Scientific publishing is a hugely profitable business regardless of its narrow audience, weighing somewhere around the size of the film industry. In order to make money as a traditional publisher, not necessarily scientific, a multitude of costs must be covered. These costs range from paying writers, employing editors to commission, shape, and check the articles, as well as paying to distribute the finished product. Typically, successful magazine publishers of this sort make profits of around 12-15%.
For scientific publishing, the way to make money would in theory seem very similar. However, in reality, scientific publishers duck most of the actual costs. Scientists research and create work under their own direction, funded usually by the government. The work is given to publishers for free, where they are then given to scientific editors to check whether or not it is worth publishing for a price. The catch is that the actual bulk of the editorial burden and the assurance of scientific validity, a process known as peer review, is done by scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to the government-funded institutions to be read by scientists, who, in a collective sense, created the product to begin with.
Scientists are aware of the bad deal they’re playing with. Why should an industry receive its raw materials from its customers, use those customers to check quality control, and then sell the product back to the customers at an inflated price? Many scientists also believe that the publishing industry is able to exert unnecessary influence over what scientists choose to study, which ultimately hurts the field of science in the end. After all, they are a business, and scientists themselves, knowing what kind of work would get published, align their work accordingly. This is turn defeats the purpose of scientific thought and allows for the control of demand for certain ideas in a place where pure creativity and innovation should prevail instead.
Since the early 2000’s, scientists have theorized an alternative called “open access”. This removes the problem of balancing commercial and scientific imperatives by simply eliminating the commercial element. In practice, this idea takes the form of online journals, where scientists pay for editing but the work is available for everyone. However, despite the funding from some of the biggest agencies in the world, including the Gates Foundation, only about a quarter of scientific papers are readily available. The question that arises is the extent to which scientific advancements are hindered from the privatization of science itself. How much potential is lost when business is incorporated into science as a study?
