Funding agencies can end profit-first science publishing:
Funding organisations can fix the science publishing system – which currently puts profit first and science second – according to new research.
The new paper says the current relationship between researchers, funders and commercial publishers has created a "drain" – depriving the research system of money, time, trust and control.
The research team used public revenue and income statements to assess the money being spent on publishing articles with the biggest commercial publishers, and placed this in the broader historical context, including recent trends.
Published on arXiv, the paper examines the scale of publisher profits – with the four leading publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis) generating over $7.1 billion in revenue in 2024 alone, with profit margins exceeding 30%.
Much of this money comes from public funds intended for research – and the new paper says bold action by funders is now essential.
"The real solution is not for scientists to band together. We've tried that for 30 years and it hasn't worked – publisher profit margins have remained steady despite every attempted reimagining of science publishing," said Dr Mark Hanson, from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter.
"The funding agencies hold all the cards. They're the ones paying authors to do research, and journals to publish that research. They can mandate change.
"Some already are. For example, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has proposed limits on how much it will reimburse researchers for payments to publishers to make their articles open access (free to read).
"We researchers can support the battle, but we cannot lead the charge."
Research funding often includes money to pay journal fees to make articles open access. With these fees rising, increasing amounts of research funding – which often comes from taxpayers – becomes publisher profits.
[...] Professor Dan Brockington, from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, said: "When facing large and powerful organisations, you need allies that are equally large and powerful. We have them: funders, government agencies, foundations and universities, which together could decide where funds for publishing go and what incentives drive researchers.
"The current system harms science: it fuels a proliferation of papers focused on prestige, which strains the publication machinery.
"It also discourages slow, careful interdisciplinary thinking, which is key to achieving higher-quality science. Ultimately, it contributes to a weakening of quality and, consequently, to an erosion of public trust."
Last year, researchers including Dr Hanson and Professor Brockington wrote a landmark paper highlighting the "strain" on scientific publishing caused by the rapidly rising number of papers being published. A 2023 study described an "oligopoly" in which the big five academic publishers profit from article processing charges. These studies paved the way for the new paper, entitled: "The Drain of Scientific Publishing."
Journal Reference: arXiv:2511.04820 [cs.DL] https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.04820
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, @12:24AM (3 children)
Just cut all government funding
Problem solved!
(no.. I don't agree with this, but in reality that is what is happening)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Friday January 02, @02:40AM
I was going to point out that this is more or less why they keep cutting government funding. There's less of an incentive for the government to rig the outcome as the solar companies bribing politicians isn't that much different for them than the oil companies doing it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 02, @05:54PM (1 child)
And yet who is it that prioritizes quantity of publications over the value of research?
This reminds me of NASA's activities since the end of the Apollo program. Some supporters wax poetic [soylentnews.org] about the jobs and infrastructure protected by NASA for 50 years and then get huffy [soylentnews.org] when someone actually found a use for those people and infrastructure. There's no consideration at all of what those engineers and the resources poured into the "infrastructure" could have done, if someone at NASA had been serious about space development.
Expensive publishing cartels are a symptom. So is the even more harmful symptom of opportunity cost where careers of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of academics are wasted chasing publications, because that's the metric for getting promotions, funding, etc. The driver for all that is government funding of science.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Friday January 02, @07:12PM
That's a real problem. We have Nobel prizes and Ignoble prizes, it's high time we got another similar type of prize for the scientists in various fields that contributed the most to replicating studies or debunking bad science to help balance out the issues. Not that that's a perfect solution, or even a solution, but it's at least a step in the right direction.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, @02:41AM
The link in tfa to this MIT paper,
https://direct.mit.edu/qss/article/5/4/823/124269/The-strain-on-scientific-publishing [mit.edu]
might be worth reading if you are in a paper mill environment. For example,
Lots of tables and graphs showing various metrics, often separated by publishers. For example, the rejection rate for papers seems to only correlate with the individual publishing companies!
