Science under the control of major publishers: profit over knowledge
The current publishing system is harmful to science. A new analysis involving ICTA-UAB, Spain, shows that in scientific publishing, commercial interests put profit ahead of advancing knowledge and academic integrity.
The four leading publishers Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis generated over $7.1 billion in revenue in 2024 alone, with profit margins exceeding 30% —much higher than in other sectors— and accumulated over $14 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024. A large part of this money comes from public funds intended for research, which researchers must spend to publish their own work or access that of other scientists.
The study warns of a four-fold drain on the scientific system: money diverted from research, time researchers spend publishing and reviewing articles unpaid —estimated at 130 million hours in 2020 alone— loss of trust due to fraud, retractions, and questionable practices, and concentration of academic control by private companies.
These companies also control metrics and databases such as the Journal Impact Factor and Scopus, defining what research is considered “excellent” and marginalizing community- or regionally governed models. “Commercial publishers are intimately entwined with academia, both in the way they collect data about us and in how they are integrated into academic evaluation,” notes Dan Brockington, ICTA-UAB and ICREA professor and co-author of the study. This system harms science: it fuels a proliferation of papers focused on prestige, which strains the publication machinery. It also discourages slow, careful interdisciplinary thinking, which is key to achieving higher-quality science. Ultimately, it contributes to a weakening of quality and, consequently, to an erosion of public trust.
Although the Open Access movement sought to democratize access to science, many publishers have turned publication fees (Article Processing Charges, APCs) into an additional source of revenue. Between 2019 and 2023, they collected nearly $9 billion in APCs alone, without returning control of publishing to the academic community.
This affliction of poor scientific publishing practices is most painful in the Global North. In the South entities like SciELO, Redalyc, Latindex or African Journals Online provide strong, community-owned alternatives. Accordingly, the authors call for re-communalizing scientific publishing, promoting community- and non-commercially-led systems with active leadership from universities, governments, and funding agencies. In this model, costs are funded by scholarly societies and their funders, and profits return to research, along with the data it generates. Researchers have repeatedly called for this.
Brockington insists that: “To reform the system, it is necessary for researchers to stop working with commercial publishers. When facing large and powerful organizations, you need allies that are equally large and powerful. We have them: funders, government agencies, foundations, and universities, which together could decide where funds for publishing go and what incentives drive researchers.”
They warn that, without deep reforms, the system will continue prioritizing profits over the advancement of knowledge, wasting public resources, researchers’ time, and society’s trust in science.
Article of reference: Beigel, F., Brockington, D., Crosetto, P., et al. (2025). The Drain of Scientific Publishing. arXiv:2511.04820