How Academic Publishing Became a $19 Billion Industry Built on Free Labor..
By The Arcaneum
Category: Economics & Policy
Tags: academic publishing, open access, article processing charges, elsevier, research funding, scientific publishing, knowledge equity, global south, relx, serials crisis, robert maxwell, diamond open access
In March 1991, Robert Maxwell sold Pergamon Press to Elsevier for £440 million. He needed the money; his newspaper empire was haemorrhaging cash, and investigators would later discover he had been systematically raiding his employees' pension funds to keep it afloat. Maxwell died that November, his body found floating in the Atlantic beside his yacht, under circumstances that were never fully explained. Elsevier kept the journals.
What Elsevier acquired was not just a list of 150 scientific titles. It was a business model that Maxwell had identified in the 1950s as essentially without parallel in the history of commerce, one he had spent four decades proving could be extracted from indefinitely. The researchers who wrote the papers got no royalties. The peers who reviewed the work got no payment. The editors who ran the journals were academics doing it as a service, not salaried employees of the publisher. The universities paid the subscription fees. The publishers kept the margin.
That margin, in Elsevier's case, currently runs at 38.4 per cent.
To understand how unusual this is: the median profit margin for S&P 500 companies is around 12 per cent. Pharmaceuticals, not an industry known for leaving money on the table, average roughly 19. Elsevier's parent company, RELX, reported an adjusted operating profit of nearly £3.2 billion in 2024 from revenues of £9.43 billion. The scientific publishing division alone had revenues of £3.05 billion. And unlike pharmaceuticals, which at least bear the cost of drug development, publishers here are primarily profiting from research they did not fund, written by researchers they do not employ, reviewed by academics they do not compensate.
The academic publishing industry as a whole has five dominant companies, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE, controlling more than half of all research output globally, which generates roughly $19 billion in annual revenue. It did not get there accidentally.
Maxwell's insight, in the late 1950s, was that scientific publishing operates under conditions of demand that commercial markets almost never encounter. A library cannot substitute one journal for another, the way a consumer can switch brands. If the paper a researcher needs appeared in Nature, there is no cheaper version containing the same work. Each journal is effectively a monopoly over its own content. Publishers could raise prices without losing subscribers because losing a subscription meant losing access to research that exists nowhere else. They understood this decades before their customers did.
Between 1959 and 1965, Pergamon grew from 40 titles to 150. Maxwell's method was systematic: identify a subfield without a dedicated journal, recruit prestigious academics to the editorial board, launch the title, sell it to university libraries that had no alternative, then raise the price annually. By the time he sold to Elsevier for £440 million, he had established the template for modern scientific publishing. Elsevier and the others simply scaled it.
Subscription prices grew faster than inflation for decades. Librarians gave this a name, the "serials crisis", which is an effective euphemism for what is actually a slow-motion extraction. Journal costs across Europe rose by nearly 50 per cent between 2005 and 2018 alone. Even Harvard, holder of the largest library budget of any university in the world, publicly acknowledged it had been forced into "serious cancellation efforts" because of cumulative price increases. If Harvard cannot afford to subscribe, the implications for a university in Accra, Dhaka or Kampala are not difficult to calculate.
Then came open access, which was supposed to fix this.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative, published in 2002, made a simple argument: research funded by the public should be freely available to the public. It was a genuinely radical idea. It gathered real momentum. Funders began requiring it. Governments began mandating it. Plan S, launched in 2018 by a coalition of European research funders, required that all publicly funded research be immediately available open access upon publication.
The publishers adopted it on their own terms.
In the dominant model that emerged, instead of charging readers via library subscriptions, publishers charge authors to publish. These Article Processing Charges APCs currently average around $2,000 for journals indexed in major databases. For a paper in Nature, the fee runs as high as €9,500. An independent assessment of what it actually costs to publish a scholarly article efficiently puts the figure at €200 to €1,000.
The gap between those numbers is not explained by the services provided. It is explained by market power.
A researcher at a well-funded German university applies for a grant, includes a publication fee line item, publishes in an Elsevier journal, and the world can read the paper for free on the day of publication. This is how open access advocates imagined it working.
A researcher at a public university in Nigeria faces the same $2,000 charge. Their grant, if they have one, almost certainly doesn't cover it. Their institution has not negotiated a transformative agreement; those deals are the product of years of legal wrangling, conducted by wealthy Western institutions with the resources to walk away from Elsevier entirely, as the University of California did in 2019. UC eventually reached a deal in March 2021 that was announced as a "landmark victory for open access." Perhaps it was. But the fact that cutting off access to one publisher's catalogue for twenty months, by one of the largest public university systems in the world, constitutes a landmark tells you something about the nature of the problem. Most universities worldwide lack the leverage or the tolerance for that kind of standoff.