The paper ends with,
Me? I review a handful of engineering papers every year where the standards are much looser than science papers. I wind up rejecting (or sending back for major rework) nearly half as being either terrible work, terrible writing, or work already done elsewhere. Often the other reviewers are easier and those useless (imho) papers are approved--wasting the time of future researchers that might be attracted by the title or abstract.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Friday January 02, @05:13AM
$7.1 billion in annual revenues is one of those numbers that's hard to think of in terms other than "huge"
For context, that's a little less than 1 out of every 4 dollars [publishers.org] spent on books of any kind(digital or physical, subscription or purchase) in the US.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday January 02, @01:10PM (12 children)
The business school graduates who have appointed themselves to run most of the institutions of the world today, including government and academia, think about the problem thusly:
Of course, all this gleefully ignores that pure research will discover things nobody expected to find and also develop new lines of applied research with ROIs in the future. But for people trained to look at quarterly and maybe annual returns, those all look like waste, not progress.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, @05:49PM
This is exactly where it has gone. Neoliberalism has turned everything into a service model. Implicit in this is that you do what people with money want. Call it what you want - but in practice it means Cybertrucks and profit extraction at all levels. Anyone doing work is a sucker. The smart guys are exploiting labor and creaming profits.
How does anything get done in this environment? Read a textbook and see how science was actually done. Not by labor camps of Chinese students being squeezed by authoritarian Leadership to generate product (shitty articles).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 02, @06:48PM (8 children)
I'll issue the usual challenge here. Is there any historical research which had long term ROI, but not enough short term ROI to justify the research's cost? I've asked variants of this question over the past couple of decades (for [soylentnews.org] example [slashdot.org]), and no one has yet to come up with that example.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 03, @03:06AM (3 children)
> Is there any historical research which had long term ROI, but not enough short term ROI to justify the research's cost?
Does the Wright Brothers research resulting in powered flight count as delivering long term ROI? They certainly lacked for short term funding, needing to keep their bicycle shop going so they could self-fund their aircraft work.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 03, @06:27AM (2 children)
We have planes flying now. And seems likely that we'll be having them fly a lot of people and cargo for a long time. So yes, it does have long term ROI (not just of the monetary sort). My point is rather that when we have research or engineering that results in long term ROI, like powered flight, we also have short term ROI. Short term ROI doesn't need to be massive to justify research that also isn't massive. So for the Wright brothers, the markets of thrillseekers and performers, or reconnaissance for military forces, would be sufficient to generate enough ROI to justify the effort.
And even when there is clear ROI short or long, it doesn't mean that one can successfully exploit that as the Wright brothers example shows.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 03, @07:30PM (1 child)
Not sure how to interpret your comment:
> it doesn't mean that one can successfully exploit that as the Wright brothers example shows.
A capsule summary of their company at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Company [wikipedia.org]
So the Wright Brothers were not leading/managing their company for very long (one died...), but the company was successful for many years.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 03, @08:12PM
Exactly. Both brothers out of the company in six years. Your post supports "it doesn't mean that one can successfully exploit that as the Wright brothers example shows."
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday January 03, @03:18AM (3 children)
... because in your linked post, you simply dismissed every example provided as not counting.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 03, @06:30AM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 03, @09:21PM (1 child)
More on this. My point here is that there is a strong bias among researchers before the modern era towards useful R&D. The term "blue sky research" actually comes from a 1976 article [atsjournals.org] on 19th century research into why the sky appeared blue. The concept is very recent.
In the original experiment:
That's the layout of the experiment (TL;DR gas with lots of fine particles in it scatters light which tends to be bluish). Even we suppose this were an example of a true blue sky experiment, it's a blue sky experiment with low costs. Understanding how light works in the atmosphere helps us understand and explain weather observations better which continues to be of great value to us.
It's only in modern times that we've attempted to justify extremely expensive experiments (for example, most fusion research and the International Space Station) on the basis of science for science's sake. This has always been a myth. That is why there have been these repeated failures to come up with a real world example of blue sky research (with scarce short term benefit and massive long term benefit) from before the modern time. They never existed in the first place!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 04, @04:02PM
Rather "not enough short term benefit to justify the research and massive long term benefit".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Saturday January 03, @01:07PM (1 child)
... in the chapter I am reading just now looking at the NIH:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_book) [wikipedia.org]
They write about the ossification of research funding in the USA. They explain that in the late 1940s and early 1950s these government funding organizations were created to do basic research -- after seeing the success from WWII of things like radar and the Manhattan project. They explain how over the decades that changes to more risk-averse funding of less-risky cautiously incremental projects. As one result, NIH funding went from granting about 22% of funding to early-career-stage scientists decades ago to about 2% now. They do say NIH is creating some grants targeted at younger investigators now.
