I write research articles for my living. I did my research projects and then I need to publish the outcomes of them somewhere. Recently, I even feel that I enjoy the writing of the paper more than the research project itself. But this is beyond the topic that I would like to talk about in this post.
Today’s topic is Open Access. No one should pay to read the research papers we have written. From the poorest person to the richest 10 trillionaires. From our friendly colleagues to our harshest critics. Even from the things that I hate such as those bloody web crawlers for LLM training data. Just no one should pay to read research papers. It is simply because the knowledge we generated is a public good. Public good should be free at least as in free beer.
With this being written, it should be clear that research papers should not be behind the paywall. Even though I write it this way, I think the metaphor of “paywall” and the adjective “paywalled”, like many contemporary academic writing, are unpopulated. 1 Unpopulated writing is usually a noun or noun phrase, or even a nominalized noun from a verb (those -izations or -ifications). An example of unpopulated writing is “An attack”: We don’t know who attacks whom. It can progressively give more information by transiting from an unpopulated noun, a sentence in passive voice (“you have been attacked”), to a sentence in active voice (“Cops attacked you”). We can only understand all the parties in a transaction, when we reformulate the “paywall” from its noun form to its verb form. We need to answer all the question words in this sentence about the paywall: Who pays whom how, how much, and for what?
The first part is simple: To whom? Because there is only one possibility: Commercial Publishers of academic journals take the money, not the researchers writing those research papers. Chances are, the publishers are the so-called Big Five: Elsevier (or its parent company RELX), Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis (or its parent company Informa), and Sage. Down the list are university presses and academic organizations such as Oxford University Press and American Psychological Association (APA). I just wanted to talk about those Big Five today. It is because unlike university presses and academic organizations, the Big Five basically are purely commercial companies. They are purely for profit and answering only to their share holders. Not the universities or their academic members. In a way, we can say that these publishers only care about the academia, as long as the academia has a wallet holding money.
The Dutch company Elsevier, for example, has a market share of 16%. Many important academic journals such as The Lancet are published through it. Springer Nature was formed from the merger of two German companies, Springer 2 and Holtzbrinck. Because Holtzbrinck owned a lot of companies, including the UK company Macmillan 3 and its many subsidiaries, Springer Nature is also the publisher of many important journals, including the namesake Nature. As said, it owns a lot of brands (in the academic publishing jargon, they have a lot of imprints), including Open Access journals from BioMed Central (BMC), European Physical Journal (EPJ), and Scientific Reports. Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Sage are in comparison smaller than Elsevier and Sprining Nature, but they publish also important journals. Just take my field as an example: Wiley was the publisher of all ICA journals, e.g., Journal of Communication; 4 Taylor & Francis is the publisher of Communication Methods & Measures, Information, Communication & Society, and Political Communication; Sage is the publisher of Communication Research, New Media & Society, and Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ, to which I will come back later).
The key takeaway is that, these Big Five publishers do publish some important academic journals. They are important for a reason. From our perspective, it looks great on our CVs to have papers published in these important journals. These journals, as well as their publishers, become the arbiters of power in the academia. However, we need to think about how these publishers get into that position. Is it because they did something great to the academia so that they can have such a power? In my opinion, no. The articles published in those journals are written by academics. The articles are peer reviewed also by academics. The editors are academics. In many cases, even the editorial assistants are academics. Actually, it is not those important journals that make our CVs look good. Instead, it is because important researchers published their papers in those journals. And then those important journals become an indicator of quality. If researcher X and researcher Y both publish their papers in journal A, probably X and Y are equally important researchers.
So, why does these commercial publishers put our papers behind a paywall and can get money from our papers? Well, in most of the case, we forfeited some of our rights in order to let this happen. In the worse case, we have to transfer the copyright to the publisher, therefore we don’t even own our own article. In most cases, we have to at least conceit the exclusive publishing right to the publisher. And by signing these documents, usually mindlessly, these commercial publishers have the legal basis to put our papers behind a paywall. To write it in a populated way: Authors, in order to publish their articles, allow the commercial publishers to hide their articles behind the paywall so that the commercial publishers can make profit out of their articles. 5 6
The next obvious question is: Who wants this paywall? Academics don’t because they want more people to read their articles; or they want to read their colleagues’ articles. I think there is only one party who wants this paywall: these commercial publishers. The paywall creates a $25-Billion academic publishing industry. This amount of money is obscene in my opinion. We are not talking about private jet industry ($16B), which mostly the rich would pay. So, I think it is a great transition point to another question: Who pay and for what?