For researchers at institutions without that leverage, which is most institutions, the APC model presents a binary: pay to be read, or publish in journals that cannot gain indexing in the databases that determine career advancement. The old paywall stopped readers in poor countries from accessing papers. The new paywall stops researchers in poor countries from publishing them. Both models serve the same commercial interests. One of them was celebrated as a reform.
A 2019 analysis found that 75 per cent of European spending on scientific journals flows to just those five major publishers. The contracts governing these arrangements are almost always confidential; publishers require non-disclosure clauses as standard, meaning no institution knows what the others are paying. This is a cartel practice, deployed in the market for the knowledge that public funds produced.
There is a model that actually resolves the conflict of interest. Diamond open-access journals charge neither authors nor readers. They are funded by institutional consortia, learned societies, or public grants. Currently, diamond journals publish roughly 8 to 9 per cent of all scholarly articles. But they are consistently underrepresented in the major indexing databases that define prestige. Researchers are evaluated on publications in high-impact journals. Impact factors depend on citations. Citations cluster in indexed journals. Diamond journals, many of which produce rigorous, serious work, operate largely outside this circuit, not because of any deficiency in the research, but because the prestige infrastructure was built by and for the commercial publishers, and the commercial publishers have no incentive to let a free alternative inside it.
arXiv, the preprint server for physics and mathematics that has operated since 1991, provides free access to more than 2 million papers and runs on an annual budget that amounts to a rounding error in RELX's accounts. The gap between what open science infrastructure actually costs and what major publishers charge is not a reflection of genuine production expenses. It is a measure of how thoroughly the major publishers have captured the institutions, universities, funding agencies, and career evaluation systems that researchers depend on to do their work.
In 2024, RELX reported that Elsevier's pay-to-publish revenue stream was growing "very strongly." The parent company's operating profit rose 10 percent on the previous year. The open access transition, which was supposed to dismantle the paywall model, has so far made the publishers more profitable.
Maxwell saw in 1951 what his successors see now: that scientific publishing is unlike other markets because the people who produce the product also validate it, because the institutions that employ those people feel obligated to give them access to the resulting literature, and because prestige, the one currency academics won't sacrifice, is controlled by the same companies setting the prices. No regulation emerged to check this. No government that funded the underlying research retained any claim over where it was published or at what cost.
The research is now freely available. The business model is intact. These two facts coexist without contradiction, which is perhaps the most revealing thing about what the open access movement ultimately achieved.
SOURCES
Yonghong An, Michael A. Williams, Mo Xiao — "High Prices and Market Power of Academic Publishing Reduce Article Citations" — ProMarket (University of Chicago Booth School of Business) — April 24, 2024 — https://www.promarket.org/2024/04/24/high-prices-and-market-power-of-academic-publishing-reduce-article-citations/
Research Professional News — "Elsevier parent company reports 10% rise in profit, to £3.2bn" — February 13, 2025 — https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-world-2025-2-elsevier-parent-company-reports-10-rise-in-profit-to-3-2bn/
The Conversation — "Academic publishing is a multibillion-dollar industry. It's not always good for science" — January 19, 2026 — https://theconversation.com/academic-publishing-is-a-multibillion-dollar-industry-its-not-always-good-for-science-250056
Wikipedia — "Article processing charge" — including citation of 2019 European spending analysis and diamond OA figures, with underlying citations to DOAJ and STM Association data — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_processing_charge
Wikipedia — "Pergamon Press" — including the £440 million Elsevier sale figure and title growth data — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Press
Mark W. Neff — "How Academic Science Gave Its Soul to the Publishing Industry" — Issues in Science and Technology — August 2022 — https://issues.org/how-academic-science-gave-its-soul-to-the-publishing-industry/
SPARC — "Research Companies: Elsevier" — landscape analysis — https://infrastructure.sparcopen.org/landscape-analysis/elsevier
Heather Morrison — "Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature" — eLife, 2018 — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5832410/
WordsRated — "Academic Publishing Statistics" — June 2023 — https://wordsrated.com/academic-publishing-statistics/
Tidsskrift for Den norske legeforening — "The money behind academic publishing" — August 2020 — https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2020/08/kronikk/money-behind-academic-publishing