Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

The Guardian ^ | June 27, 2017 | Stephen Buranyi

[CheshireTheCat]

It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell.

In 2011, Claudio Aspesi, a senior investment analyst at Bernstein Research in London, made a bet that the dominant firm in one of the most lucrative industries in the world was headed for a crash. Reed-Elsevier, a multinational publishing giant with annual revenues exceeding £6bn, was an investor’s darling. It was one of the few publishers that had successfully managed the transition to the internet, and a recent company report was predicting yet another year of growth. Aspesi, though, had reason to believe that that prediction – along with those of every other major financial analyst – was wrong.

The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.

But Elsevier’s business model seemed a truly puzzling thing. In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.....

[CheshireTheCat]

Perhaps an oldie, but a goodie in light of current events.

Robert Maxwell, father of a certain paramour of a certain allegedly hanged man.

[CheshireTheCat]

Thanks for the Skepolitic for the heads up on this.

[Yo-Yo]

Is the practice in academia of “publish or perish” bad for science?

[UnwashedPeasant]

Expensive research reports are often available free on Sci Hub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

Current URL: sci-hub.se

[sauropod]

I’m familiar with Elsevier. You pay for most articles.

[hinckley buzzard]

Seems to be obsessing about the life history of this Maxwell guy. Misses the real issues entirely, ie the crisis of irreproducibility, the collapse of the “peer review” system, and the actual dynamics of publishing: publications are the coin of the realm in academia, and researchers will pay by the page to get their articles published in many journals such as Elsevier created. Much of “peer-reviewed science” is rubbish, but how to sort it out when editors don’t even know what they are publishing.

[jimfr]

Uhm, Usually the authors pay to have an article published and the subscribers (universities and indivuals) also pay to receive the journals. so how they are loosing money is a big question.
As for peer review, is often very politcal and can be very difficult to get published if you don’t have a popular conclusion.