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How Academic Publishing Became a Billion-Pound Swindle

Academic Leadership Academic Writing Open Access Publishing
DrRoyHanney
29-12-2025

Reposted from my LinkedIn articles, first published July 29, 2025.

Academic publishing is broken—but not beyond repair. This article traces how we arrived at a model that commodifies knowledge, exploits labour, and restricts access, and argues why Diamond Open Access must be the cornerstone of a fairer system.

Academic publishing was born out of a noble ideal: the open dissemination of knowledge in service of the public good. Yet over the course of three and a half centuries, it has evolved into something far less idealistic—a sprawling, profit-driven industry that extracts public resources, exploits academic labour, and restricts access to knowledge.

To understand how we got here, it’s worth tracing the long arc of academic publishing—because it didn’t have to turn out this way.

📜 Origins: The Rise of Scientific Journals (17th–19th Century)

The first academic journals emerged in the 17th century with the founding of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1665). They were designed to circulate ideas and establish scientific priority. Early publishing was largely subsidised by learned societies and governments.

Over time, as science and scholarship expanded, journals proliferated. The goal remained the same: share knowledge for the common good. Commercial motives were secondary.

🏛️ Post-War Expansion & The Birth of the Business Model

The landscape changed significantly after World War II. Scientific research expanded dramatically, fuelled by public investment and Cold War imperatives. Into this environment stepped Robert Maxwell, a publishing magnate who recognised a market opportunity and set about transforming what had been a collegial culture of knowledge exchange into a highly profitable commercial enterprise.

Maxwell’s innovation was to see academic journals not as public goods but as private commodities. In the 1950s and 60s, he acquired and launched numerous scientific journals through Pergamon Press, targeting new fields and emerging disciplines. The key was not to appeal to broad readerships but to carve out niche subject areas and sell subscriptions directly to institutional libraries (Buranyi, 2017).

The success of this model lay in the bundling of content: instead of selling individual journals, publishers began packaging titles into large subscription bundles, which institutions had to purchase wholesale. Over time, these bundles became more opaque, with escalating costs and restrictive contracts. The strategy proved incredibly lucrative and laid the foundations for the oligopolistic industry we see today.

By the 1980s, Pergamon Press was sold to Elsevier for £440 million—solidifying Elsevier’s position as one of the dominant players in scientific publishing. Maxwell’s legacy is not just commercial; it fundamentally altered how academic knowledge was distributed and accessed, setting in motion the market logic that still governs scholarly communication.

💰 1990s–2000s: The Serials Crisis

By the end of the 20th century, journal subscription prices had soared. Between 1986 and 2002, costs rose over 300%, while library budgets stagnated. Universities were forced to cut subscriptions—prompting what librarians called the serials crisis.

The underlying issue? The Maxwell model had worked. Academic publishing had become a commercial oligopoly, with five major companies controlling the majority of peer-reviewed literature—and earning profit margins of 35–40%, despite contributing none of the research labour.

The cost of scholarly communication was now borne entirely by universities, which paid to produce the work, peer review it, and then pay again to access it (Lawson et al., 2015).

The bundling of journal subscriptions into so-called “Big Deals” further entrenched this system. Institutions were locked into long-term contracts with limited flexibility, even as costs ballooned. Access was determined by institutional wealth, not public need.

This crisis also opened up new questions about how the quality of research was judged—leading to renewed scrutiny of academic gatekeeping, particularly the peer review process.

Academic publishing profits compared to other sectors
Academic publishing profits compared to other sectors

🔎 The Myth of Peer Review

🔎 The Myth of Peer Review

Amid the financial pressures of the serials crisis, it became clear that the cost of scholarly communication wasn’t just economic—it was also structural. One pillar of that structure, often taken for granted, is peer review. While seen today as a cornerstone of academic rigour, peer review has a surprisingly recent and uneven history. It only became standard practice in most disciplines during the mid-20th century. Before that, editorial boards made publication decisions directly, often informally.

