Breaking Up with Commercial Academic Publishing

Making the move to support non-profit and community-led alternatives

The New Year is a time for celebration. It is a time filled with high hopes and new possibilities. It is a time for reflection and a time for setting goals and aspirations for the months that follow. As we dive deeper into 2025, I've decided that one of my professional goals (for 2025 and beyond) will be to minimize my interaction with commercial academic publishers and to more fully support non-profit and community-led alternatives. This post attempts to explain why.

The Current State of Academic Publishing

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Closed Access: Barriers to Opening Up Research and Scholarship

There are millions of scientific and scholarly papers published in academic journals each year. Yet, much of this work remains “closed access” (e.g., Piwowar et al., 2018). Readers are often required to pay a fee (sometimes $30-50 USD per article) or rely on institutional subscriptions to access and read these papers. Authors can sometimes make their work “open access” (i.e., make free to be read, by anyone, at time of publication), by paying article processing charges (APCs). This is what is commonly referred to as “gold open access” (link).

But APCs for gold open access range from several hundred to several thousand dollars, per article — making this a cost prohibitive option for those who lack funding or other institutional supports (see discussion by Klebel & Ross-Hellauer, 2023; Pai, 2020). For some examples, check out the archived links below, which can be used to identify journal-specific APCs for three major publishers:

Elsevier (link)
Taylor & Francis (link)
Wiley (link)

Using the Elsevier link above, I performed my own quick analysis of journal APC prices for (as of November 2024). The data show a range of APCs, from $250 to $8,900 USD across 824 Elsevier journals, for those listed as offering gold open access (Note: Journals were only included if an APC was publicly listed). The average APC cost was $2,146 USD.

As an alternative to paying APCs, authors may opt to “self-archive” their work. This option, often referred to as “green open access”, allows authors to make the final, unformatted version of their article available, for free, in an institutional repository. (link).

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However, green open access and other alternatives, such as file and account-sharing (see Elbakyan, 2024, pp. 2-4) aren't without obstacles. Many commercial publishers place and enforce embargo periods on accepted manuscripts, which delay self-archiving by several months (often somewhere between three and six months) or even years (for further discussion, see section 2.8 in Tennant et al. (2019). Platforms, such as ResearchGate, which have become a popular medium for researchers and scholars to share their work, have come under legal pressure to enforce copyright policies (link)

Commercial Publishing and Academic Exploitation

At a broader scale, structural restrictions (i.e., high publication fees, loss or restriction of publishing rights) on how research and scholarship can be disseminated reinforces an already highly exploitative relationship between researchers and commercial publishers (see Chalmers & Solomon, 2022). APCs are highly lucrative, at least for those charging them. Haustein and colleagues (2024), estimate that, for six major publishers, researchers and scholars spent nearly $9 billion USD [$8.968 billion] over a five-year period (2019-2023). The ostensible “benefit” gained by authors is increased exposure of their work (what journalologist James Butcher [2023] calls, “amplification”]), but the benefits of greater exposure are undetermined. Exposure may or may not ultimately translate into later career advancement. But even if such benefits could be clearly demonstrated, it is arguable whether it justifies such an enormous financial cost — one often shouldered by tax payers and funders.

These conditions are primarily fostered and driven by the major commercial publishers, like Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and Sage, which dominate the scholarly publishing landscape. Some characterize the situation as a type of economic oligopoly (e.g., Lamdan, 2022; Larivière et al., 2018), one in which researchers and scholars conduct studies, analyze and report their findings, review submitted manuscripts, and serve on editorial boards — again, (typically) all without receiving any share of the aforementioned profits.

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This point is driven home again, when considering another facet of the publishing process: peer review. Peer review of a scholarly manuscript occurs when researchers and scholars are asked to provide feedback and expertise on the work of their colleagues, prior to its publication. This is typically done for free (see discussion by Tennant, 2020). Aczel et al. (2021) estimate that, for 2020, peer reviewers in the U.S. spent more than the equivalent of 15,000 years of time contributing to journal peer review. They estimate that the monetary value of this time is worth more than $1.5 billion (USD). This is a staggering figure, given the amount of labor provided, and in light of the substantial profits accrued by commercial publishers.

Emerging Issues - The Rise of “Surveillance Publishing”?

woman inside a building using her laptop

Photo by Time Gouw on Unsplash

The situation is further muddied by the revelation that large publishers, like Springer and Elsevier, are (purportedly tracking, analyzing, and otherwise surveilling user behavior — including search and reading histories, downloads, geolocation data, and more (Colbert-Lewis et al., 2024; Lamdan, 2022; Pooley, 2022; Yoose & Shockey, 2023).