Another aspect of this is the fierce competition for funds as a result of "the Big Crunch" Dr. David Goodstein wrote about and testified to Congress about in the 1990s. Sad that Caltech can't bother to keep up important old web pages from late professors, but thankfully archive.org still has it
https://web.archive.org/web/20240213233731/https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html [archive.org]
"Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever."
The competition for funding has shaped so much of US academics over the past few decades. In that context of financial difficulties, the Bay-Dohl Act was also particularly harmful because it shifted the focus of academia from freely sharing knowledge to restricting it and licensing it (eventually indirectly leading to the tragic death of Aaron Swartz).
""Atlantic: The Kept University"
https://pnau.wordpress.com/atlantic-the-kept-university/ [wordpress.com]
"Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education—disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies"
"In the fall of 1964 a twenty-one-year-old Berkeley undergraduate named Mario Savio climbed the steps of Sproul Hall and denounced his university for bending over backwards to “serve the need of American industry.” Savio, the leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, accused the university of functioning as “a factory that turns out a certain product needed by industry” rather than serving as the conscience and a critic of society. To the modern ear this sixties rhetoric may sound outdated. To many people in the academic world, however, Savio’s words ring truer today than ever. Although our national conversation about higher education remains focused on issues of diversity and affirmative action, nothing provoked more debate on many college campuses last year than the growing ties between universities and business—and nowhere was the debate livelier than at Berkeley. ..."
To bring this back to the main story, I wrote this about twenty years ago on how it is up to funders to insist that what they fund is made freely available:
"An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society"
https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html [pdfernhout.net]
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. ..."
Longer earlier version: "On Funding Digital Public Works
https://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html [pdfernhout.net]
A decade ago I suggested a pledge that non-profits could take to say they would only release free works, but even Richard Stallman was hesitant about it (including perhaps because he wanted opinion pieces to have some licensing restrictions on modifications):
"Pledge to only fund and create free software and free content"
https://pdfernhout.net/pledge-to-only-fund-and-create-free-works.html [pdfernhout.net]
"The FSF could start a new campaign to get foundations and non-profits to pledge that all content and software they fund or develop for the public using charitable or public dollars will be released under free licenses.
One by one, foundations and non-profits could be approached and asked to commit to a pledge similar to the following:
"Our organization, ______, pledges to our our stakeholders and the people of the world that from this date forward, ________, whenever we use charitable or public dollars to fund or create any new content, software, or any other sort of copyrightable or patentable materials intended for public distribution and public use (or substantially modify existing public content), we will ensure those works will be distributed to the public under free/libre licenses. Free/libre licenses means those who receive the works have the freedom to use, run, copy, study, change, improve, redistribute, and/or distribute modified versions of the works without paying additional fees or obtaining additional permissions."
If the organization is not willing to sign the pledge, then that fact could be made known as well, along with their reasons. The FSF would keep such a list publicly available on its website of organizations that have been approached (and the date) and their responses (including the date they took the pledge or the reason for their refusal).
The FSF could recommend people only donate money to such organizations as have made that pledge. For non-profits already committed to making free works, being on this list would be a good way to advertise that fact.
With trillions of dollars expected to pour into foundations soon, this campaign might make a huge difference in funding for those who want to work on free/libre works. ..."
The deeper issue though is how the USA's culture since the Reagan-esque 1980s ("Greed is good") became focused on emphasizing exchange-economy transactions while relatively neglecting subsistence, gift, and planned transactions. We probably need all four types of transactions to be balanced more for a healthy resilient society. I explain more on that here:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY [youtube.com]
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
Ultimately, I feel the perspective shift in my sig about abundance is the key insight: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
A consequence of the USA ignoring this needed perspective shift -- such as by emphasizing yesterday's scarcity technologies like fossil fuels to help some big oil companies privatize gains while socializing risks and costs (like pollution) -- the USA is falling behind on basic research into things like, say, Sodium batteries (even as solid-state batteries might ultimately be better):
"SODIUM TAKEOVER! CATL Confirms Mass Deployment of Sodium Batteries for EVs"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOiAhtEEgEk [youtube.com]
"CATL’s confirmation of mass sodium-ion battery deployment signals a major shift in the EV industry, promising lower costs, improved cold-weather performance, and reduced reliance on lithium. This move could reshape entry-level EV pricing and intensify competition across global battery markets."
