More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the ‘greed’ of the publisher. Ian Sample speaks to correspondent Hannah Devlin about the remarkably lucrative business of scientific publishing, hears from Prof Chris Chambers about what was behind the recent mass resignation, and finds out why researchers are demanding change. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

A few weeks ago the entire board of the academic journal Neuroimage, owned by publishing giant Elsevier, resigned from their posts.

Now this might sound like a niche story, but the walkout gets to an issue that's been bubbling away in the scientific community for decades.

The big business of scientific publishing.

Billions are made each year producing journals and sharing academic articles around the world.

It's a system that dictates scientists' careers, the way science is done, and what impact that science has.

The industry has also been called perverse, bizarre, exploitative, and that it should be seen as a public scandal.

It's kind of why science exists, how science has worked for a long time, under various constraints, the most latest being profiteering.

We need to make active steps toward dismantling this publishing culture that surrounds science and feeds off it like some kind of organism.

So what is going on in scientific publishing?

And is this the beginning of the end for 1 of the most lucrative businesses out there?

I'm the Guardian's Science Editor, Ian Sample, and this is Science Weekly.

Hannah Devlin, as a science correspondent, you spend a lot of your time going through scientific research papers in journals.

I mean, what role do these journals play in the scientific endeavour?

I mean, how fundamental are journals to science and scientists?

I mean, I think they're hugely fundamental.

If you think about it, scientists are doing their work to contribute to the grand sum of scientific knowledge and to contribute to scientific progress.

And that requires them to share their work with other people so that findings can be understood by other people and in some cases applied to medicine or engineering or whatever the field is.

Once a scientist has done their experiments, got their results, they then write that up in a paper which will explain why it's important, exactly what they did and they'll submit that to a journal.

The journal will send it out to other scientists to review it, to look at whether it stands up to scientific scrutiny and then if they agree that it does, it'll be published.

And so journal articles are the end point.

It's basically all the money that's going into research to buy new equipment, to do experiments, to pay for people's salaries.

Effectively everything that's discovered is condensed down into a journal article.

It's basically the output of what public funders and charities are paying for.

And this whole sort of scientific publishing system has become so integrated into how modern science is done that we almost don't really question anymore, where did it actually come from?

Before the big business of scientific publishing, scientific papers were often produced by scientific societies on a bit of a shoestring and more as a sort of afterthought.

Often big results were presented at conferences or scientific meetings.

And then I think in the 1940s, there was a shift from science being more of an amateur pursuit or, you know, the pursuit of wealthy gentlemen that could afford it to being a respected profession.

And cash flooded in, science expanded, and scientific publishing became a business opportunity and 1 that really took off.

And around that point in the UK, you had Robert Maxwell, the infamous media mogul, who established Pergamon, and he had this realization that when it came to scientific publishing, it wasn't like a fixed size pie.

It was something that you could almost divide into smaller and smaller pieces and grow.

So you didn't need to just have 1 physics journal, you could be divided into all sorts of sub-specialties that people would also want to publish in.

So this scientific publishing system we have now, I mean it's critical, It's a crucial part of academia and industry.

Have we got any idea of how much it's worth, how big this market is?

So this might sound like a very niche field, and certainly some of the titles of the journals sound very niche, but it's actually a huge business that's worth billions of dollars each year.

And if you take something like Elsevier, which is the biggest science publisher, it's got nearly 3, 000 journals that are publishing more than 600, 000 articles each year.

I think it's worth mentioning here that it's not just the scale of this, it's also that the profit margins are very generous.

Some of the biggest companies have profit margins between 20 and 40%, which is way above what you would see in a lot of other industries.

And I think that's 1 of the things that has caused a certain degree of outrage, really, that in effect, the public or charities are often paying for the science.

Scientists are writing up the articles, And then within the scientific community, people are called on to review each other articles for free.

And then often these journals are also edited.

The editor-in-chief, an editorial board who may receive a small fee will also be scientists who are essentially doing some of that work because they believe it's in the interest of their community.

And then the traditional model is that university libraries, learned societies and so on are paying subscriptions then to access that material.

