There is a lot of great reading material on this subject and a lot of hard-working, courageous people are also working on changing the situation. This also means that everything I write here has been written better or in more depth somewhere else.
The reason I wrote this post is to serve as a growing (digital garden style) summary I keep for myself and to share with people outside academia as well. I will update this post to collect links and sources for statements over time.
Parasites
To start with some key background information: In academic publishing, in most cases the authors of articles pay to publish what they write. Yes, that sounds a bit crazy. But then, providing a stable infrastructure to provide access to scientific articles and quality control1 for making sure what is published can be considered a scientific article, costs money and resources.
There is a huge and hugely profitable industry providing such scientific publishing services. The big players (Big Publishing2 in the following) is companies such as Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis or Elsevier. They offer researchers infrastructure for hosting journals, organizing peer review and turning manuscripts eventually into web articles and PDFs considered part of documented, accumulating scientific knowledge3. Sounds ok, right?
Well, except that academic publishing, as currently organized, is completely fucked up4. The big publishing companies have not been competing on providing efficient publishing services to researchers for a long time. Instead, they have turned into rent-extracting parasites, turning public funds into private profits. Insane profits.
How it works is that Big Publishing is not providing publishing services. Big Publishing is in the much more lucrative business of selling prestige.
Many researchers feel that for their careers, they are evaluated based on prestige they accumulate by publishing articles in journals. Each article gets you prestige points. Publishing a scientific article for many is as much about communicating insights from research as a game of getting prestige points. I would go so far as to say that I have interacted with many researchers for whom scientific writing is entirely decoupled from the content of what is written. Instead, the production is a game of producing textual artifacts that no one reads or cares about, solely for career advancement.
Big Publishing feeds on this. The key is that different journals award different amounts of prestige. Article in Science or Nature? Many, many prestige points on your unlikely path to a professorship.
What is considered a prestigious journal is based on social conventions, which are different across different research fields. Commonly, in many fields, a small set of journals have amassed prestige over many decades. Over the last decades, Big Publishing has managed to take control of the vast majority of prestigious journals. It’s a gold mine for them.
I have mentioned initially that researchers generally pay publishers for publishing their work. Big Publishing in the current, fucked up system essentially charges fantasy prices for publishing in or accessing their prestigious journals, because researchers pay for prestige points, not for publishing services. And since there is no real alternative to the prestige of a journal that has grown for decades in a field (funded by editing and reviewing work paid by public money), Big Publishing acts like any rent-seeking monopolist and cashes in big.5
In the past, Big Publishing usually made their money by selling subscriptions to their journals that universities or anyone wanting to access scientific articles needed to pay. For a long time, individual authors of articles did not need to pay for publishing a single article. They generated the content for a journal, in exchange for having a place to publish. The publishers then monetized the content of journals by selling subscriptions.
The subscription-based model was already fucked up though. Remember, a lot of research is paid by public money. Taxpayers pay salaries, equipment and facilities of researchers. With these resources, researchers produced articles for prestigious journals owned by Big Publishing, which Big Publishing then sold very profitably back to universities, who paid for it (again) with public money. And given the prestige of journals involved, universities had little choice but to subscribe to the journals, which their researchers again demanded access to.
Then came the open access “revolution”. You might have heard of open access, and it might have made you feel warm and fuzzy inside. Publicly funded research is now required to be freely accessible to anyone! And Big Publishing companies are helping to make it happen! Actually, it’s one of the more tragic stories.
The open access revolution was well intended. It was eventually entirely subverted by Big Publishing. The thinking of the open access revolution was that if public money paid for research, the result of this research should be free for the public to access6. Every article should be available to everyone. As this idea picked up steam, this meant an end to the core business model of Big Publishing, which relied on subscriptions and paywalls.
It could have been a glorious moment for researchers to take back control of the publishing system. Instead, Big Publishing found a way to adapt their business models to increase their profits even more. Key to this was that the ownership of prestige in the system did not change. Big Publishing still owned all the prestigious journals, their golden goose, and would definitely not let go of them.
Instead, Big Publishing found an even better way of milking the system - they started charging so-called Article Processing Charges (APCs) for every article to be published in one of their journals. These APCs supposedly covered their costs for providing the services involved in publishing an article to be available for everyone to read. Actually, APCs were just a way for Big Publishing to continue to sell prestige, as soon they started demanding fantasy prices again (and making great profits). But this time, the revenue came from individual researchers through APCs on a pay per article basis, not subscriptions.
