[IRTalk] The Drain of Scientific Publishing

[Ina Smith]

The Drain of Scientific Publishing - new preprint by Fernanda Beigel, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto, Gemma Derrick, Aileen Fyfe, Pablo Gomez Barreiro, Mark A. Hanson, Stefanie Haustein, Vincent Larivière, Christine Noe, Stephen Pinfield, and James Wilsdon.
"The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments and Universities, to lead the drive to re-communalise publishing to serve science not the market."
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.04820

Main findings:

  *
For-profit journal publishing creates a four-fold “drain” on science - of Money, Time, Trust and Control - because the incentives of commercial publishers are fundamentally misaligned with the interests of research.
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Money: A small oligopoly (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis) extracts very high, stable profit margins (often >30%), via subscriptions, “big deals”, read-and-publish contracts and APCs, diverting billions in public research funds into private profit.
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Time: Publication volume has grown much faster than the research workforce, pushing scholars into quantity-driven publishing and consuming huge amounts of unpaid peer-review labour (~130 million hours in 2020), which crowds out slower, riskier and more locally relevant research.
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Trust: Business models based on volume and speed (e.g. special-issue factories, cascading journals) erode editorial independence and quality control, contributing to paper mills, peer-review rings and mass retractions, and weakening confidence in peer review.
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Control: Key infrastructures for evaluation and integrity (impact-factor indexes, Scopus, COPE) are concentrated in Global North commercial entities, entrenching narrow notions of “excellence” and marginalising community-led, non-commercial platforms such as SciELO, Redalyc, Latindex and AJOL.
  *
Main recommendation: The authors argue for “re-communalising” scholarly publishing – shifting ownership and governance to universities, libraries, funders and communities; investing in federated, public, diamond-OA infrastructures; and reforming research assessment so that funders and institutions actively reward publishing in community-owned venues and disincentivise publishing in profit-maximising commercial journals.



Ina Smith (her/she)

SciELO SA Planning Manager | Scholarly Publishing Programme
Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)

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