The political problem is that a technology of abundance like solar panels doesn't make people as dependent and controllable on a short time scale as making them rely on large distribution networks of refined fossil fuels.
This political issue for enforced dependency remains true even as it seems likely more energy from electricity and natural gas is apparently needed to refine oils into gasoline than it would take to power an EV to go the same distance as the gasoline-powered car. (Liquid fuels still have their merits though in some applications.)
http://evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm [evnut.com]
"How much electricity does it take to make a gallon of gasoline? We don't know - but here's one stab at it. Ballpark figures only, and NOT a supportable conclusion. The most important message to take away is that it is not trivial! This part of gasoline is ignored by the folks who are concerned about the big impact on our electrical grid if we were to suddenly shift all transportation from gasoline to electricity.
To extract one gallon of gasoline (or equivalent distillate): 9.66 kWh (maybe not all in the form of electricity*)
To refine that gallon: 2.73 kWh additional energy (maybe not all in the form of electricity*)
Total: 12.39 kWh per gallon.
*Roughly one-third of the energy content of a gallon of gasoline produced from California wells is input from natural gas. Less than 2/3's is net energy (probably a lot less!).
So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"
With China's (politically-problematical?) help, Africa is moving past that big oil dependency.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/climate/solar-south-africa-china.html [nytimes.com]
"Cheap Solar Is Transforming Lives and Economies Across Africa
Chinese panels are now so affordable that businesses and families are snapping them up, slashing their bills and challenging utilities. ...
What’s happening in South Africa is repeating across the continent. Key to this shift: China’s ambition to lead the world in clean energy."
China also has a different cultural attitude about sharing knowledge compared to the USA.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 03, @08:54PM
Those other sorts of transactions don't work well at the nation-state level. And much of that went away due to high mobility - people moving on average every 5-8 years. Not much point to such transactions when most people move on in a few years.
They wouldn't have the Great Firewall of China, if their attitude were more sharing.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Friday January 02, @02:35PM (5 children)
LOL they think that'll reduce what they charge, but IRL they'll just take the shortfall out of the grad student and post-doc paychecks. Or reduce spending on safety equipment, etc.
A better strategy would be pulling funding from places that support "publish or perish". You'll use a metric other than applicants paying to get published, or we'll pull some funding or preferential grants to other institutions.
Academic culture is already more or less atheist monastery complete with original sin, fire and brimstone preaching, inquisitions, etc, so turning it into a pure donation system or welfare system is not really all that bad of an idea if we're already at the point of paying a tithe to the church anyway.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, @06:01PM
> Academic culture is already more or less atheist monastery
Wow where do you get your info - Fox News? Academia is overrun with entrepreneur wannabes in waistcoats and bowties bullshitting eachother and name-dropping their collaborations, number of students and funding. Work is the absolute lowest degrading activity that nobody with any self-respect touches. The Asian peasant model... oh what a coincidence all the positions are occupied by Asians. They good at math, you know.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Sunday January 04, @06:59AM (3 children)
People undergoing academic training learn about standards of evidence. Those are really incompatible with full adherence to traditional religious beliefs.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday January 04, @04:25PM (2 children)
The religion they're pushing is, indeed, the opposite of that.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Sunday January 04, @11:16PM (1 child)
I'm not aware of any academic discipline that espouses religious beliefs. Perhaps you could enlighten me, so to speak.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 05, @02:39PM
Not my problem, but its not exactly hard to find apocalypse beliefs, original sin, hatred of other believers, mandatory dogma, peculiar language specific to the religion, a focus on spoken belief vs factual reasoning, inquisitional activity, foundation myths taken as absolute fact, etc