Some aspects of the underlying business model of the for-profit scientific publishing industry did change. In the subscription era, there was a certain limit to scaling profits. In the APC era however, every article the publishers print gets them revenue. And we soon discovered that the amount of articles researchers were willing to publish for prestige points was seemingly endless. Now profits for Big Publishing scaled with the absolute number of articles published. Big Publishing has done very, very well in the open access era for this reason, launching more and more journals and publishing more and more articles. Who would have thought.
At the same time, new, equally problematic publishing companies entered the market due to the open access revolution. Companies like MDPI started offering “open access” journals for researchers to publish in, with somewhat lower APC costs. To milk the system, companies like MDPI started publishing enormous amounts of articles per year. These journals still looked like legitimate scientific journals, but focused on letting researchers publish as fast as possible, with lower quality control7. It worked out for the companies, as many researchers were willing to get “cheap” articles in this way. Again, who paid for all of this nonsense was the public.
So now in 2025, as researchers and as a society, we are staring at a fucked up scientific publishing system, which somehow, absurdly, still continues to get worse. One of the ways this is happening is Big Publishing increasingly exploring ways to get into the so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI) game. The overheating paper mill, geared toward publishing content for content’s sake, has been very susceptible to AI slop being published. And it seems likely that Big Publishing will also look at increasing its profit margins by cutting costs and replacing more parts of what is left of the editorial process with glorified chat bots. Big Publishing does not care and will not care and we should not expect it to.
What to do
There really is no good reason that things have to be this way. It’s just collective laziness, failure to cooperate and coordinate action, cynicism and opportunistic behavior. And no, it’s not the incentives.
I have participated in this. I have published with Big Publishing. Quite a bit, actually. Before I knew better. But I also believe that once you know, you have a moral obligation not to knowingly be complicit in turning public money you are entrusted with into private profits for prestige points.
There are many ways in which we, as researchers, can start to unfuck the publishing system. Courageous people have been at it for decades. The tools to take back publishing exist. Super cool initiatives have come and gone, but many are still here. I will not offer a comprehensive 5-year plan to unfuck the system here, but I will list some things I believe in can be done right now, by everyone.
First, I increasingly believe in a whitelist approach to choosing publication outlets. This means formulating a set of criteria for journals that don’t suck™ (here are mine) and then stop publishing elsewhere. Also, stop reviewing elsewhere. Start reviewing with care for for your journals that don’t suck™. Share lists. Get organized. They need our content and we do not need them.
Second, if you can, support one of your journals that don’t suck™ in an organizing role. Get involved with editing, resign from your Big Publishing editorial board, start a Peer Community In, whatever you can. For many of us looking at short-term contracts, this is likely not an option, but if you have been given a life-time job by the public, dear Professor, get involved.
Third, the complement to getting organized is getting informed. The scientific publishing system is so obviously fucked up that it is pretty fun to raise the issue among the class of supposedly critical thinkers that researchers think they are. When you do, show empathy however. I believe it is appropriate to be harsh with the people in secure positions who keep this system going. I also believe that it is cruel to be harsh with a precariously employed PhD student in a foreign country looking at risking their employment if they do not publish their last thesis paper as fast as possible. They will have other opportunities.
Lastly, I also believe in raising the issue more broadly. The public entrusts us with money to do research and they should know that we are failing them in feeding it to Big Publishing.
Footnotes
mostly relying on an often problematic system of pre-publication peer review↩︎
as in Big Tobacco or Big Tech, because they belong to the same circle of hell↩︎
Recently, Big Publishing has been getting very much into the ad-tech and surveillance business as well, but that is another story↩︎
There might be some swearing in this post, but the situation really warrants it↩︎
How can we tell? Well, for one, it’s all public (somewhat) in their annual reports. Big Publishing makes extraordinary profits, dwarfing basically any other industry. Second, there is a in not-for-profit, community-organized profit scientific publishing, which manages to produce great quality with lower costs.↩︎
obviously ignoring that for many, piracy, most famously sci-hub, already offered free access to most articles↩︎
Interestingly, in my experience, the tactic also worked because of a built-in ambiguity. These scammy journals published the odd solid article or got researchers to contribute who actually cared about their work, which confused other researchers who would only judge the predominantly scammy journal by the few good articles they might have come across over time↩︎