In general, there are a few parties who pay for the access of research papers from these commercial publishers. This is the first way these commercial publishers can earn money from the artificial scarcity of information access created by the paywall. It creates a sense of “have not”. In general, I don’t think individual researchers would pay one-off fee to access individual paywalled article. Let’s take Information, Communication & Society as an example: One has to pay 48 Euros to access one article. This is surely overpriced: Just as an example, for this price you can buy three full academic books from the academic publisher Polity.
Instead, university libraries usually pay these commercial publishers for the access of all employees of the entire university. It is called a “subscription.” However, it is not like the subscription in the 1990s kind of sense: You subscribe to The New Yorker, for example, the New Yorker will mail the magazine every week or two to you by post and then you own the magazine. No, it is subscription in the Netflix-kind-of way. The library never owns the articles. Instead, the subscription gives the university the access to the archive of some selected available articles according to the contract. One can download those articles. However, when the university library stops paying the commercial publishers, the researchers of that university will not be able to download any more articles instantly. There is one important problem to this. University libraries usually have to sign a NDA not to disclose publicly how much money they pay these publishers for the access. 7
Another stream of venue that commercial publishers earn from us is through the so-called article processing charge, or APC. Actually, APC is a euphemism, or a word without an -ism, a lie. These publishers never charge us for the AP of APC, they charge us for not letting them put our articles behind their paywalls, so that the articles are open access. Once again, this deal, like the subscription, is scandalous. The APC can be ridiculous high. Fair, some publishers charge different rates for researchers from different part of the world. But let’s take Nature Human Behaviour, as an example, the so-called APC is €10690.00 (that can buy 668 academic books from Polity, can fill up a small library). Flat. Even with a so-called impact factor of 15, no one would find this APC a fair deal. Except Springer Nature of course.
As the APC is usually overpriced, open access becomes a lucrative business for these publishers as a side effect of the paywall. Butler and colleagues 8 estimate the total APC revenue of every journal from 2015-2018. The most lucrative journal, Scientific Reports by Springer Nature, should have received $105 million from APC alone in 4 years! One journal!
Similar to the direct dealing with these publishers for subscriptions, universities and even countries are dealing with these publishers to get a deal for these open access agreements. The most famous is the Projekt DEAL of German universities for reaching deals with Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer Nature. My organization, for instance, also has some deals with Sage and Taylor & Francis. From my (a researcher’s) perspective, it is goodies. I don’t need to pay APC when publishing my articles as open access in some selected journals of these big publishers. But those deals are not free, libraries still need to pay. And university libraries are mostly funded by tax payers’ money. Just like any of these deals that only those with money can make, these deals widen the gap between the haves and havenots. Or the gap between researchers from the Global North and the Global South.
Up to this point of my analysis, a critic might say: These Big Five publishers are for-profit commercial firms, not charity associations. 9 What’s so wrong with earning money? Besides, they have cost to pay too to keep their business running. Indeed, it is fine to earn money. And it is also true that these commercial firms do need money to keep their business running. But there are two things bother me.
First, the Big Five Publishers know that they can operate their business like selling status symbols. Because publishing in their important journals is a signal of (higher) class. Similar businesses would be luxury conglomerates like LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE. Carrying a Louis Vuitton bag or drinking a Moët is also a signal of class. Because they think that there is no real competition in that space, they can mark up their subscription fee or APC, because there is no way to put a price tag on a leap in class perception. Therefore, the APC can be €10690.00. But look, rich people buy goods from LVMH as a luxury. Should tax payers’ money go that way too?
