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. 2017 Apr 20;6:518. [Version 1] doi: 10.12688/f1000research.11415.1

We can shift academic culture through publishing choices

Corina J Logan 1,a
PMCID: PMC5428494  PMID: 28529711

Abstract

Researchers give papers for free (and often actually pay) to exploitative publishers who make millions off of our articles by locking them behind paywalls. This discriminates not only against the public (who are usually the ones that paid for the research in the first place), but also against the academics from institutions that cannot afford to pay for journal subscriptions and the ‘scholarly poor’. I explain exploitative and ethical publishing practices, highlighting choices researchers can make right now to stop exploiting ourselves and discriminating against others.

Keywords: exploitative publishing, ethical publishing, academic culture, discrimination

The problem

In December 2016, over 100 UK universities signed away over £200 million ( Gowers, 2016) to the publishing giant Elsevier so researchers at those institutions that can afford it can read their own research. However, it costs only $1.30–318 to post and preserve a PDF on the internet ( Bogich et al., 2016), which is essentially all that is needed for modern publishing. How did academic publishing become dissociated from the actual cost of publishing?

The cause of the problem is multifaceted; however, I argue that researchers have played a key role because they pursue prestige, which has further distanced researchers from understanding how publishing works and how much it costs. Current incentive structures pressure researchers into pursuing prestige to advance their careers – a cultural tradition that is maladaptive because it leads to poor research methods and practices (e.g., Edwards & Roy, 2017; Lawrence, 2016; Nosek et al., 2012; Smaldino & McElreath, 2016). Much attention has been given to this topic elsewhere, therefore I will focus on how researchers can instigate a cultural shift to change the incentive structure by valuing the improvement of research rigor through ethical publishing.

The publishing landscape has had the potential to change rapidly since the internet made communicating results cheap and easy, and many options now exist to place the focus back on increasing scientific rigor. Publishers represent a large industry in which each researcher might feel like they play a small and insignificant role. Researchers focus on their research and the myriad of other time demanding activities needed to attempt a career in academia, leaving no time to conduct the meta-research needed to unpack how large publishers hide what they do. I present this meta-research here by explaining two contrasting routes to publication: exploitative and ethical.

Exploitative route to publication

Exploits researchers and academia

When a paper is accepted at a journal that will put it behind a paywall (i.e., require a journal subscription to read), we researchers are excited and think it was free because it cost us nothing. However, academia (i.e., university libraries) pays an average $5000 per article on our behalf through subscription fees, which results in a 37% profit margin for Elsevier for example ( van Noorden, 2013), whose goal is to maximize profits ( Figure 1A). The goal of academia is to share research, which is in direct competition with the publisher’s goals of making profits.

Figure 1. Two routes to the publication of a journal article.

Figure 1.

Open in a new tab

( A) The exploitative route exploits researchers and academia and discriminates against who can read research because only individuals at those institutions that can afford journal subscriptions can read the research. ( B) The ethical route keeps profits inside academia and does not discriminate against who can read research. OA=Open Access, APC=Article Processing Charge.

Publishers obtain the product (the journal article) for free, as well as many of the services involved in the peer review of the product (e.g., volunteer editor and peer reviewer time). It is estimated that the global academic community contributes £1.9 billion per year in kind so their researchers can serve as peer reviewers ( Research Information Network, 2008). After obtaining these free products and services, publishers sell our research back to us at a profit.

Discriminates against the public and other researchers

When the paper is published, only individuals at institutions that can afford journal subscriptions can read the research. This is a form of indirect discrimination, which is “a practice, policy or rule which applies to everyone in the same way, but it has a worse effect on some people than others” ( Citizen’s Advice, 2017). Therefore, we not only discriminate against the public (who usually pays for our research in the first place), we also discriminate against other researchers and the ‘scholarly poor’ (e.g., medical doctors, dentists, patients, industry, politicians) when publishing behind paywalls ( Murray-Rust, 2011; Tennant et al., 2016). This violates anti-discrimination policies that exist at most universities.

