Why vs How: An Examination of Academic Publishing

The dissonance within academic research, is it starting to change?

I remember writing about research in my application to medical school. I spoke about the beauty within process. The rigorous search for truth that, if carried out the necessary drive and commitment, could yield answers to life’s most pressing questions. I knew very little about academic research before I entered college and fortunately my introduction was made by excellent mentors. Those full-time faculty and PhD students taught me everything I know and inspired a genuine curiosity in the pursuit of knowledge that I carry with me to this day. Yet, that spirit has not gone unchallenged. Let me introduce you to the world of academic publishing.

Deploying a mosquito trap in Costa Rica as part of my undergraduate honors thesis on mosquito-born disease

Scientific publishing works a little different than traditional publishing. Let us take a look at the two. If I owned a book publisher I would have lots of costs to cover. I would have to pay the writer for their manuscript, pay multiple editors to review the work and format it appropriately, pay artists for nice cover art, pay a marketing team to spread the word, pay for the costs of producing the books, and then finally pay for there distribution. After all those costs are covered, I would see a little profit when customers actually buy the books. The margins in the business are slim. The best publishers only making around a 10% profit margin in good years, meaning for every 10 dollars sold they only get to keep 1 dollar after covering all their costs.

Now lets look at how the academic publishing industry works. For context, the academic publishing industry has a yearly revenue of about 19 billion dollars. That is more than the entire music industry! They also have profit margins of 30% to 40%, which is larger than even the fabled margins of tech giants such as Apple and Google. This is how they do it.

Largely government-funded scientists create work which they give to publishers (academic journals) for free. Journals then get other government-funded scientists to review and edit that work for free. Once approved, journals offer a choice. Either the scientist pays $3,000 dollars (the average price in 2021) for something known as “open access’’ so that anyone can read it or allow the journal to sell expensive subscriptions for staggering profits to government-funded institutions and universities so that only those privileged few (usually other government-funded scientists) associated with them can read it.

As one scientist put it, “what other industry receives its raw materials from its customers, gets those same customers to carry out the quality control of those materials, and then sells the same materials back to the customers at a vastly inflated price?”.

For outsiders it’s often hard to believe, but it is painfully obvious for scientists whose careers are largely tied to how often they publish articles in the most well-respected of these journals. A field whose supposed goal is the free exchange of ideas and pure search for knowledge is reliant on being able to get past a pay-wall in order to carry it out. It is hard to miss the irony. The history behind how this industry came to exist is incredibly interesting but a little beyond the scope of this post, if you’re interested I encourage you to read this long-form essay in the Guardian.

Now why I am writing about this here, on a blog meant to explore orthopedics and global health? Alongside the trials and research projects I am helping run here in Tanzania, I have also been helping the residents craft their research proposals and protocols. Every resident at MOI is expected to complete a project and publish it during their extremely busy 3 years of training. It can be difficult, but there really is no better way in my opinion to learn about a topic then to dive into the literature, find a question no one has answered, and then design and carry out a study to answer that question. This is how experts are formed and innovation is fostered.

However, in order to begin and properly carry out this process you have to first have access to the existing literature. Do you see where I am going here?

One of the residents most common requests has been for me to help them get access to research articles, something the VPN on my computer and the connection to an American university who pays the exorbitant subscription fees to allows me to do. It’s a process I most definitely take for granted. When I search for literature on university wifi, there is hardly ever a research article I can’t get completely free of charge (to me at least). These orthopedic residents work at at Tanzania’s national hospital, which is attached to the most prestigious medical university in the country, and they are unable to access most scientific literature through a traditional pathway because the university can’t pay the large access fees to big academic publishers. This is a massive barrier to conducting and publishing research. I have had many discussions with multiple scientists and physicians, both here in Tanzania and across the globe and the problem is the same. It is incredibly frustrating for them and it’s not hard to see why.

I know I have painted journals in a certain light so far, but I do want to take a beat to give them a small break. Academic publishers have served critical roles in the scientific publishing process, curating, ensuring quality, and distributing the vast amount of science that is produced every year. The system is also not the result of any individual publisher’s actions. The incentives to publish in academia are complex and journals identified a need in the community and filled it during the explosion of science after World War II. Some journals will offer discounted access to institutions in lower-resourced settings, but it is nowhere near universal and often not enough. The problem persists and they have so tightly ingrained in the scientific distribution process, with worldwide recognition and followings, that no attempt to disrupt the industry has so far been successful.

So how does science move forward, balancing the lofty ideals of science with the for-profit industry that dominates a crucial aspect of the process?

There is no great answer to that question. A few large academic publishers, such as Wolters-Kluwer and Elsevier, control the vast amount of the market of published academic literature across nearly all fields of study. Everything from quantum mechanics to psychology, history, and everything else in between. Without access to the academic articles they hold the rights to publish, scientist’s and academics of every discipline would be able to unable to do their jobs. It’s a powerful monopoly that science has entangled itself with, and not one that will be easy to get out of. The immense popularity of illegal websites such as Sci-Hub, which offer free downloads of many scientific articles, represents the immense discontent with the status quo. Understandably, these avenues are under near constant legal threat from publishers and are not likely the long term solution to problems I have outlined above, but there are glimmers of hope.

One solution would be for scientists to publish their own work directly online, cutting out the middleman. This however exposes the key role in quality control and distribution journals are currently playing and highlights the fact that no good alternative currently exists. Some websites such as OA.Works are attempting to help solve this by working in parallel with scientists to get around the pay-walls of academic publishers. They legally distribute text-only versions of any published article. I am not a legal expert but somehow this gets around most legal challenges (If you know why please reach out and let me know!)

This creative solution makes the scientific work freely-accessible while still allowing scientists to harness the benefits from being associated with journals, most notably the good quality control and academic prestige. Government funders such as the National Institute of Health (NIH), the largest funder of medical research in the US, and NGOs like the Gates Foundation are increasingly making free access after publication a requirement of their funding. This makes it likely that we will continue to see organizations like OA.Works grow in popularity and use.

People have long claimed that not only is change possible in academic publishing but that it is destined to happen. The internet and the launch of digital media in the early 2000’s was supposed to be the end of the academic publishing industry as we know it, with free access to all articles at the tips of your fingers no matter who you are. Yet here we are more than 20 years later and not much has changed. Academic publishers found a way to not just persevere through the suspected challenge, but turn it into an asset by harnessing the lower publication costs associated with digital articles. The 19 billion dollar industry continues to roll along largely untouched.

Any change will undoubtedly take a lot of work and effort on the part of scientists and those that fund and incentivize their research - largely from government sources, aka your tax dollars - if there is ever going to be true change. Until, or should we say if, that happens science will continue to remain in it’s rather bizarre state of existence and researchers around the globe will be systematically separated from the information they need to take part in the academic process. Change is overdue and may very well be happening, but it is hard to bet against the money and power of the academic publishing industry.

I still, perhaps foolishly, hold onto hope. The belief in the optimistic idealized values of science that I wrote about in my applications those many years ago continues to smolders on. A more equitable system with a free and open exchange of high-quality knowledge may one day exist. Hopefully that optimism is not misplaced.

Until next time,

Jamieson

P.S.

A big thank you to Gabe W, my esteemed former roomate and classmate who got me started exploring this topic. I encourage all my academic peers to consider open access journals and explore sites such as OA.Works. Remember that publishing in a journal shouldn’t be the final step of your work! It should be reachable and readable by all. This in turn will also help you with the all important impact factor of your work as others are able to read and cite it within their own research. A win-win situation, what is there not to like?