Second, what the Big Five Publishers doing is rent seeking (like all those digital platforms). Rent seeking is now often associated with manipulating public policy. These Big Five Publishers did that too. But I am talking rent seeking in the traditional sense: The paywall actually matches the classic rent seeking example of a lord setting up a chain across the river and collecting fee from boats for using the river. The Marxist term is appropriation. Setting up the chain across the river does not add any value to the river. In fact, it decreases the utility of the river. The only reason for locking the river is for the lord to earn money out of the users (boats). The users do not benefit from the locked river. Simply put, the river should not be locked in the first place. Similarly, the paywall does not add any value to the journal, as well as the papers therein. It prevents people from utilizing the knowledge. The only reason for the paywall to exist is for the profit of the publishers.
Now, I need to answer the burning question: These Big Five Publishers also need money to maintain and produce the journals. So, it should be alright for them to collect money from university libraries (subscription) and researchers (APC), right?
To answer this question, I need to first reveal a fact: By some estimates, the operating margin of scientific journals is over 30% (Elsevier’s is even 38%). 10 This level of profit is insanely high. Apple, for instance, is said to be a very successful tech company for its very high profit margin. Its operating margin? 26%. Only luxury products have a similar level: Gucci, for instance, has an operating margin of 33%, still lower than Elsevier. Other sectors that can have this high margin are Big Pharma and Big Banks. All of them are oligarchies.
The reason why academic journals have such a high operating margin is that it is actually super cheap to operate an academic journal these days. These Big Publishers outsource all labor intensive parts of journal production to either volunteers seeking prestige (academics writing the articles, reviewing the articles, and editing the journal) or super cheap offshoring labors (e.g., typesetting and customer service). The decision to use offshore labors for important tasks such as typesetting and customer service means that these publishers actually do not care about the product. Previously, I wrote about Schrödinger’s corrections: Typesetting and the so-called Proofing procedures are like betting these days, because the typesetters don’t care about our paper (probably because they are poorly paid) and they can introduce errors into our papers. I said I will come back to JMCQ: Yes, I have a new research, which I really liked, published in JMCQ in October. But fuck, the typesetters introduced a lot of formatting errors in that paper. My coauthors and I immediately complained. Despite several follow-up e-mails and up to this point in December, we still have an error-laden paper published online. We look like a bunch of idiots and I am so ashamed of the paper now. Even feel sorry for it ending up like this. I have no joy what so ever in publishing that paper in JMCQ.
Because Big Five Publishers outsourced all the labor intensive part, they can enjoy the economies of scale. From their perspective, the additional (or marginal) cost of publishing one more journal is decreasing when they publish more journals. Their software and layout design can be reused across journals. 11 The only recurring cost for them is web hosting, data storage, and DOI registration. 12 The unit cost of all three gets cheaper when one buys more. However, the (time) cost for academics to write, review and edit articles does not get cheaper when a journal publishes more papers; or more journals are published. The volunteering of peer review is not sustainable, 13 while these Big Five Publishers enjoy sustained profit.
Let’s face it: Hosting electronic journals is not more complicated than, for instance, hosting a moderately popular blog. The traffic to a journal is not that high. Most (social science) paper might have a few thousand views in its life time. You can imagine how cheap the web hosting can be. DOI registration, even in its most expensive case, is like €6 per item. If you register 8000 a year, the volume discount can reduce it to €1.3. In fact, DOI is not essential (although not convenient). 14 One can certainly do without. The fact that many university libraries can host and operate non-commercial academic journals themselves actually shows how cheap (monetarily speaking) it is to host electronic academic journals now. 15 With tools such as Open Journal System (OJS), it is super easy to host a complete system for managing a non-commercial academic journal.
The bottom line: These Big Five publishers are greedy and I should not support them anymore. Of course, I don’t mean that you should do piracy such as using SciHub. But I cannot stop you. But surely, you should install Unpaywall to obtain the available legal version of a paywalled article.