Further, staff at the World Health Organization (HINARI http://www.who.int/hinari/en/) and the United Nations (AGORA http://www.fao.org/agora/en/) spend valuable resources trying to get low-income countries access to our research, rather than focusing on more pressing matters, such as feeding hungry people.

Additionally, whole research fields are discriminated against because their papers do not generate as many citations as papers in other fields (e.g., Falagas & Alexiou, 2008). If a generalist journal in the sciences accepts papers from less cited fields, their journal’s impact factor would decrease. The same problem exists in the humanities only here books are the research products and publishers are the gatekeepers. Consequently, generalist science journal and humanities publisher interests influence what research is conducted because this is the only kind they will publish.

Ethical route to publication

Keeps money inside academia

When a paper is accepted at a 100% open access (OA) journal, an article processing charge (APC) is incurred or there is no cost depending on which journal a researcher chooses ( Figure 1B). APCs are paid by researchers, their funders, or their institutions. The researcher, not the publisher, decides how much is being paid to publish an article by choosing a journal with an APC they can afford.

Choosing a 100% OA journal is not enough. For money to stay inside academia, that journal must also be published by an ethical publisher. Ethical publishers are academic non-profit organizations, which ensure that profits are reinvested in academia, and for-profit corporations that charge no or low APCs and/or heavily invest profits in academia and/or are working to modernize publishing infrastructure ( Table 1).

Table 1. Ethical examples from the field of animal behavior.

100% open access journals (listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals; www.doaj.org) at publishers that keep profits inside academia. Article processing charges vary from $0–2900 and fit a range of budgets. Other factors that can promote scientific rigor include publishing the review history alongside the published article (Open Reviews), having the methods and analyses peer-reviewed before the data are collected (Registered Reports), and selecting articles based on their scientific validity rather than their predicted impact on the field (which is subjective). CC-BY licenses allow people to not only read the article, but also to access its content. Some researchers prefer to submit papers to society-owned journals. NP=non-profit organization, FP=for-profit organization.

Journal Article
Processing
Charge		 Open
Reviews		 Registered
Reports
accepted		 License Articles
selected for
scientific
validity not
subjective
impact		 Society-
owned		 Publisher
Royal Society
Open Science		 Free Yes Yes CC-BY Yes Yes Royal Society
(NP)
PeerJ $399/author
(lifetime
membership) 		Yes No CC-BY Yes No PeerJ (FP *)
eLife $2500 Yes No CC-BY No No eLife (NP)
Comparative
Cognition &
Behavior Reviews		 Free for authors ^ No No CC-BY-
NC-ND
3.0		 Yes Yes The Comparative
Cognition Society
(NP)
PLOS (several
journals)		 $1495–2900 No No CC-BY Some yes,
others no		 No PLOS (NP)
ScienceOpen
Research		 $400 or 800 Yes No CC-BY
4.0		 Yes No ScienceOpen
(FP *)
Biology Open $1495 No No CC-BY Yes No Company of
Biologists (NP)
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*These for-profit publishers reinvest profits into academia and are working to modernize publishing infrastructure

^If institutions can pay, an article processing charge of $1000 is requested

Editor and peer reviewer time are donated as in the exploitative route. However, the services go toward benefiting academia rather than decreasing publisher costs to maximize profits. In either publishing route, one can make their peer reviewing efforts more valuable to academia by making pre- and/or post-publication reviews public (e.g., via Publons.com, PubPeer.com, or a blog).

One common misconception is that publishing in journals owned by academic societies is always ethical. This is not actually the case because many society journals are not 100% OA and are published by exploitative publishers. For example, in the field of animal behavior, the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour owns the journal Animal Behavior, which is a hybrid journal (not 100% OA) published by Elsevier. The Ethological Society owns the journal Ethology, which is also a hybrid journal and is published by Wiley. Both Elsevier and Wiley drain profits from academia ( van Noorden, 2013). If your favorite journals are not on the ethical route, you can ask them to make their journal 100% OA and to change to an ethical publisher or use free open source publishing software (see Tennant et al., 2016 and www.corinalogan.com/journals.html).