So I think there is a feeling that the model is fundamentally unfair.

So the public are funding the science, the scientists are doing the work around these articles and journals for free.

And then organisations, often with public funds, are paying again to access the journals.

So to combat this, there's been a move towards making things open access, right?

Yeah, so about a decade ago there was a real shift towards funders requiring the results of research to be made open access so that people wouldn't have to pay to view the results of work that being funded publicly.

And so there's been this shift to what's known as the open access model where instead of people paying to view the work through subscriptions, people pay to publish their paper.

It has had I think some unintended consequences.

1 of those is that it creates really an incentive for journals to publish more articles, which the risk of that is that the quality drops down.

And for researchers it's not always straightforward because they've then got to find the money themselves out of their own grants sometimes.

Of course, journals argue that they provide an essential and valuable service for science and well-functioning research.

When we reached out to Elsevier for comment, they told us, Elsevier helps researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society.

We do this by facilitating insights and critical decision-making for customers across global research and health ecosystems.

90% of researchers say the process of publishing with Elsevier has improved the clarity of their research.

They also said, our overarching principle remains to charge unit prices below the market average while delivering above-average quality and publicly available data shows this is the case.

Part of the sometimes fraught relationship between journals and scientists is that their careers are dependent on publishing articles, particularly in esteemed journals.

There's almost a brutal hierarchy of where you publish and different journals have different what you call impact factors, which is basically how many people read and cite the work.

It's something that scientists often are measuring obsessively, what their own index is for how high impact journals they've published in and how many people have cited their work.

So publishing has a huge influence on both people's careers, but also the types of research that gets funded.

Have you spoken to many scientists about these issues over the years?

I'm wondering how they tend to feel about it.

There is quite widespread frustration, but it's a problem that individual scientists can't really deal with by themselves.

So I think what will be interesting is whether scientists can come together like the editorial board behind NeuroImage have done to try and move things for their whole fields.

So my name's Chris Chambers, I'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Cardiff University, where I'm the head of brain stimulation at our imaging centre, and I'm part of the resigning editorial team at NeuroImage and NeuroImage Reports.

And that editorial team was the whole board resigning from NeuroImage, which is published by Elsevier.

So to reflect on this, we have to understand a little bit about how the publishing world works in academia.

So if you take a large company like Elsevier or Wiley or any of the other big ones, They provide the infrastructure for supporting peer review through software and some administrative support for publication.

What some publishers have done is try to extract the most possible profit they can from this process.

So when an author submits to a scientific journal.

Sometimes they have to pay a submission fee, which goes straight to the publisher.

If their work is accepted for publication, they then may have to pay what we call an article processing charge, or APC.

This can be anywhere from 1 to $10, 000 per article.

And on top of that, they might have to pay page charges, color figure charges, all of this money going to the publisher.

So you end up in a situation where scientists are paying and the public is paying effectively.

Now we resigned from this editorial board because Elsevier, the publisher of NeuroImage and NeuroImage Reports, increased its charges significantly into the realm which was frankly unaffordable I think for many people and is regressive in science.

Because of that increase and because of their unwillingness to negotiate a reduction in the APC, we decided we'd had enough.

We can choose to say no to these publishers if we want to, but we need to act collectively.

But Chris, these issues around scientific publishing, they're not new.

What was the last straw, if you like, if that's the situation we're in?

It's difficult to pinpoint any particular reason for this apart from the fact that we just happen to be a group of people who got fed up by it.

Because you have to look at the reward structure that's going on here.

We created a very effective and leading journal which was attractive to the scientific community.

The reward for that is that the scientific community then gets charged even more to publish in that journal.

The better you make a journal, the more attractive you make it as a home for high quality science, the more the publishers raise the price of publication.

I'm interested in how it felt for you to actually leave to hand over this work you're doing for Elsevier.

I've never regretted stepping away from it because I think it's actually quite pernicious.

We can do all of the same work we do, all of the editing work that we do for the community, all of the reviewing that we do for the community, we can do through more ethical channels.

We can even do it at the pre-print stage for free for everybody without having journals at all, which is an even bigger issue that we can think about.