As the research economy expanded, peer review was institutionalised, but not necessarily improved. The process increasingly became enmeshed in a prestige-driven publishing system that prioritised selectivity and brand recognition over transparency and accountability.

Today:

  • Reviewers are unpaid.
  • Their work is often invisible and uncredited in academic workloads.
  • Peer review is criticised for bias, inefficiency, lack of accountability, and slowness (Ross-Hellauer, 2017).

Rather than serving as a neutral arbiter of truth, peer review frequently operates as a mechanism for upholding academic hierarchies. High-status journals use it to enforce exclusivity, while publishers reap the reputational benefits of rigour—without paying for the labour that produces it.

This exploitation mirrors the broader economic model: academics research, write, review, and edit for free—while commercial publishers package and sell the content back to the very institutions that funded its production. Recognising the systemic role of peer review in this ecosystem is essential if we’re to envision a fairer publishing future.

🌐 The Open Access Movement (2002–)

In response to the serials crisis and the consolidation of commercial control, the early 2000s saw a surge in support for open access. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), followed by the Berlin and Bethesda declarations, called for publicly funded research to be made freely and openly available to all (BOAI, 2002).

This gave rise to multiple models:

  • Gold Open Access: Articles are free to read but often require authors to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) (Suber, 2012).
  • Green Open Access: Authors self-archive preprints or postprints in institutional repositories, often with embargo periods imposed by publishers.
  • Diamond Open Access: Articles are free to read and free to publish, with no APCs. Instead, publication costs are covered by universities, scholarly societies, consortia, or public funders (Fuchs & Sandoval, 2013).

While Gold and Green OA represent steps toward wider access, they still operate within the economic logic of commercial publishing. APCs recreate inequality—just at a different point in the process. Researchers in well-funded institutions may afford to publish, but many scholars, especially in the Global South or in underfunded disciplines like the arts and humanities, are locked out (Lawson et al., 2015).

Diamond Open Access, by contrast, is a radical reimagining of what scholarly communication can be. It is:

  • Simple: No subscriptions, no paywalls, no APCs.
  • Fair: No one pays to publish, and no one pays to read.
  • Scalable: Built on shared infrastructure and collective funding models, it can serve global needs without commodifying research.

Diamond OA reflects the values academia claims to hold: equity, openness, and collaboration. It challenges the idea that prestige and quality must come at a financial cost and reasserts that knowledge is a common good.

There are already successful examples—Open Library of Humanities (OLH), SciELO, Redalyc, and hundreds of scholar-led journals operating on cooperative models. What’s missing is not viability, but widespread commitment.

If we are serious about reforming academic publishing, Diamond OA must be the cornerstone of that future.

🔧 What Needs to Change

The historical trajectory of academic publishing has brought us to a point of deep contradiction. We have a system that relies on public funding, academic goodwill, and scholarly labour—but rewards private profit and entrenched prestige. If knowledge is a public good, then the systems that produce and circulate it must serve the public, not the shareholders of a handful of multinational corporations.

To move forward, we must break from the economic logic of the Maxwell model and embrace the digital possibilities already available. That means:

  • Decoupling academic prestige from commercial publishers. Scholars should be rewarded for rigour, relevance, and openness—not the brand of the journal.
  • Creating and funding open, shared infrastructure. Universities and funders must invest in platforms and repositories owned by the academic community.
  • Recognising peer review and editorial work as academic labour. These contributions must be visible, credited, and fairly resourced (Ross-Hellauer, 2017).
  • Making diamond open access the norm, not the exception. Publishing should be free to read and free to publish, with costs borne collectively.
  • Designing systems that support sharing—not scarcity. In a digital world, knowledge can be distributed instantly and globally. Our publishing models should reflect that.

Academic publishing is not beyond repair—but it does require a radical rethink. By recovering the values that once underpinned scholarly communication, and applying them to the digital age, we can build a system fit for purpose: ethical, accessible, and aligned with the public good.

💬 What changes have you seen in your institution’s publishing practices? Are you working toward alternatives to commercial publishing? I’d love to hear from you—comment below or get in touch.

📚 References

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