Availability to read by everyone leads to additional benefits

OA articles do not discriminate against who can read them because they are freely available to read by everyone. This results in OA articles having more readers, citations, and media attention, and their authors benefit from more job and funding opportunities ( McKiernan et al., 2016; Tennant et al., 2016). Additionally, OA journals with CC-BY licenses ensure authors retain the copyright to their research, and enable others to reuse the work (with credit) and mine the content ( https://sparcopen.org/our-work/author-rights/introduction-to-copyright-resources/). This means that rather than simply gaining access to a PDF to read, individuals instead gain access to the information inside the PDF, such as the data, figures, and content.

Not all open access is equal

Just because an article is OA does not mean it is ethically published. Some subscription journals give researchers the option to pay APCs, which allows that article to be OA (a hybrid journal). However, hybrid APCs are more expensive than APCs at 100% OA journals, which exploits researchers and academia ( Pinfield et al., 2015; Solomon & Björk, 2016). Moreover, many publishers ‘double dip’ by collecting APCs in addition to journal subscription fees for OA articles. These publishers charge more than once for the same article, further increasing their profits. Therefore, the ethical route to publication is also the cheapest option.

Ethical publishing is social justice for researchers and the public

Since researchers are primarily funded by the public, we have a responsibility to publish ethically ( Edwards & Roy, 2017; Tennant et al., 2016). We are also responsible for creating a culture that values ethical practices that increase scientific rigor – a legacy we can leave to future generations.

Researchers can change the incentive structure by changing publishing choices

Funders are driving changes in incentive structures by requiring OA (e.g., Research Councils UK, Wellcome Trust, European Commission, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). Researchers can also drive change. One way forward is to connect researchers with the costs and consequences of our publishing choices and shift academic publishing away from exploitative models, which will also save academia millions. All of the options we need to publish ethically already exist, and at prices that fit a range of budgets.

Acknowledgments

I thank Laurent Gatto, Stephen Eglen, Peter Lawrence, Peter Murray-Rust, Rupert Gatti, Yvonne Nobis, and Erin McKiernan for manuscript feedback and discussions, and Ross Mounce for discussions.

Funding Statement

CJL has a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust and Isaac Newton Trust.

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

[version 1; referees: 1 approved

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F1000Res. 2017 May 8. doi: 10.5256/f1000research.12324.r22316

Referee response for version 1

Chris H J Hartgerink 1

Considering this is an opinion piece, my peer-review should be regarded more as a discussion. Judging whether an opinion is scientifically valid makes no sense to me; it is still worthwhile to discuss the contents nonetheless.

In general, this opinion piece aims to incentivize a shift towards more Open Access (OA) publishing, and specifically more ethical OA publishing. In the first two sections ("The problem" and "Exploitative route to publication") the author aptly summarizes the current situation, albeit sometimes implying that the reader is familiar with certain aspects of the discussion.

Moreover, in the first section, the author makes quite a promising statement: "I will focus on how researchers can instigate a cultural shift to change the incentive structure by valuing the improvement of research rigor through ethical publishing." However, in the sections following, I was disappointed to see that the author primarily focusing on describing the landscape instead of actually providing ways to instigate cultural change. Understanding the landscape is important, but what the effective, actionable aspect of the piece that was offered in the beginning remains absent. As such, the piece does not deliver.

In the next section on exploitation, the author mentions exploitative and ethical publishing. Although I tend to agree that OA is less exploitative, calling it ethical is rather difficult without an explanation as to what normative framework is being applied to judge this. Why, for example, is the APC range of 0-2900 USD seen as ethical, when in the first paragraph it is mentioned that publishing costs range between 1.30-318USD? I understand many of the underlying principles, but I think the discussion of these issues can be honed and would make it much more convincing for people unfamiliar with many of the underlying principles that are implicit for OA proponents. E.g., is the ethical statement made from a Kantian viewpoint that OA is more sustainable? If so, please make it more explicit so it can show the underlying logic instead of just the conclusions.