I feel proud actually to be surrounded by colleagues that feel this strongly, that we need to make active steps toward dismantling this publishing culture that sort of surrounds science and feeds off it like some kind of organism, but contributes really very little of value.

So what would you like to see change in the world of scientific publishing?

I mean, is there still a place for the prestigious journal and peer reviewers we know it, and all those things that publishing companies will claim to do, and do do to some extent, to add value and justify these charges.

There is a place for peer review in my view, but I don't see that it needs to have anything to do with publishers.

It's under a lot of pressure, but basically it works.

Which leads us to ask, what can academic publishers provide?

And I think academic publishers do have a role.

It has to be something actually, genuinely additive to the process.

So for example, signposting particular research of notes, writing news and views commentaries, interactive ways of presenting data and for allowing readers to interact with information that they're getting.

There's all of this kind of innovation that academic publishers could do, which they're not doing.

I do think they have a place, but I think they won't potentially for very long.

I think the time of the dinosaur is coming to an end, I think, when we look at the role of academic publishers and also if we look beyond that to even the role of journals.

In response, Elsevier told us, we value very highly our editors and are disappointed with the decision of the Neuro Image Editorial Board to step down from their roles, especially as we have been engaging constructively with them over the last couple of years as we transition Neuro Image to become a fully open access journal.

In line with our policy of setting our article publishing charges competitively below the market average relative to quality, the fee that's been set for NeuroImage is below that of the nearest comparable journal in its field.

Euroimage has appointed an interim internal editorial team.

They added, we want to reassure all authors that we will continue to work together with the outgoing editors to ensure all submissions already in process are handled to a final decision.

NeuroImage has implemented measures to ensure high service levels for authors of new submissions.

Hannah, we've heard from Chris about open access and alternatives of what a new system could look like, but do you see things actually changing?

I mean, is this a business model on its last legs or is this just a group of academics feeling they've had enough, they all resign, another bunch will step in and things will just carry on as they have done for a long time now.

Yeah, I think it's a really open question of whether this is going to trigger a whole cascade of other editorial boards stepping down.

You know, actually, not every editorial board is going to have the same mindset.

You know, not everyone is as well set up to kind of make this wholesale shift to another publisher.

But I do think that, you know, things also do feel in flux.

You know, 1 of the things that really changed the way publishing was working was COVID, the pandemic, there wasn't the time to go through that normal peer review process.

And, you know, a lot of papers were just immediately put up online as preprints, not peer reviewed, you know, immediately available for everyone to see.

And perhaps sidestep some of the other problems that you have with peer review where sometimes you get scientists who are holding up publication or people get trapped in this process for months and months when they just want to get their work out there.

I think, you know, when it comes to, you know, this sort of really big generalist journals, there probably is an important role for someone external to kind of be scanning the horizon and looking at what's really going to make a big difference in a particular field and maybe spill over into related areas.

But I think whatever your view is on scientific publishing and the value that publishers add, something probably does need to change because there's this ongoing sense of frustration that the model we've got at the moment isn't working for everyone, especially scientists often.

It's not always in the interest of their careers.

It's not always leading to the most high quality, reliable science.

I'm not sure how we're going to get there, but I think there is a sense that something needs to change.

Thanks to both Professor Chris Chambers and Hannah Devlin.

Chris and his colleagues are setting up a non-profit open access journal and we've put a link to that on the podcast web page at theguardian.com and that's it for today the producer was Madeline Finlay the sound design was by Joel Cox an executive producer was Ellie Burie We'll be back on Thursday.


Speaker 0: This is The Guardian.

Speaker 1: A few weeks ago the entire board of the academic journal Neuroimage, owned by publishing giant Elsevier, resigned from their posts. Now this might sound like a niche story, but the walkout gets to an issue that's been bubbling away in the scientific community for decades. The big business of scientific publishing. It's a staggeringly profitable industry. Billions are made each year producing journals and sharing academic articles around the world.

It's a system that dictates scientists' careers, the way science is done, and what impact that science has. The industry has also been called perverse, bizarre, exploitative, and that it should be seen as a public scandal.

