The stand was symbolic—but also painful. It underscored the stranglehold publishers have over access to scientific information. Other institutions have tried to follow suit, but the fear of access gaps remains a powerful deterrent. This isn’t a publishing model; it’s a protection racket.

The Author Pays Model: From Exploitation to Extortion?

In response to growing demands for open access (OA), publishers rolled out APCs—a model that flips the payment burden from reader to author. On paper, it looks promising: free access for readers, with authors (or their institutions) covering the publication cost. In practice, it has morphed into a pay-to-play system that mirrors the worst aspects of vanity publishing.

A single APC can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $11,000, depending on the journal’s prestige. For example, Nature’s OA option charges authors over $10,000 per article. The rationale? Editorial work, production, and digital infrastructure. But critics argue that these costs are inflated beyond reason. After all, the peer reviewers are still unpaid, and manuscript handling has been largely automated.

Open access was meant to democratize science. Instead, it’s become another channel for monetization. The gold OA model incentivizes publishers to accept more articles—not necessarily better ones—since revenue is tied to volume. This opens the door to quantity over quality, further eroding peer review standards and academic trust. Meanwhile, less wealthy institutions and researchers from the Global South are priced out of publishing in top journals. OA has become a luxury for the well-funded.

Publish or Perish, Profit or Die

In academia, publishing is currency. Promotions, grants, and reputations hinge on a scholar’s publication record—especially in high-impact journals. This obsessive focus on publishing has created a system where quantity often trumps quality. And the publishing giants have capitalized on it.

Journals with high impact factors charge more, reject more, and rake in more prestige. Researchers clamor to be accepted into these circles, fueling the demand. The publishers respond by raising APCs, tightening submission gates, and selling prestige at a premium.

The result is a prestige economy where scholarly value is measured not by impact on the field but by impact on a specific set of metrics. Originally intended as a library acquisition tool, the Journal Impact Factor has become a career-defining metric. Publishers use it to justify fees, institutions use it to rank departments, and researchers are trapped in a cycle of citation-chasing.

This system turns scholars into content creators, desperately feeding a machine that converts their labor into revenue. It’s academia as a service economy, and the service provider always has the fatter wallet.

Predatory Journals or Just Greedy Ones?

Predatory journals, those bottom-feeders of academic publishing, are often demonized—and rightly so. They exploit the desperation of early-career researchers, promise quick publication, and charge hefty fees without proper peer review. But let’s be honest: the line between predatory and profit-driven is getting increasingly blurry.

Mainstream publishers have adopted some of the same tactics. While technically legitimate, these mega-journal empires are built on rapid publication cycles, high acceptance rates, and aggressive solicitation of authors. They exploit the same “publish or perish” pressure that fuels predatory journals, but cloak themselves in the language of innovation and speed.

So, who is worse—the shady operator running a fake journal or the billion-dollar publisher profiting off a broken incentive system? In some cases, the latter does more systemic harm by normalizing a model of monetized trust. The real scandal isn’t that predatory journals exist. The legitimate ones often act similarly, and still get invited to the academic table.

The Gatekeepers of Knowledge, or Just the Toll Collectors?

Academic publishing is also an infrastructure game. Major publishers own the journals and the platforms, databases, and identifiers underpinning scholarly communication. Crossref, ORCID, Web of Science, Scopus—these tools shape discoverability and influence.

Control over these tools gives publishers more than just revenue. It gives them data—on who’s publishing, citing, collaborating. This data is valuable, and it’s not being shared with the scholarly community equitably. Publishers are not just custodians of knowledge; they are data extractors with monopoly powers.

The result is a form of digital enshrinement. If your article isn’t indexed in Scopus or Web of Science, it may as well not exist. The visibility gate is as vital as the publishing gate—and it’s tightly guarded. By controlling both, publishers ensure that even as models shift, the profits remain in the same hands.

Can AI Break the Cycle?

There’s growing speculation that artificial intelligence might finally disrupt the monopolies of scholarly publishing. AI can review, summarize, translate, format, and even generate academic texts. This has the potential to cut costs, bypass traditional bottlenecks, and democratize access.

But here’s the caveat: the same publishers already integrate AI into their platforms. Elsevier and Springer are embedding AI for manuscript screening and metadata enrichment. So instead of disrupting the system, AI may become another gear in the profit machine, scaling up exploitation instead of dismantling it. Unless researchers and institutions take control of the tools themselves, AI won’t be the revolution—it’ll be the upgrade.

Conclusion: Reclaiming Knowledge from the Greedy Grasp

Scholarly publishing is not broken. It is perfectly engineered for publishers’ benefit. Every component—from unpaid labor and institutional dependence to opaque metrics and exorbitant fees—serves a profit logic that has little to do with advancing knowledge and everything to do with extracting value.

The good news is that alternatives exist. Community-led journals, preprint servers, consortial Open Access models, and public infrastructure can offer escape routes. But they require collective will. Academia must stop feeding the hand that bites it.

Knowledge is not a commodity. It is a public good. Until the academic community reclaims ownership over its outputs, scholarly publishing will remain what it is: a cash cow run not on principles but greed.

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