Continuing with providing explanations as to why certain things are considered ethical, I think the piece could really benefit from justification as to why keeping money inside academia would be considered more ethical. For-profit businesses can very much contribute ethically to the knowledge ecosystem and retain the profits, albeit it would require some changes in how the system is setup (e.g., knowledge should no longer be commodified). It is rather narrow to state that keeping money within academia is beneficial to academia more so than a combination of inside and outside, at least without thorough analysis as to why that would be the case. The premises seem to be implied now, which makes it rather unconvincing (despite that I somewhat agree with the outcome).

As such, it seems to me that the perspective proposed here is lacking in thoroughness of the reasoning proposed (despite that I am a proponent of OA). As such, I would encourage the author to make the implicit steps taken in the reasoning more explicit. Moreover, calling something ethical without providing a framework is, to me, rather difficult. Deeming something ethical is always subject to cultural context and the normative framework.

Finally, I would like to ask the author whether she thinks that philanthropic efforts to increase OA are ethical in themselves. For example, OA is promoted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), but recent efforts that put pressure on publishers have created an OA privilege so it seems. Researchers funded by the BMGF now have the possibility to publish gold-OA in Science for example 1, but non-BMGF financed researchers do not. As such, considering the Merton's ethical framework for science, this decreases equality between researchers and could be considered unethical. If OA is deemed ethical, are the means to an end here deemed ethical as well? It seems that this is a crucial question that is being neglected throughout this opinion piece.

I have read this submission. I believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above.

References

  • 1. Chawla D: Gates Foundation strikes deal to allow its researchers to publish in Science journals. Science.2017; 10.1126/science.aal0767 10.1126/science.aal0767 [DOI] [Google Scholar]
F1000Res. 2017 May 4. doi: 10.5256/f1000research.12324.r22132

Referee response for version 1

Anthony Dart 1

This paper addresses the cost of academic publishing, the role of the profit margin in this cost and the inequitable access inherent with a reader pays model whereby potential readers with limited financial resources are prevented from accessing articles relevant to their research.  The author also acknowledges that the prestige – seeking behaviours of researchers are important factor in considering academic publications. 

It is a given that publishing, in whatever form, academic research has to incur a cost.  This can come from reader in the form of subscriptions etc, the author, in a form of an article processing charge, from third parties such as advertises or a combination of some or all of these.  I imagine all or most researchers would agree with the notion that cost should be kept to a minimum.  As stated in the article it is also important to improve equitability of access and to retain as much funding as possible for research itself. 

As one solution the author suggests that researchers should elect to use an ethical route to publication.  One of the features of this would be that ‘any profit’ would be returned to academia and this would be most readily achieved through learned societies or institutions publishing in their own right.  As the author indicates the true nature of the finances behind publications can be opaque and it would be a big burden on researchers to undertake and keep up-to-date with the financial arrangement of the myriad of publishing vehicles now available.  In relation to this, and perhaps a little over looked in the article, is in indeed the gross proliferation of journals now touting their business to the academic community.  Almost all these journals require an article processing charge to be paid and it is usually not evident how much of this contributes to the publishers profit margin. 

The authors suggestion that researchers could elect to publish with the publishers whose charges are within their means is not really going to help with issues of equitability.  Researchers, certainly under the current usual means of performance evaluation, will have an overriding desire to publish in the most prestigious journal available. This is specially so with the proliferation of journals situation has been reached whereby almost anything could be published providing that authors persevere!  Therefore there needs to be other ways to overcome the perception that impact factor is a surrogate measure of important and validity of data.  Certainly publications of original data and comprehensive methods etc, generally in a supplementary or appendix, can help in this regard. 

Although not the subject of this article, there is no doubt that real reform in this sector thus requires a change in the wide academic careers are evaluated.  The reliance on the numbers of publications and the impact of the publications become so important in most institutions that real reform could only happen once this reliance measures is reduced.

I have read this submission. I believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.

F1000Res. 2017 Apr 24. doi: 10.5256/f1000research.12324.r22021

Referee response for version 1

Björn Brembs 1

In this manuscript, the author proposes a more ethical publishing system compared to the one we have today. The author starts by explaining, in simple and broadly understandable terms the current parasitic relationship between corporate publishers and academia today. She correctly notes that the main driver for these developments on the academic side was "pursuing prestige".