Speaker 2: Openness. It's kind of why science exists, how science has worked for a long time, under various constraints, the most latest being profiteering.

Speaker 1: And many researchers have had enough.

Speaker 2: We need to make active steps toward dismantling this publishing culture that surrounds science and feeds off it like some kind of organism.

Speaker 1: So what is going on in scientific publishing? And is this the beginning of the end for 1 of the most lucrative businesses out there? I'm the Guardian's Science Editor, Ian Sample, and this is Science Weekly. Hannah Devlin, as a science correspondent, you spend a lot of your time going through scientific research papers in journals. But let's just start with the basics.

I mean, what role do these journals play in the scientific endeavour? I mean, how fundamental are journals to science and scientists? Dr. Mehreen Tahirer

Speaker 0: I mean, I think they're hugely fundamental. If you think about it, scientists are doing their work to contribute to the grand sum of scientific knowledge and to contribute to scientific progress. And that requires them to share their work with other people so that findings can be understood by other people and in some cases applied to medicine or engineering or whatever the field is. Once a scientist has done their experiments, got their results, they then write that up in a paper which will explain why it's important, exactly what they did and they'll submit that to a journal. The journal will send it out to other scientists to review it, to look at whether it stands up to scientific scrutiny and then if they agree that it does, it'll be published.

And so journal articles are the end point. It's basically all the money that's going into research to buy new equipment, to do experiments, to pay for people's salaries. Effectively everything that's discovered is condensed down into a journal article. It's basically the output of what public funders and charities are paying for.

Speaker 1: And this whole sort of scientific publishing system has become so integrated into how modern science is done that we almost don't really question anymore, where did it actually come from? Kate Mills-Burke

Speaker 0: Before the big business of scientific publishing, scientific papers were often produced by scientific societies on a bit of a shoestring and more as a sort of afterthought. Often big results were presented at conferences or scientific meetings. And then I think in the 1940s, there was a shift from science being more of an amateur pursuit or, you know, the pursuit of wealthy gentlemen that could afford it to being a respected profession. And cash flooded in, science expanded, and scientific publishing became a business opportunity and 1 that really took off. And around that point in the UK, you had Robert Maxwell, the infamous media mogul, who established Pergamon, and he had this realization that when it came to scientific publishing, it wasn't like a fixed size pie.

It was something that you could almost divide into smaller and smaller pieces and grow. So you didn't need to just have 1 physics journal, you could be divided into all sorts of sub-specialties that people would also want to publish in.

Speaker 1: So this scientific publishing system we have now, I mean it's critical, It's a crucial part of academia and industry. Have we got any idea of how much it's worth, how big this market is?

Speaker 0: So this might sound like a very niche field, and certainly some of the titles of the journals sound very niche, but it's actually a huge business that's worth billions of dollars each year. And if you take something like Elsevier, which is the biggest science publisher, it's got nearly 3, 000 journals that are publishing more than 600, 000 articles each year. So it's a massive enterprise. I think it's worth mentioning here that it's not just the scale of this, it's also that the profit margins are very generous. Some of the biggest companies have profit margins between 20 and 40%, which is way above what you would see in a lot of other industries.

And I think that's 1 of the things that has caused a certain degree of outrage, really, that in effect, the public or charities are often paying for the science. Scientists are writing up the articles, And then within the scientific community, people are called on to review each other articles for free. And then often these journals are also edited. The editor-in-chief, an editorial board who may receive a small fee will also be scientists who are essentially doing some of that work because they believe it's in the interest of their community. And then the traditional model is that university libraries, learned societies and so on are paying subscriptions then to access that material.

So I think there is a feeling that the model is fundamentally unfair.

Speaker 1: So the public are funding the science, the scientists are doing the work around these articles and journals for free. And then organisations, often with public funds, are paying again to access the journals. So to combat this, there's been a move towards making things open access, right?