For example, ScienceDirect, Elsevier's bibliographic database and search engine, is reported to engage in the following behaviors and practices:

Use of web beacons, cookies, and other invasive web surveillance methods to track user behavior outside and beyond the ScienceDirect website
Extensive collection of a broad range of personal data (e.g., behavioral and location data) from ScienceDirect combined with personal data harvested from sources beyond ScienceDirect (i.e., third parties in and outside of RELX and data brokers as stated in Elsevier’s Privacy Policy and U.S. Consumer Privacy Notice)
Collection of personal data by third parties, including search engines, social media platforms, and other personal-data aggregators and profilers such as Google, Adobe, Cloudflare, and New Relic, through extensive use of third-party trackers on the ScienceDirect site
Disclosure of personal data to other Elsevier products and the potential for disclosure of personal data to other business units within RELX, including risk products and services sold to corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies
Processing and disclosure of personal data (and personal data inferred from personal data) for targeted, personalized advertising and marketing

Yoose, B., & Shockey, N. (2023)

The media researcher Jeff Pooley links the emergence of surveillance publishing with the issues we've described earlier. He notes,

For Elsevier and its peers, we’re the product and we’re paying (a lot) for it. Indeed, it’s likely that windfall subscription and APC profits in Elsevier’s “legacy” publishing business have financed its decade-long acquisition binge in analytics.

Pooley (2022)

The issues described above don't appear to be improving. Commercial publishing continues making sizable profits (Abizadeh, 2024), extracting as much value as possible from the labor of authors. The historical power imbalance(s) between publishers, researchers and scholars remain. Some recent sparks have since been extinguished.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many commercial publishers opted to make all pandemic-related research open access, for free (link). This offered a glimmer of hope for a fresh start, for new social contract between parties (see Dunleavy, 2020; Dunleavy et al., 2020). But any hopes at making a more open and equitable publishing system, have largely been dashed. This presents a quandary for those of us who believe that scientific and scholarly knowledge is a public good to be shared by all (e.g., Swartz, 2008; UNESCO, 2025) or those disciplines and professions which rely on the accumulation of evidence to generate evidence-based guidelines, practices, and policies (e.g., Dunleavy, 2021; Gair et al., 2021).

A New Year's Resolution: Supporting Non-Profit and Community-Led Alternatives

At this point in my career, I've served on the editorial board and reviewed for several leading social work and disciplinary journals in my areas of interest (e.g., Social Work, Research on Social Work Practice, Social Work in Mental Health, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders). By-and-large these activities have been done to the benefit of commercial publishers, like Springer and Taylor & Francis.

After about a decade of service and somewhere around 100 peer review reports, I am no longer interested in providing feedback that is hidden, unaccountable, uncredited, and unrewarded (see discussion in Dunleavy, 2024). Instead, I am looking towards supporting, publishing in, and peer reviewing for independent journals and publishers – especially those that are scholar-led or backed by libraries and universities (Note: this doesn't even touch on the quite compelling efforts of the decentralized science ["DeSci"] movement, which is reimaging how research and scholarship is funded, how peer review is incentivized, and how all aspects of the research life cycle are shared).

There are a number of respectable examples across the biomedical and social sciences, such as the journals Meta-psychology (Linnaeus University Press; see Carlsson et al., 2017) and Collabra: Psychology (Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science and University of California Press; link). In addition to being backed by university publishers, these journals are notable for their emphasis on methodological rigor (supporting reproducibility and core principles of open science) and editorial transparency (e.g., use of open peer review). Other groups, such as the Peer Community In organization, decouple editorial assessment from journal publication, and makes peer review both transparent and citable. This puts power back into the hands of both authors and peer reviewers. The Peer Community in Registered Reports (link) provides one example of how this works in practice.

Scholar-led publishers, such as Open Library of Humanities (link), and punctum books (link) and aligned movements (see Edwards, 2025) demonstrate the possibility, actuality, and sustainability, of "diamond open access" — a model in which neither authors, nor readers are charged to publish or read books and articles. Besides avoiding APCs, these efforts put the ethics of publication up-front and in the open (see also UNESCO, 2025).

Meaningful change requires meaningful action. I hope the small steps I'm taking away from commercial publishers and toward non-profit and community-led alternatives will not only support the budding efforts across the scholarly ecosystem, but also inspire others to do the same. Together we can build a more open, equitable, and transparent system of sharing and governing knowledge.

