Various discussions and arguments in social media, and blogs in our scholarly scientific publishing world, have the nebulous underpinning that mission-driven not-for-profit organizations are the “good guys”, while big profit-driven corporate publishers are the “bad guys”.
Having worked for both types of scientific publishers, I can tell you that it’s not quite that simple. Although, with the current shifts in the industry, maybe now is the time for the rise of the not-for-profit publisher. One thing that is true, in my opinion, is that whoever controls the top level of governance of a company makes a big difference. This has been eloquently argued by Joe Esposito in a Scholarly Kitchen article.
While the big for-profit publishers are all heavily promoting some variation of “Researchers are our North Star”, it’s their shareholders who have the biggest influence on decisions made at these companies. The very survival of the big for-profit publishers depends upon returning profits to their shareholders and showing steady growth year after year. Therefore, the employees at these companies devote a significant amount of time and effort towards achieving the required income and cost targets each quarter, which often results in ruthless cost-cutting and cut-throat price increases. One may naturally think that these companies are too big to fail. However, there are plenty of companies of similar sizes, and larger, that have failed (Polaroid, Blockbuster, Borders etc. – we all know the stories). If a company fails to adapt when the world no longer wants what it is providing, then their end is near. Hence, the big publishers are dialing up their megaphones in an attempt to project the image of being customer focused to the nth degree. However, with the shift to open access, there is undoubtedly a growing tension within these publishers who are faced with the conundrum of trying to balance what the research community (and related stakeholders such as funding partners and institutions) want, while continuing to make a profit for their shareholders. As we transition into the new paradigm of open access publishing, there is a clash of interests emerging between the requirements of shareholders of for-profit publishers and those of the research stakeholders; it is here where the not-for-profit publishers may have a distinct advantage.
A rather obvious statement is that not-for-profit publishers are driven by their mission, while for-profit publishers, at a fundamental level, are driven by profits. In my experience, the tension between profit and customer demands is typically much lower for not-for-profit publishers. Of course, publishers that are mission-driven, rather than profit-driven, have many other driving forces. For example, at Canadian Science Publishing, our mission is to mobilize science, making sure it is easy to discover, use, and share. Which of course means that we are champions of open access and are moving our journals to open access as fast as our funds allow. This is a big difference from the big for-profit corporate publishers. Unlike big corporate publishers who are accountable to shareholders, not-for-profit publishers are accountable to their stakeholders and are governed by a board comprised of volunteers who are committed to their mission. The key question for our governing Board of Directors is “how can we sustainably move to open access to best support the research community?” Rather than “how can we grow our profits to keep our shareholders investing in us, while we move to open access?”
The entire STM (Scientific, Technical, Medical) journals publishing industry is worth around $9.5 billion (USD) per year (STM Association 2021 report ), and it’s usually estimated that around 50% of these funds runs through the five largest for-profit publishers. At profit margins of 20–40%, this is roughly $1 to $2 billion in profit earned annually by for-profit publishers, money that is not being spent on research. The calculations are rough, but the profits involved look huge, especially from the viewpoint of the smaller not-for-profits or the recipients of meagre research grants. Corporate publishers argue that their profits fund developments in the publishing infrastructure – which then benefit the research community. Not-for-profit society publishers also often make large profits either via a for-profit publisher or via their own publishing efforts, which raises concerns about whether it is morally correct for library funds and research grants to, in effect, be propping up, if not completely supporting, scholarly societies. Of course, the not-for-profit publishers must have an income to be sustainable. Canadian Science Publishing is funded by its journal publishing as well as some income from ethical investments. Other not-for-profits have their publishing income topped up by charitable organizations, research funders, universities, or governments. Many not-for-profits also receive support in the form of office space, IT and HR services, or other in-kind resources. The concept of “profit” isn’t straightforward in scholarly journals publishing.
The recent Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) report on open access attacks the big for-profit publishers for their focus on growing profits and their numerous conflicts of interest. Of course, a counter argument is that they have grown their profits because they are very successful at meeting customer needs. The opposing opinions are that the growth of the big journal publishers is either because (1) they have an unfair advantage owing to their monopoly or (2) they are very good at supplying what their customers want.
The cOAlition S position also criticizes the profits of the big for-profit publishers, with Plan S demanding price transparency with the aim of revealing and shaming those with large profit margins. Their “rights retention” strategy could also be interpreted as having ‘undermining the large publishers’ as one of its aims.
