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3 Major Financial Concerns of The Academic Publishing Industry and Their Impact on Educational Institutions

Scholarly and Academic Publishing Profit Margins

Journal Publishing

Conventional publishers acquire their key assets from academics without charge. Authors donate the texts of new articles and the rights to publish them. Editors and referees donate the peer-review judgments to improve and validate their quality.1,3 But then conventional publishers charge for access to the resulting articles, with no exception for authors, editors, referees, or their institutions. Publishers argue that they add value to the submitted manuscripts, which is true. But other players in the game, such as authors, editors, and referees, add far more value than publishers. For funded research, the funding agency is another critical player. It, too, must pay for access to the resulting articles, even when the cost of a research project is hundreds or thousands of times greater than the cost of publication. Among these five value-adders—authors, editors, referees, funders, and publishers—publishers add the least value and generally demand ownership rights.

The fact that scholarly journal publishers do not pay the authors of the articles they publish but charge the universities for which those authors work to access those same articles, and the enormous profit margins that this system generates. These were two of the trends behind the Open Access movement, which we will cover in a later module. Currently, academic libraries spend around 80 percent of their collections budgets not on monographs but on digital database subscriptions.4

Open Access, in some ways the sibling movement to OER in scholarly journal publishing, is a movement that came about as an effort to both counter this pressure on universities and library budgets and reduce barriers to access of scholarship. We’ll cover that more in Module 6.

Some Future Trends in Scholarly Publishing

Unsurprisingly, a lack of competition between publishers has had a significant impact on the price of scholarship. Decades of subscription cost increases and talk of 40 percent profit margins for the biggest names in academic publishing have been concerns for academic libraries for years. Unfortunately, unsustainable pricing is an issue that has not garnered much attention within the larger academy. This is perhaps due to the peculiarity of the economics of scholarly publishing, whereby the main consumers of academic research (academics and students) are largely shielded from the cost.

Aside from purely financial considerations, consolidation, and commercialization have the potential to cause harm to the integrity of science itself. Increasingly, publishers favor positive results and novel studies. Researchers, realizing what is likely to be published, may then direct their research to meet these demands. Lately, scientists have begun to reckon with the consequences of publication bias, including bringing awareness to the replication crisis and advocating for high-impact journals to highlight negative results in studies.

Publishers as Research Analytics Providers

While big publishers have been creating new journals and purchasing smaller publishers and independent journals, they have also expanded their portfolios to include products and services relevant to other parts of the research life cycle. For example, along with its scholarly publications, Elsevier is also the owner of Scopus, SciVal, Pure, Clinicalkey, Mendeley, SSRN, and several other tools that researchers, librarians, and institutions rely on to support the research endeavor.

As these publisher brands continue to expand and integrate other pieces of academic infrastructure into their portfolios, there is growing concern about the implications this will have on the academy. While it may be feasible for scholars and institutions to publish their journals and make their research available, it is much harder to imagine them recreating tools like SciVal. This tool pulls data from other Elsevier products to visualize research performance and benchmark scholars relative to their peers. It is perhaps telling them that recently Elsevier has rebranded itself as a “global information analytics business”, choosing to highlight its value not in publishing but in analytics tools, which are supported using data generated via its publishing arm.

To learn more about the consolidation of academic infrastructure, review: Posada, Alejandro and George Chen (2018). Inequality in Knowledge Production: The Integration of Academic Infrastructure by Big Publishers. Licensed under CC-BY.

Final Remarks

Academic publishing, including textbooks, scholarly monographs, and journal articles, is a massive, complex industry with multiple stakeholders at work. There are billions of dollars at stake and the industry is currently in a state of disruption due to the growth of both OER and OA. To work in Open Educational Resources, one must have at least a basic understanding of the current trends in academic and scholarly publishing.

A major trend to keep an eye on will be the moves that for-profit publishers are making to monetize OER content by bundling it with proprietary systems such as testing services and reading platforms. While some OER publishers, such as BCcampus and OpenStax, do offer instructor-only material, the upkeep of such systems requires consistent funding and labor hour input. How well OER will be able to evolve to meet consistent instructor demand for such digital services will become more apparent during the next decade.

It is not the goal of either the OER or OA movements to destroy the for-profit publishing industry. At least, it’s not my goal. Nor has it been, as far as I know, the goal of my colleagues who work in these areas. Rather, Open Educational Resources and Open Access seek to use existing technologies to make open and freely accessible what can be made so, if it can be made so well. There are some things the publishing industry does that can never be replicated by the often DIY ethic of OER and OA. Science textbooks can cost millions of dollars to develop and take a staff of many people years to do so. Publishers can offer ongoing support that requires to be trained, skilled, professional labor to do. And publishers can update textbooks with new editions, whereas many OER textbooks are (currently, anyway), one-and-done affairs.

It also remains to be seen what impact the increasing move to digital textbooks will ultimately mean for the secondary textbook market, which is not a favorite of publishers. If a textbook is digital-only, bundled inextricably with proprietary software and reading platforms, then no secondary market can exist for that textbook.

Whatever the future holds, the OER professional will always be an actor working within the system of scholarly and academic publishing. And like any industry professional, keeping up to date on one’s industry is an essential component of the profession.

References

Acknowledgements

Preceding section adapted material from:

License

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Open Educational Resources for Librarians and Educators Copyright © 2024 by Craig Finlay is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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