Giant publishers are bleeding universities dry, with profit margins that rival Google’s. So we decided to start our own
Arash Abizadeh is a philosopher and the Angus professor of political science at McGill University, Canada
If you’ve ever read an academic article, the chances are that you were unwittingly paying tribute to a vast profit-generating machine that exploits the free labour of researchers and siphons off public funds.
The annual revenues of the “big five” commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes of Google. Meanwhile, academics do almost all of the substantive work to produce these articles free of charge: we do the research, write the articles, vet them for quality and edit the journals.
More Stories
Scientists hope sequencing genome of tiny ‘functionally extinct’ frog could help save it
UK among lowest-ranked countries for ‘human flourishing’ in wellbeing study
‘I do what I like’: British woman, 115, claims world’s oldest living person title