References and Further Reading

Abizadeh, A. (2024, July 16). Academic journals are a lucrative scam - and we're determined to change that. The Guardian. https://web.archive.org/web/20241021061420/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/16/academic-journal-publishers-universities-price-subscriptions

Aczel, B., Szaszi, B., & Holcombe, A. O. (2021). A billion-dollar donation: Estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review. Research Integrity and Peer Review, 6, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-021-00118-2

Butcher, J. (2023). Journalology #30: Amplify. Journalology. https://web.archive.org/web/20250114154420/https://journalology.kit.com/posts/journalology-30-amplify

Carlsson, R., Danielsson, H., Heene, M., Innes-Ker, Å., Lakens, D., Schimmack, U., ... & Weinstein, Y. (2017). Inaugural editorial of meta-psychology. Meta-Psychology, 1, a1001-a1001. https://doi.org/10.15626/MP2017.1001

Chalmers, B., & Solomon, D. L. (2022). Academic exploitation. The Lancet, 400(10347), 159–160. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00922-9

Colbert-Lewis, D., maminta, L., McElroy, K., Slaght, G., & Swartz, M. (2024). The citation economy as a site of extraction for surveillance publishing. Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship, 10, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.33137/cjal-rcbu.v10.43293

Dunleavy, D. J. (2020). Coronavirus as impetus for a lasting change in research culture. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/2ryt3

Dunleavy, D. J.. (2021). Social work and the necessity of open access. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4447503

Dunleavy, D. J. (2024). Research note—Making peer review evidence-based: It’s time to open the “black box”. Journal of Social Work Education, 61(1), 160–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2024.2378685

Dunleavy, D. J., Tennant, J., & Francuzik, W. (2020). Scientific practice in the time of COVID19: It’s time to commit to change. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3873630

Edwards, C. (2025, March 31). Academic libraries cannot afford to carry on with transformative agreements. LSE' Impact of Social Science. https://web.archive.org/https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2025/03/31/academic-libraries-cannot-afford-to-carry-on-with-transformative-agreements/

Elbakyan, A. (2024). From black open access to open access of color: Accepting the diversity of approaches towards free science. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202409.0197.v1

Gair, S., Zuchowski, I., Beddoe, L., & Tangata, T. K. T. (2021). Open access publishing: A key enabler to research impact, informed practice and social justice. Advances in Social Work and Welfare Education, 22(2), 25–38. https://web.archive.org/web/20241214092345/https://journal.anzswwer.org/index.php/advances/article/view/71

Haustein, S., Schares, E., Alperin, J. P., Hare, M., Butler, L. A., & Schönfelder, N. (2024). Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.16551

Klebel, T., & Ross-Hellauer, T. (2023). The APC-barrier and its effect on stratification in open access publishing. Quantitative Science Studies, 4(1), 22–43. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00245

Lamdan, S. (2022). Data cartels: The companies that monopolize and control our information. Stanford University Press.

Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). The oligopoly of academic publishers in the digital era. PLoS ONE, 10(6), e0127502. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

Pai, M. (2020, December 1). How prestige journals remain elite, exclusive and exclusionary. Forbes. https://web.archive.org/web/20241222183829/https://forbes.com/sites/madhukarpai/2020/11/30/how-prestige-journals-remain-elite-exclusive-and-exclusionary/

Piwowar, H., Priem, J., Larivière, V., Alperin, J. P., Matthias, L., Norlander, B., ... & Haustein, S. (2018). The state of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375

Pooley, J. (2022). Surveillance publishing. The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 25(1). https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.1874

Swartz, A. (2008). Guerilla open access manifesto. https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/mode/2up

Tennant, J. P. (2020). Time to stop the exploitation of free academic labour. European Science Editing, 46, e51839. https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2020.e51839

Tennant, J. P., Crane, H., Crick, T., Davila, J., Enkhbayar, A., Havemann, J., Kramer, B., Martin, R., Masuzzo, P., Nobes, A., Rice, C., Rivera-López, B., Ross-Hellauer, T., Sattler, S., Thacker, P. D., & Vanholsbeeck, M. (2019). Ten hot topics around scholarly publishing. Publications, 7(2), 34. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7020034

UNESCO. (2025, January 10). Diamond open access: Advancing knowledge as a public good. https://web.archive.org/web/20250124212701/https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/diamond-open-access-advancing-knowledge-public-good?hub=686

Yoose, B., & Shockey, N. (2023). Navigating risk in vendor data privacy practices: An analysis of Elsevier's ScienceDirect (Version v1). SPARC. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10078610

Author's note: This post is also archived at Zenodo at:

Dunleavy, D. (2025). Breaking up with commercial academic publishing. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15120634