Academic Publishing: Knowledge in the interest of profit

Aislinn Shanahan Daly explains how publishing under capitalism is dominated by corporations, and how everyone in society loses out as a result. She argues that collective organising by researchers and staff within academic institutions and systemic change are needed to put an end to the for-profit rip-off of knowledge.

When we think of the big money-making companies in modern society, we might immediately look to those of the tech “Broligarchy”, such as Meta, Tesla and OpenAI. Amidst these headline-grabbing ventures, corporate academic publishers often seem to sail by unnoticed. It would be a mistake not to examine the obscene profit margins of this industry, which outperforms even the likes of Google. As of April 2025, top academic publisher Elsevier’s profit margins stood at 37% compared to Google at 34.3%.

The corporate exploitation of research is not just something that concerns researchers or those wishing to publish work. Big academic publishers have a huge and invasive control over what knowledge is shared in society and how it is distributed. Just as patents work to prohibit the production of life-saving medicines so that private companies can profit from them, the privatisation of academic research means that not only must people pay exorbitant fees to read published research, but researchers must pay to publish it too. This is exclusionary and leaves the ability to research and publish in the hands of a few.

Privatisation

Many will remember Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted sex offender and accomplice to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. Her father, Robert Maxwell, played a central role in the privatisation of academic publishing. He stated that his greatest desire in the wake of WW2 was to become a millionaire. Alongside Paul Rosbaud, he bought up all the shares of the floundering publishing houses Butterworths and Springer, and formed a new venture named Pergamon.

As scientific research was booming in the post-war period and universities received massive state funding, Pergamon created a new model. This bypassed the need for articles to be rigorously peer-reviewed by experts in their respective disciplines. Pergamon simply created new journals for burgeoning fields, and would sell the individual subscriptions for these journals to academic libraries. By the end of the 1960s, commercial academic publishing was booming. Concerns about copyright were dissolved by the prestige attached to these international journals. Maxwell, whose commitment to science was questionable, sold Pergamon to Elsevier for just under half a million dollars in the 1990s. The story of Pergamon is just one part of the bigger picture of how academic publishing evolved into a profiteering racket.

It is useful to look at how the publishing process today operates within these profit-driven frameworks. Say I want to publish an article with a big publisher – I would choose them because I want my research to be seen by as many people as possible to increase my employability. I then have to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC). These range from an average of €2,000-2,500 to a whopping €11k for some Springer Nature journals. APCs act as a barrier to scholarly research being published efficiently, or published at all. Most researchers can’t afford to pay these fees, and need to secure external funding to cover APCs before their research can be published.

If I even manage to get my article into a big journal, I will most likely lose my copyright entitlements to it and the article will belong to the publisher. I, and the institution I am associated with, make no direct profit from this process whatsoever. My research, if publicly funded, has been supported by the state or my institution. However, the publisher makes thousands from the fees I pay to publish, the continuing subscription fees it charges to academic libraries and consortia, and the charges to unaffiliated individual readers.

Fraud and exploitation 

Fraud pervades the corporate publishing world. Last year, Wiley had to shut down 19 journals due to issues surrounding research fraud, like the use of fabricated data and the selling of authorship. Recently, 50% of Taylor and Francis articles and papers were found to have ethics issues.

AI only adds to the ethics crisis by enhancing our ability to produce convincing false data and images. This would not be so much of an issue if it wasn’t for the profit motive underlying academic publishing. The outrageous profitability of the APC model means that journals will publish research that is not up to standard. This is exemplified by an incident where the reputable journal Frontiers published a peer-reviewed article containing fraudulent AI generated diagrams depicting a ridiculous image of a rat with giant genitals. It was retracted only after 48 hours.

Another massive issue is the ‘reproducibility’ crisis, where up to 65% of researchers have failed to produce the same results with a previous research framework. Researchers are under immense pressure to produce positive results due to the pressure to publish and continue to secure funding. This leads to an exaggeration of the significance of results and moreover unreliable scientific knowledge.

When researchers’ working conditions are degraded and their wages stagnate, it is no longer in their immediate interest to be open to peer-reviewing for the sake of good karma. It is generally not a paid activity, and seen as a contribution to the scholarly community. Publishers are exploiting this unpaid labour for profit, but more crucially, this voluntary model has led to reviewer fatigue and subsequent delays for papers to get reviewed. This all becomes an incentive for publishers to fast-track articles without rigorous examination from experts in the field. Offering paid incentive to peer-reviewers is often dismissed by publishers as creating a conflict of interest – yet inflated APCs are never touted as a conflict of interest for the publisher.

The barriers between ‘academic’ and ‘public’ knowledge, and growing mistrust of the ‘experts’ is something that has played into the hands of broad far-right movements. In 2023, the Pew Research Centre found that 27% of Americans have ‘not too much’ or ‘no’ confidence in scientists, compared with a figure of 12% in 2020. In an era of fake news and diminishing trust in institutions, it comes as no surprise that people’s faith in so-called expertise to guide and condition their lives in question. A clear example of this is the level of distrust in the legitimacy of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was a watershed moment where the far right was able to channel people’s frustrations into skepticism and conspiracy theories against the vaccine.