The main argument of anti-big-publisher groups is that as scientific publishing has become a largely for-profit industry over the last 50 years or so, it has come under the control of shareholders who do not have the researchers’ interests at heart. Many believe that the days of the for-profit publishing industry are over, and it’s time to put scientific publishing back under the control of the researchers and scientists, i.e., the not-for-profits (e.g., The Guardian)
The Dimensions database rather scarily shows that, about 58% of the nearly 140,000 scholarly articles published in 2020 by Canadian researchers were published with just eight large commercial publishers: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Sage Publications, MDPI, and Frontiers. Furthermore, nearly 27% of these articles were published as paid open access. If we assume, perhaps somewhat conservatively, that Article Processing Charges (APCs) average $3,000 (USD) in hybrid journals and $2,000 (USD) in pure open access journals, we can make a back-of-the-envelope estimate that large for-profit publishers might have received as much as $47.5 M (USD) in open access fees from Canadian researchers in 2020. In total, Canadian researchers may have paid upwards of $82 M (USD) in open access fees for all publishers combined. These estimates assume that a Canadian author is paying the APC rather than any international coauthors they may have on their papers and do not account for special arrangements to cover the cost of APCs such as transformative agreements or waivers. However, the estimates provide an indication of the magnitude of spending required by researchers who choose to publish their work as open access under the current APC model. These large numbers also suggest that paying for open access via author-paid APCs might not be the ideal way to fund open access.
The total number of Canadian articles published in the subscription journals of the big publishers was ~80,500 in 2020. Why are such a large volume of Canadian articles published with the big for-profit publishers if they are the “bad guys”? There are several reasons:
- Researchers’ tenure and promotion is still often (or perceived to be) linked to publishing in high impact factor journals.
- Big publishers’ journals often have higher journal impact factors than not-for profits’ journals.
- Big publisher subscription journals have more readers than those of the not-for-profits.
- Big publishers provide slicker publishing services than not-for-profit publishers because they have huge economies of scale.
Researchers, universities, and research funders need to look beyond the “impact factor” and pay serious attention to where their publishing money is being spent. Publishing with not-for-profit publishers puts control of the publishing workflow back into the hands of the academic and research community. Stopping the reliance on impact factor, as expressed by the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), is fundamental to this initiative. Researchers still use impact factors to determine where to publish, as the impact factors of the journals in which they have published are still used as part of their assessments for promotions, tenure, and grant funding. For-profit publishers of high-impact factor journals stress the need to maintain “author choice”, meaning that authors should be free to continue publishing in their highly profitable high-impact journals. Therefore, for-profit publishers have no incentive to move away from an impact factor-based system. To break the stranglehold of the big for-profit journals, those evaluating researchers for grants and promotions need to intensify their efforts to evaluate articles based on their own merit rather than on the impact factor of the journal in which they are published.
Libraries want to provide their users with access to the journals of the largest science publishers – and they can get access to a large percentage of the world’s best research with just a few big deals. Libraries are now recognizing that the “big deal” from for-profit publishers is not as effective as open access for providing maximum access to research. With a shift to open access, exposure of an article to world-wide readers will no longer depend on whether the journal in which it is published is part of a large publisher’s big deal. To enable not-for-profit publishers to convert journals to open access, it is essential that libraries prioritize their current funding of these journals either through subscriptions, subscribe to open schemes, or transformative read and publish agreements.
The ability to provide efficient, fast, innovative publishing services is also within the capability of the smaller not-for-profit publishers now that there are more start-ups and other innovative companies offering exciting new and affordable services that make the article publishing process faster and smoother. Additionally, the personal service involving “real people”, which has been lost by the large publishers in their drive for economies of scale, is still offered to authors by many not-for-profits, which can help level the playing field.
In conclusion, I believe the next few years are going to be rather rocky for subscription journal publishers (~70% of the market) as the industry undertakes a massive transformation to open access. If not-for-profit publishers are supported adequately by the research funders, libraries, and research communities they serve, they will be able to be at the cutting edge of the scholarly communications transformation and provide what researchers, rather than shareholders, want from this key part of the research workflow. The future looks promising for the not-for-profit publishers, and I’m looking forward to seeing a big increase in our open access publishing output at Canadian Science Publishing over the next few years.
Isn’t it worth supporting not-for-profits to have publishing back under the control of the researchers?