However, from reading the article, the reader is forced to conclude that the author believes that today, scientists do not strive to pursue prestige any more, as essentially every single suggestion the author puts forth asks scientists to do the opposite of pursuing prestige, by asking them to "publish ethically", regardless of the consequences for their salary, funding or other career aspects.

Such a text constitutes a laudable appeal to the selflessness of scholars, echoing many similar appeals that have been formulated over the last 20+ years. Clearly, those are lofty ideals, but I have strong reservations as to the mass applicability of such a plan. After all, her predecessors have asked their colleagues exactly the same thing without much tangible effect for the last 20+ years. I doubt that more of the same will drastically alter anything.

In contrast to what the author (and this reviewer) might hope for, it is highly unlikely that the prestige factor historically and currently dominating publication practices everywhere will disappear tomorrow. Thus, at the very least, this article needs to deal with how scholars either a) may be convinced more effectively to adjust their publication practices against their own self-interest (and if one needs to refer to "changing the incentive structure", please explain how this could be done in realistic steps without brainwashing of about 7 million 'full-time equivalent' researchers) or b) remove the current source of prestige differential: journal rank. Without such an explanation, I see no value in adding this article to the already bulging literature on this topic.

Below the more detailed comments to each segment of the article.

First paragraph and Figure 1:

It makes little sense to compare the subscription costs of a subset of libraries of a single country with the online archiving costs of some file on the internet. There is no relation at all between such two completely arbitrary numbers.

We do know what the annual cost of publishing scholarly articles is: several sources mention converging ballpark figures just under US$10b. With the number of articles per year at about 2m, we arrive at a current consensus figure of ~US$5k per article the taxpayer is currently paying.  We also know that a whole slew of publishers operate on per-article costs of just under ~US$100 up to ~US$500, which constitute the lower bound of actual per article costs. In other words, anything above ~US$500 requires an explanation (in some cases even costs above US$100). In the case of current subscription publishers, this difference includes (but is not limited to) profit and paywalls. In the case of gold publishers, it is not at all clear where the difference to 100-500 goes. Hence, in Fig. 1A there is a lot missing and in Fig. 1B, it is not at all clear why charging $2900 should not be similarly exploitative as in Fig. 1A.

I suggest to drop all the numbers in Fig. 1 and just show profit and paywalls in A as excluding scholarship, while whatever costs accrue in B are investments and not lost.

Exploitative route:

The author writes: "Publishers obtain the product (the journal article) for free, as well as many of the services involved in the peer review of the product (e.g., volunteer editor and peer reviewer time)."

This wording invites misunderstandings: scholars don't work for free, many if not most of them earn a (in some cases more than decent) wage. They provide their services mostly for the authors, which coincidentally means at no cost for the publishers. This is not to be confused with "free" - it is actually a coincidental subsidy of publishers inasmuch as the scholars' salary is paid out of the public purse.

"When the paper is published, only individuals at institutions that can afford journal subscriptions can read the research." In principle, this is correct. However, this statement is complicated by, e.g., the fact that some institutions may be able to afford subscriptions, but choose not to subscribe to certain journals and that most publishers offer reduced or even waived subscription fees to developing countries on the IUGG or UNDP lists.

The author also cited an "impact factor" without reference. In the case of Clarivate Analytics' Impact Factor, the author cannot cite the IF as if it were computed rather than, at least in part, negotiated, without clarifying citations.

In this section, the author also neglects the standard acquisition rules in academia (and indeed in the entire public sector!) that acquisitions need to follow a bidding process. Subscriptions these days, especially the "Big Deal" bought by large public institutions, are negotiated behind closed doors, commonly with professional publisher negotiators completely outmaneuvering their hapless librarian counterparts. Any mention of costs should reasonably also mention the way academia pays for them: by breaking or at least bending commonplace rules.

