There’s not much news today except for what you already know: Trump is imposing ridiculous tariffs on China, which will, contrary to his stupid claim, cost U.S. citizens more. Tariffs are never a good idea. And Doris Day died. The big news from Chicago is that all ten of my ducklings are still alive and thriving, which goes a long way toward counteracting the bad news.
In the absence of news, here’s a personal rant, which I’ve made before. Commercial scientific publishers like Springer and Elsevier are well known for gouging both scientists and university libraries by charging huge amounts for subscriptions to journals, for “publication charges” (what you pay when you publish a paper in their journals), and for online reprints. I recently discovered, for instance, that the University of Chicago Library, which is not impecunious and is well stocked with journals, can’t afford to carry Nature Ecology & Evolution, an important journal in my field. That’s because its publisher, like all Nature journals, is Springer, and is charging more money for the journal than our library can afford. (This is not a predatory journal or an obscure one; it’s one I would read if I had access.)
As I wrote in 2016, the profit margins of commercial science publishers are obscene. My beef at that time, which still holds, was this:
I’ve long complained about the bloated profits of commercial scientific publishers, which can be as high as 40%. That’s obscene if you realize that other companies which actually make a product make far less money, that the scientific publishers get that money by not only charging authors to publish there, but having their scientific papers refereed and improved by reviewers who are paid nothing. Those reviewers—and I’ve done plenty of gratis reviewing for journals like Nature and Current Biology, as well as for journals issued by less greedy publishers—are done out of a sense of “public service”. Profit-hungry journals like to play on our sense of duty and public service, all the while raking in huge profits by using scientists to do the journal’s job for free. And remember that these journals charge people for access to papers that are, by and large, funded by government grants—by the taxpayer. It’s reprehensible that the public who funds such research is denied access to the results of that research. (Some funding organizations, however, allow journals to charge for access for only one year. But even that is too much.) Commercial publishing of taxpayer-funded research is a travesty unless the profits, beyond those needed to pay salaries and run the company, are plowed back into more science.
But young scientists, who need to make their reputations by publishing in well-known journals like Cell and Nature, have no choice, for their hiring, tenure, and promotion often depend on what journals accept their papers. Sadly, many of the “high quality” journals are put out by greedy publishers. And it’s not just young scientists, either: organizations that hand out grants often look at where you’ve published your papers before deciding whether to give you further funds.
I’ve complained about this before, especially about the company Elsevier, one of the greediest scientific publishers around (see here). Eventually I, and 16,383 other scientists (the number is growing), pledged to do no more work for Elsevier until they adopted reasonable business practice instead of gouging scientists. Even editors have fought back: as I reported last November, “all six editors and 31 editorial board members of Lingua, a highly reputed linguistics journal that has the misfortune to be published by Elsevier, have resigned in protest of high library and bundling fees and of Elsevier’s refusal to convert the journal to open access.”
Companies like Springer and Elsevier are, unlike society journals or university-published journals, purely capitalistic: their aim is not to disseminate science, but to make money. And they do. Here are the profits I reported in the post above; note that I can’t be sure that these figures hold now, nor that they were absolutely accurate in 2016. But this is what I had:
Want to know the obscene level of profits these companies make? From Sauropod Vertebrata Picture of the Week, we have a listing of the profits of well known technical scientific publishers. These are from 2012 and represent profits as a percentage of revenue:
Here’s a comparison of profits from various companies, including nonscientific ones, listed on Alex Holcombe’s blog in 2013; they’re compared to profits of other companies. [JAC: I believe these are profits as a percentage of revenues.]
As pointed out in the article I’ll shortly summarize, Elsevier made a profit of $1.13 billion dollars in 2014—1.3 times the entire annual budget of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
One way that companies like Springer fatten their purses is by getting scientists to do reviewing for them, and then paying them nothing or almost nothing. What this means, in effect, is that scientists are working as no-wage slaves so that commercial scientific publishers can make more money. Here’s an email I got yesterday from an editor at Springer (names changed to protect the capitalists):
From: [NAME REDACTED]
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2019 2:50 PM
To: Jerry Coyne
Subject: Population Genetics-Historical Fiction
Dear Prof Coyne,
Greetings from New York. Please allow me to introduce myself as an editor in Life Sciences at Springer. As you may know, Springer is an international publisher of scholarly research and reference works in a variety of academic disciplines.
We have recently received a book proposal entitled [TITLE AND DESCRIPTION OF BOOK REDACTED]. Given your academic interest in this field, I wonder if you are available to review this unique project for scope and suitability for publication (2 pages plus sample chapters). I am delighted to offer any ebook of your choice from Springer (valued at $250 or less) as a token of my gratitude. In the event that you are unable to review for us, please feel free to suggest a colleague who might be a suitable alternative.
I look forward to hearing from you, and thank you in advance for your time and consideration.
With best wishes,
[Name REDACTED]
Note what they’re offering. In return for several hours of work (I’d have to review a short book proposal but also “sample chapters”, which are long and take time), I get an ebook of my choice. Now what does that cost Springer? Nothing! Once an ebook is produced, handing out one free copy to a reviewer has a marginal cost of zero. (And I don’t even read books online.) In other words, they’re asking me to put in several hours of work in return for bupkes. Nobody else who invested so much time in acquiring scientific expertise would be expected to work for nothing. But journals like this one do, counting on our “sense of duty as scientists.” (Some companies do offer real books, but often of a value less than that of a reviewer’s time, especially given that the cost of a book to a publisher is about half what you’d pay in a bookstore or online.)
Well, I will and do exercise a sense of duty for journals that aren’t run for profit, but not for companies like Springer. I wrote them this reply:
Sorry, but the offer of an e-book, which costs you virtually nothing, is hardly reasonable payment for what would be at the minimum several hours of work on my part. I should make at least as much as a plumber, don’t you think?
And I don’t have an e-reader.
I consider such offers pure exploitation of academics so that your already obscenely large profits (34% of revenue) can become even larger. When you offer a decent stipend instead of e-books, then maybe you’ll get more takers.
I’ll add that your journals cost so much that our library at the University of Chicago cannot even afford to take Nature Ecology & Evolution, which is a journal right in my area.
I can see why you make so much profit: you pay book reviewers virtually nothing.
Yours,
Jerry Coyne
