Exploitative Practices in the Publishing Industry

The traditional scientific publishing industry is rife with exploitative practices, which place undue burden on researchers and contribute to systemic inequities within the scientific community

Today, the scientific publishing industry generates 26 billion dollars per year. The whole publishing process is an extreme shameful lose-win game played by the publishing houses.

The billions earned by this industry are at the expense of ‘voluntary’ work done by scientists in the peer-review process as Editors and Reviewers. It has been calculated that scientists spent 100 million hours of free work in 2021 in peer-reviewing.

Authors of scientific papers pay for publishing from 2-11k USD per paper. They also pay for open access another 2-3K USD per paper should they wish their papers would be outside a paywall where readers would have to pay 35-60 USD to download a pdf. Authors also must sign a complete and perpetual copyright handoff to journals. Therefore, loosing rights as content creators.

The scientific publishing industry is a prestige industry. To build prestige this industry’s value creation plays with selective filters of high rejection to ever increase their fees. Some proudly displays their rejection indices to be 98%! To enhance value creation the scientific publishing industry created the impact factor.

Scientists must fulfill 2 main conditions to publish in the so-called high impact journals:

1) they must belong to a select club of high ended science, and

2) they must afford to pay those excruciating fees

Those conditions are not only cruel, but they also clearly disfavor young scientists in their early careers, disruptive non-dogmatic science and those who simply cannot pay. In another words, they hinder science development in its very core.

Perhaps unaware that impact factor is part of the value creation of the scientific publishing industry, and not of authors, the impact factor has been adopted by departments, universities, research institutes and, grants’ foundations to evaluate scientific production and worse, a scientist rank and reputation. Those who made to publish in outrageously expensive journals are considered more genius.

The whole game is perverse and misaligned with true scientific quest.

As with the rest of science is currently dealt (intellectual property-IP rights, domain-specific know-how, research data), the current scientific publishing models is absurdly expensive and monopolized in the hands of few where 50% of those 26 bi USD are held by 5 companies, the rest being shared by 50k journals worldwide (25k in the English language).