The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do

If you ever want a good laugh, ask an academic to explain what they get paid to do, and who pays them to do it. In STEM fields, it works like this: the university pays you to teach, but unless you’re at a liberal arts college, you don’t actually get promoted or recognized for your teaching. Instead, you get promoted and recognized for your research, which the university does not generally pay you for. You have to ask someone else to provide that part of your salary, and in the US, that someone else is usually the federal government. If you’re lucky—and these days, very lucky—you get a chunk of money to grow your bacteria or smash your electrons together or whatever, you write up your results for publication, and this is where the monkey business really begins. In most disciplines, the next step is sending your paper to a peer-reviewed journal, where it gets evaluated by an editor and (if the editor sees some promise in it) a few reviewers. These people are academics just like you, and they generally do not get paid for their time. Editors maybe get a small stipend and a bit of professional cred, while reviewers get nothing but the warm fuzzies of doing “service to the field”, or the cold thrill of tanking other people’s papers. If you’re lucky again, your paper gets accepted by the journal, which now owns the copyright to your work. They do not pay you for this! If anything, you pay them an “article processing charge” for the privilege of no longer owning the rights to your paper. This is considered a great honor. The journals then paywall your work, sell the access back to you and your colleagues, and pocket the profit. Universities cover these subscriptions and fees by charging the government “indirect costs” on every grant—money that doesn’t go to the research itself, but to all the things that support the research, like keeping the lights on, cleaning the toilets, and accessing the journals that the researchers need to read. Nothing about this system makes sense, which is why I think we should build a new one. In the meantime, though, we should also fix the old one. But that’s hard, for two reasons. First, many people are invested in things working exactly the way they do now, so every stupid idea has a constituency behind it. Second, our current administration seems to believe in policy by bloodletting: if something isn’t working, just slice it open at random. Thanks to these haphazard cuts and cancellations, we now have a system that is both dysfunctional and anemic. I see a way to solve both problems at once. We can satisfy both the scientists and the scalpel-wielding politicians by ridding ourselves of the one constituency that should not exist. Of all the crazy parts of our crazy system, the craziest part is where taxpayers pay for the research, then pay private companies to publish it, and then pay again so scientists can read it. We may not agree on much, but we can all agree on this: it is time, finally and forever, to get rid of for-profit scientific publishers. The writer G.K. Chesterton once said that before you knock anything down, you ought to know how it got there in the first place. So before we show for-profit publishers the pointy end of a pitchfork, we ought to know where they came from and why they persist. It used to be a huge pain to produce a physical journal—someone had to operate the printing presses, lick the stamps, and mail the copies all over the world. Unsurprisingly, academics didn’t care much about doing those things. When government money started flowing into universities post-World War II and the number of articles exploded, private companies were like, “Hey, why don’t we take these journals off your hands—you keep doing the scientific stuff and we’ll handle all the boring stuff.” And the academics were like “Sounds good, we’re sure this won’t have any unforeseen consequences.” Those companies knew they had a captive audience, so they bought up as many journals as they could. Journal articles aren’t interchangeable commodities like corn or soybeans—if your science supplier starts gouging you, you can’t just switch to a new one. Adding to this lock-in effect, publishing in “high-impact” journals became the key to success in science, which meant if you wanted to move up, your university had to pay up. So, even as the internet made it much cheaper to produce a journal, publishers made it much more expensive to subscribe to one. The people running this scam had no illusions about it, even if they hoped that other people did. Here’s how one CEO described it: You have no idea how profitable these journals are once you stop doing anything. When you’re building a journal, you spend time getting good editorial boards, you treat them well, you give them dinners. [...] [and then] we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out and you wouldn’t believe how wonderful it is. So here’s the report we can make to Mr. Chesterton: for-profit scientific publishers arose to solve the problem of producing physical journals. The internet mostly solved that problem. Now the publishers are the problem. These days, Springer Nature, Elsevier, Wiley, and the like are basically giant operations that proofread, format, and store PDFs. That’s not nothing, but it’s pretty close to nothing. No one knows how much publishers make in return for providing these modest services, but we can guess. In 2017, the Association of Research Libraries surveyed its 123 member institutions and found they were paying a collective $1 billion in journal subscriptions every year. The ARL covers some of the biggest universities, but not nearly all of them, so let’s guess that number accounts for half of all university subscription spending. In 2023, the federal government estimated it paid nearly $380 million in article processing charges alone, and those are separate from subscriptions. So it wouldn’t be crazy if American universities were paying something like $2.5 billion to publishers every year, with the majority of that ultimately coming from taxpayers. (By the way, the estimated profit margins for commercial scientific publishers are around 40%, which is higher than Microsoft.) To put those costs in perspective: if the federal government cut out the publishers, it would probably save more money every year than it has “saved” in its recent attempts to cut off scientific funding to universities. It’s unclear how much money will ultimately be clawed back, as grants continue to get frozen, unfrozen, litigated, and negotiated. But right now, it seems like ~$1.4 billion in promised science funding is simply not going to be paid out. We could save more than that every year if we just stopped writing checks to John Wiley & Sons. How can such a scam continue to exist? In large part, it’s because of a computer hacker from Kazakhstan. The political scientist James C. Scott once wrote that many systems only “work” because people disobey them. For instance, the Soviet Union attempted to impose agricultural regulations so strict that people would have starved if they followed the letter of the law. Instead, citizens grew and traded food in secret. This made it look like the regulations were successful, when in fact they were a sham.1 Something similar is happening right now in science, except Russia is on the opposite side of the story this time. In the early 2010s, a Kazakhstani computer programmer named Alexandra Elbakyan started downloading articles en masse and posting them publicly on a website called SciHub. The publishers sued her, so she’s hiding out in Russia, which protects her from extradition. As you can see in the map below, millions of people now use SciHub to access scientific articles, including lots of people who seem to work at universities: Why would researchers resort to piracy when they have legitimate access themselves? Maybe because journals’ interfaces are so clunky and annoying that it’s faster to go straight to SciHub. Or maybe it’s…