Open access & publishing from below

In September 2024, a neuroscience professor at UCLA named Lucina Uddin, filed a class-action lawsuit against 6 of the major academic publishers – Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer.  The first 5 publishers mentioned here dominate 50% of the entire market, and Elsevier alone takes up 16%. The lawsuit found the research process suffered in three main ways:

1. Peer-reviewing is not consistently remunerated despite being an essential part of the writing and publication business.
2. Researchers can only submit their work to one journal at a time, which can lead to publication delays.
3. Preprints – manuscripts that have not been published yet – cannot be shared, meaning that research findings are often held in limbo while they go through lengthy review processes.

While Uddin’s lawsuit takes a shot at a deserving enemy, it is unlikely to fundamentally alter the state of academic publishing. The whole industry of academic publishing in capitalism is fundamentally flawed. Real change will require a radical democratisation of knowledge production and dissemination.

In response to the move towards privatisation, a movement for open access publishing has grown significantly over the last 3 decades. The principles of open access are even touted now by the big publishers themselves. They advertise these initiatives as creating opportunities for research to have more discoverability within and beyond its field, basically increasing competition.

2020 was the first year that more articles were published through open access protocols than not. However, the most common approaches to open access still involve financial barriers such as APCs. Despite this apparent support for some open access principles on the surface, big publishers actively lobby against it at a state level. Elsevier has lobbied British and US governments not to adopt open access over the past few decades, even participating in a bizarre PR campaign trying to associate open access with government censorship.

Against the privatisation of knowledge, groups such as the Radical Open Access Collective advocate for scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing. They view the ecosystem of academic publishing as a digital commons that would be better managed collectively rather than by corporations. As commendable as these projects are, how much change can grassroots, not-for-profit publishing achieve against the profit-churning beast of corporate academic publishing?

Much of this not-for-profit publishing work is not funded by universities. Library staff and academics often take it on voluntarily. It is difficult to provide incentives for individual academics to publish their work on these platforms, especially if they are early in their careers and looking for more people to read their work. The impact-factor model leads everything to the same outcome – people wanting to publish in top-shelf, elite journals to make sure they stay attractive candidates for future funding. In a funding application researchers will generally state what journals they want to publish in – which reinforces the status of the big publishers to the detriment of smaller grassroots efforts. In this sense, the precarity of academic work is intimately tied to the corporate publishing system, and in fact fuels it.

The system is intent on continuing to privatise universities which makes any real widening of open access initiatives very difficult. The National Open Research Forum in Ireland have raised awareness of the issue, but they do not go far enough to dismantle the profit motive behind academic publishing. Alternatively, the Irish Open Access Publishers are in favour of the Diamond open access model, which involves no APC fees, meaning articles published are free to both publish and read. It is encouraging to see a growing directory of Irish journals and monographs that are fully open access.

Taking on privatisation

Ultimately, to democratise the production of academic knowledge, there needs to be a political stand taken against the neoliberalisation of universities.

The overall picture for higher education in Ireland is grim. A 300 million funding gap for higher education was identified in Ireland in 2022. The Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT) reported that we spend less on tertiary education than all other OECD states in relation to GDP. Crucially, the class position of workers in academia is changing. It was once a sector that allowed intellectual freedom and creative control over their work, and now many are entering the workforce with this ideal in mind – but the reality does not match up.

In the North, universities which faced years of UCU strikes from academic staff up until the end of 2023 have successfully normalised stagnating wages, precarity, unbearable workloads, and funding cuts that disproportionately attack the arts and humanities. Academic staff are increasingly under pressure to approach research as a commodity – as an accessory to job stability – and to frame their research to appeal to funders under the privatised rubric laid out by institutions, publishers and the state. This cut-throat, neoliberal approach to higher education and research is the real problem.

The stakes are high. Research needs to be seen as a public good that is freely available to all, and knowledge should be accessible beyond paywalls and embargoes. Grassroots opposition to the current status quo is inspiring, but systemic change is needed to resolve things. Organising collectively through trade unions such as IFUT and the Postgraduate Workers Organisation is one avenue to pursue this aim. Unfortunately, the issue of open access is not really on the agenda for trade unions. The University and College Union’s most recent public document on open access publishing is from 2013.

Researchers are largely expected to take the decision upon themselves to seek out ways to promote their work through open access. Some universities have adopted policies nominally requiring staff to make their work available in some form where possible through open repositories. However, the onus cannot be solely on the individual – state intervention in the market is necessary. Institutions should be adequately funded to produce in-house publishing schemes that operate on the basis of producing valid knowledge that is beneficial to society and freely accessible for all. Furthermore, the private ownership of all research infrastructure should be totally abolished. Socialists should support the fight for knowledge as a public good – collectively owned, democratically controlled, and free from profiteering.