We must be more reflexive about our relationships with these Big Five publishers. You need to ask yourself if you want to review articles for, let’s say Scientific Reports, when it charges authors €2390.00 for APC but pay reviewers nothing. Should you still sit in the editorial board of a journal when it charges authors €2390.00 for APC? 16 I never believe in TINA (There is no alternatives). There are so many alternatives. There are great, reputable open access journals that are not published by commercial publishers. For instance, Computational Communication Research (University of Amsterdam Press/HOPE), International Journal of Communication (USC Annenberg Press), and the journal published by my organization: methods, data, analyses (mda, GESIS/University of Mannheim). 17 18
Instead of paying €2390.00 APC to some multi-billion companies, how about donate 10% of this amount to an independent journal to support our comrades’ works? It would be also good to donate another 10% to support the development of Open Access infrastructure, such as the development of Open Journal System. 19 And then you can keep the rest for your next wonderful research. For instance, hiring a student helper, or two. They need those money more so than those multi-billion companies. 20
I borrow this idea from the book Learn to write badly: How to succeed in the social sciences by Michael Billig. ↩
Note: That’s not Axel Springer SE, the publisher of the Bild Zeitung. ↩
Macmillan itself is among the Big Five of English language publishers: Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. ↩
ICA journals are now published by Oxford University Press. ↩
A common rebuttal, or just “oh, what’s wrong with this?”, is that for other types of publications, let’s say novels, non-fictions, or even the closeset form, academic textbooks, authors are routinely signing those documents to give their publishers many rights to earn money out of the authors’ works. However, there is a crucial difference here. In those cases and no matter how noble the language the authors would use, the authors and the publishers have the common for-profit objective: They both can earn money out of every copy of the published work sold (no matter how little). In those sign documents, there must be a directive on royalty and the authors should be able to get a certain percentage cut out of every copy sold. In the academic journal case, no such arrangement is in place. Therefore, publishers never pay academics (authors, editors, reviews, or even the editorial assistants) for money earned from the published works. If they would be paid, they are “paid” only by the “prestige”. It can be either, or both, priceless or worthless. ↩
Another rebuttal is that many news websites also have paywalls. Why is it an issue only for academic publications? Here, the difference is that the news organization who set up the paywall is also paying their own journalists, editors, etc. to produce the news content. The news organization collects money from readers to support the content creation, whereas in the case of academic publication, academics are volunteers, economically speaking. ↩
Leigh-Ann Butler, Lisa Matthias, Marc-André Simard, Philippe Mongeon, Stefanie Haustein; The oligopoly’s shift to open access: How the big five academic publishers profit from article processing charges. Quantitative Science Studies 2023; 4 (4): 778–799. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00272 ↩
In my native language and the signature unkind tone of the people there: 佢地做生意㗎，開善堂咩你估？ ↩
Sources: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04820 and https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502 ↩
Man, we are not talking about The New Yoker kind of classy design. The layouts of most of these commercial publishers are ugly as hell. ↩
There is also an one-off (e)ISSN registration. But in most countries (e.g., Germany), this is free. Also, I am assuming we are talking about electronic journals. Who still reads paper journals? ↩
Now as an associated editor of a journal, I know it from first hand that this system is broke and is not sustainable. But this is the topic of another day. ↩
For instance, International Journal of Communication (IJOC) does not issue DOIs. It is still a great non-commercial journal. ↩
Not to mention the hideous predatory journals are a valid fraud only because the cost of running a journal without any peer review is so fucking low. ↩
You shouldn’t. Look at the example of the previous editors of NeuroImage: https://doi.org/10.1162/imag_e_00007 ↩
If you must published with big publishers, prioritize university presses such as Oxford University Press (OUP, although PNAS Nexus is a problematic case), not the Big Five. If you must published with the Big Five, choose journals that have a nonrestrictive license agreement as well as nonrestricitive pre- or postprint policies. Find it here: https://openpolicyfinder.jisc.ac.uk/ Deposit your papers to an open access repository so that extension such as Unpaywall knows where to find it. ↩
I don’t want to burden you with tasks. But if you want to support these non-commercial Open Access journals and if you don’t know how to do it yet, learn how to write papers with software other than your word processor; as well as managing your references with standards such as BibTeX. Even when the journals only accept docx, it will save the journals a lot of time really processing your articles. ↩
Just to remind you, these journals from Big Five are operating at an margin of over 30%. Therefore, these 30% goes straight to the pocket of the shareholders. Now, you have donated 20%, which is still lower than this over 30% margin. ↩
They are facing an existential crisis because of those anti-student-helper use cases of LLMs. ↩