Ethical route to publication:

Already in the first paragraph, the author paints a misleading picture, contradicting her own text until this point. Above, the author stated: " researchers have played a key role because they pursue prestige " Indeed: researchers pursue prestige. Even if all journals were OA provided by NP organizations, they would still pursue prestige, all else being equal. Hence, the authors would *not* choose a journal with an "APC they can afford", but with a *prestige* they can afford. This, of course, makes all the difference in the world: if a lab can afford, say, 50k for a Nature article, of course they will pay for it. If a lab cannot, then the authors will have to pay out of their pocket what is required to secure a permanent position. Hence, without eliminating prestige, the injustice and discrimination so rightfully called out by the author above, will simply be transferred from reading to publishing: today, the scholarly poor can't read. In a gold-OA world as described in the article so far, the scholarly poor can't publish (at least not where they get noticed). Given sci-hub et al., the gold-OA route described so far seems even less ethical than the exploitative publishing system where the rich subsidize an obscenely expensive anachronism, such that at least the poorest countries can read and publish for free.

There remains much work for the author to convince anyone that just because there are no profits and no paywalls, the proposed system will be any fairer.

Table 1:

Likewise, there is little to convince at least this reviewer that all the journals listed here are really that much more ethical than the current corporate parasites. Certainly, the RoySoc journal looks perfect, but the reader doesn't know where the money is coming from and has to trust the name of the publisher in terms of functionalities, such as, e.g. digital long-term preservation, TDM, data and code requirements, and many more. PeerJ (which I support) are a business where we have to trust their founders that they really use our money wisely. eLife is published by the MPG and only publishes a small fraction of submitted articles at a cost prohibitive for most scholarly poor. In terms of reproducibility, we do not have any data, yet, but if eLife can be lumped in with the GlamMagz in this regard, the statistics tell us that eLife will be part of the problem, rather than the solution - and who wants the public to have access to unreliable research? CCBR publishes with a very restrictive license, which can hardly be called "OA" (e.g., no TDM allowed!), PLoS APCs are also much higher than they need to be in case of P1 due to this journal subsidizing their community journals and for the community journals due to their selectivity, which increases unreliability (statistically, on average). Neither ScienceOpen nor Biology Open (nor any of the other journals!) offer competitors to take over their services in case users are not pleased with what they get.

Thus, in brief, the list in Table 1 looks like a half-hearted attempt at saving a 20th century industry from obsolescence and badly mangling product functionality and market effectiveness as unintended consequences.

Availability to read by everyone leads to additional benefits:

Actually, PDF is probably among the worst formats for TDM. What would be required is a scholarly mark-up language that can be easily converted into any format the user desires. Just flipping our existing journals to ethical publishers and hoping that the "invisible hand" of the market will then automagically create such scholarly standards will likely not be sufficient.

Researchers can change the incentive structure by changing publishing choices:

While the author is merely simplistic and/or naive in her approach thus far, this last paragraph borders on wishful thinking. For more than 20 years we have had the possibility to make our work OA at point of publication with just a few clicks and haven't done so: as long as hypercompetition demands that we publish in certain venues, just making people pay won't change a thing. If I'm an early-career researcher and Nature has accepted my manuscript, I will publish there, as long as it carries the prospect of getting a job. In that case (and this is how it still is), this researcher will publish there if it is TA, hybrid or OA, (almost) regardless of cost. In the US (and increasingly in the UK and other countries as well), people go into debt for the prestige of a degree from certain universities. Surely they will go a little more into debt for the prestige of a certain journal? No, scholars are not free to choose where they publish and just making it expensive for them won't change that - other than making the procedure more hateful than it already is.

In conclusion, I'm far from convinced that the world the author describes will be neither more ethical nor fairer than today. In fact, from most relevant aspects, it seems it will make things even worse than what we have today, as bad as it currently is. Other than from a historical perspective, the author completely fails to account for the main driver of publication practices: prestige. For her suggestion to actually improve anything, she needs to explain why the prestige factor should completely disintegrate overnight, which seems highly implausible. I hence cannot see anything that this article could possibly contribute to the debate on this topic that hasn't already been said elsewhere, with more competence and persuasion.

I have read this submission. I believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above.

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