The staircase to the top of academia’s ivory tower is paved with underpaid, or wholly uncompensated, labour that supports the academic journal industry. Young scholars are asked to juggle teaching positions, research, and their own classes.
The “publish or perish” approach demands that aspiring academics constantly produce content so they can gain recognition and credibility in their field. The idea is that there will eventually be a return on investment for all the uncompensated labour done by graduate students and adjunct staff – collect enough prestigious writing credits, and you’ll get that shiny tenure-track position eventually.
You have to spend money to make money, as the saying goes; the problem is that nobody, except for the lucky few at the top of the publishing food chain, is making money.
Pay to play
Part of the problem in academic publishing lies with Article Publishing Charges (APCs), which would-be authors have to pay for their article to be considered for publication. In theory, APCs are meant to cover publishing costs so research can be provided to readers for free. But in practice, the editors and peer reviewers behind these journals see little to none of this money, while academic publishing giants line their pockets with increasingly inflated APCs. In particular, the peer reviewing process (which entails fact-checking and making sure that research is methodologically sound) is done on a volunteer basis, and reviewers rarely receive credit for this work. Editors may make a few thousand dollars a year, but this pales in comparison to the millions of dollars that publication companies reap in profits.
Authors, who are asked to pay APCs in the first place, do not see a dime of this money; what they get in exchange for their research is prestige. Academic journals calculate their renown by way of impact factors, which measure how frequently the average journal in an article is cited within a year. A journal with a high impact factor, then, is likely considered to be more prestigious and well-known than its competitors. But while academic publishers treat their impact factors as a form of currency, prestige does not pay the bills.
A notorious exemplar of this problem in academic publishing – expecting researchers and reviewers to create high-quality work in prestigious journals for free, all while charging exorbitant APCs – is Elsevier. The company boasts almost 3,000 journals, some of which have papers cited dozens or hundreds of times a year on average. But these staggeringly high numbers come with an equally staggering price tag: their journal NeuroImage reports an APC of $3450 USD, while The Lancet charges $6,830 USD.
Fighting back with boycotts and walk-outs
Academics have organized a number of campaigns to draw attention to their issues with Elsevier. For example, “The Cost of Knowledge” campaign of 2012 included over 20,000 researchers who vowed to boycott Elsevier however they could – whether it be by refusing to submit to its journals, conduct peer reviews for them, or serve on their editorial boards. Now over a decade later, the editorial board of the aforementioned NeuroImage organized a journal-wide exodus of its over 40 editors.
On April 17, NeuroImage editors resigned after repeated requests for Elsevier to lower the journal’s APC. According to a press release from the former editors, the costs for publishing an article in a journal are typically estimated at $1,000 or lower – a stark difference from the over-$3,000 asked of hopeful NeuroImage authors. As such, editors had asked Elsevier to reduce the APC to below $2,000 in June of 2022; when no reduction was offered, editors wrote again in March 2023 threatening to resign if Elsevier refused to reduce the APC. When the company explained that APCs would not be reduced, as “market forces” apparently supported the current APC, editors resigned. Now, former NeuroImage editors are starting their own journal published under MIT Press: Imaging Neuroscience, which will have an APC of $1,600 and an option to waive the APC for authors from low- and middle-income countries.
Stephen Smith, an Oxford professor and Editor-in-Chief of Imaging Neuroscience, explained that the urgency of lowering APCs made it clear that leaving NeuroImage was the right thing to do, although it was difficult.
“We really didn’t want to see NeuroImage disappear … But, at the end of the day, change is needed – too many publishers are making too much, largely unearned, profit – from research and writing that they did almost nothing to help produce,” said Smith.
He added that NeuroImage already had a positive culture within its editorial board, with an emphasis on getting consensus for important topics and having open discussions about important issues.
“In the case of this big move [from Elsevier to MIT Press]… getting consensus was particularly straightforward because of the dominant strong feeling in our field that the huge-profit APCs are wrong and unsustainable,” he said.
Opening access to content
The idea behind Imaging Neuroscience is to create an open-access (i.e., free-to-read), high-quality journal, without exorbitant APCs. Through philanthropic contributions, the journal is hoping to lower its APC even further, per Smith. Editors of the journal will each earn a $2,000 per year stipend – though because the journal is trying to keep its APC as low as possible, editors will not collect their stipends until the number of papers being published is large enough to cover these costs.
“We were so happy to see, in our APC discussions with MIT Press, that profit just doesn’t come into it,” Smith remarked. “A related aspect is that there is no pressure from MIT Press to lower the scientific standards of the journal, in order to make more money by publishing more papers, which we do see often in for-profit publishers.”
Solidarity within academia
Aside from withholding labour, academics may be able to put pressure on publishing giants through inter-university negotiation committees. In Canada, this is the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), a non-profit consortium of academic libraries. Craig Olsvik, CRKN’s Senior Manager of Licensing and Member Services, told rabble.ca that the organization’s mission is to provide equitable access to scholarly research across Canada.
“Primarily, our avenue for doing that is by negotiating for sustainable licensing costs for our libraries that provide access to these materials for their students and faculty,” he said, remarking that CRKN successfully negotiated a 12.5 per cent reduction in the cost of its 2021-2023 licensing agreement with Elsevier.
As CRKN’s current agreement with Elsevier is set to expire on December 31 of this year, negotiations are underway again. They come in the wake of increasing calls for Elsevier to make more of its journals open-access.
Universities are growing increasingly unwilling to buy subscriptions to journals published by for-profit giants, particularly Elsevier. For example, in March of 2021, the Joint Information Systems Committee – a negotiating committee for British universities – pressured Elsevier for cheaper fees, characterizing the costs of subscriptions to Elsevier journals as “unsustainable.” Likewise, the University of California system cancelled its Elsevier subscriptions in 2019 due to their high costs; MIT, Louisiana State University, and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill followed suit, among others.
Olsvik could not disclose what CRKN’s objectives are in its current negotiations with Elsevier, but affirmed that they are “very much in alignment with the mandate and priorities that have been communicated to CRKN by its members,” and that the network will continue to work towards “equitable access, reduced costs, and increased open access.”
Still, reducing the cost for reading scholarly articles is only half the battle: without the ability to submit papers at low cost, researchers from low- and middle-income countries and institutions are excluded from academic publications altogether.
CRKN is attempting to take on part of the burden of the cost of publishing “by reducing or eliminating the cost of APCs wherever possible,” per Olsvik. For example, authors working within CRKN-affiliated universities are eligible for a 20 per cent discount on the APC for most Elsevier journals.
“We are also engaged in discussions [with other organizations] regarding the issue of global equity in publishing with respect to the barriers to paying for APCs in lower/middle-income countries,” Olsvik concluded.
As for Imaging Neuroscience, editors hope that the journal will grow in renown and receive enough philanthropic funding to provide high-quality open-access papers, with low APCs to boot.
As the editorial board wrote in their press release, “We are committed to Imaging Neuroscience not only being the top journal in our field, but in demonstrating the way forward in non-profit publishing… we feel that the era of extreme levels of profit made by some publishers is coming to an end.”
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