Speaker 0: Yeah, so about a decade ago there was a real shift towards funders requiring the results of research to be made open access so that people wouldn't have to pay to view the results of work that being funded publicly. And so there's been this shift to what's known as the open access model where instead of people paying to view the work through subscriptions, people pay to publish their paper. It has had I think some unintended consequences. 1 of those is that it creates really an incentive for journals to publish more articles, which the risk of that is that the quality drops down. And for researchers it's not always straightforward because they've then got to find the money themselves out of their own grants sometimes.

Speaker 1: Of course, journals argue that they provide an essential and valuable service for science and well-functioning research. When we reached out to Elsevier for comment, they told us, Elsevier helps researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. We do this by facilitating insights and critical decision-making for customers across global research and health ecosystems. 90% of researchers say the process of publishing with Elsevier has improved the clarity of their research. They also said, our overarching principle remains to charge unit prices below the market average while delivering above-average quality and publicly available data shows this is the case.

Part of the sometimes fraught relationship between journals and scientists is that their careers are dependent on publishing articles, particularly in esteemed journals.

Speaker 0: There's almost a brutal hierarchy of where you publish and different journals have different what you call impact factors, which is basically how many people read and cite the work. It's something that scientists often are measuring obsessively, what their own index is for how high impact journals they've published in and how many people have cited their work. So publishing has a huge influence on both people's careers, but also the types of research that gets funded.

Speaker 1: Have you spoken to many scientists about these issues over the years? I'm wondering how they tend to feel about it.

Speaker 0: There is quite widespread frustration, but it's a problem that individual scientists can't really deal with by themselves. So I think what will be interesting is whether scientists can come together like the editorial board behind NeuroImage have done to try and move things for their whole fields.

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, sure, no problem. Do you want me to do that now? So my name's Chris Chambers, I'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Cardiff University, where I'm the head of brain stimulation at our imaging centre, and I'm part of the resigning editorial team at NeuroImage and NeuroImage Reports.

Speaker 1: And that editorial team was the whole board resigning from NeuroImage, which is published by Elsevier. So what happened?

Speaker 2: So to reflect on this, we have to understand a little bit about how the publishing world works in academia. So if you take a large company like Elsevier or Wiley or any of the other big ones, They provide the infrastructure for supporting peer review through software and some administrative support for publication. What some publishers have done is try to extract the most possible profit they can from this process. So when an author submits to a scientific journal. Sometimes they have to pay a submission fee, which goes straight to the publisher.

If their work is accepted for publication, they then may have to pay what we call an article processing charge, or APC. This can be anywhere from 1 to $10, 000 per article. And on top of that, they might have to pay page charges, color figure charges, all of this money going to the publisher. So you end up in a situation where scientists are paying and the public is paying effectively. They're paying repeatedly over time.

Now we resigned from this editorial board because Elsevier, the publisher of NeuroImage and NeuroImage Reports, increased its charges significantly into the realm which was frankly unaffordable I think for many people and is regressive in science. Because of that increase and because of their unwillingness to negotiate a reduction in the APC, we decided we'd had enough. This is the power of academia. We can choose to say no to these publishers if we want to, but we need to act collectively.

Speaker 1: But Chris, these issues around scientific publishing, they're not new. They've been going on for decades. I'm wondering why now? What was the last straw, if you like, if that's the situation we're in?

Speaker 2: Paul Keeley It's interesting. It's a very good question. It's difficult to pinpoint any particular reason for this apart from the fact that we just happen to be a group of people who got fed up by it. Because you have to look at the reward structure that's going on here. We created a very effective and leading journal which was attractive to the scientific community.

And what's the reward for that? The reward for that is that the scientific community then gets charged even more to publish in that journal. Okay, so it's completely perverse. The better you make a journal, the more attractive you make it as a home for high quality science, the more the publishers raise the price of publication.

Speaker 1: I'm interested in how it felt for you to actually leave to hand over this work you're doing for Elsevier.

Speaker 2: I've never regretted stepping away from it because I think it's actually quite pernicious. We can do all of the same work we do, all of the editing work that we do for the community, all of the reviewing that we do for the community, we can do through more ethical channels. We can do that through nonprofits. We can do that through charities. We can even do it at the pre-print stage for free for everybody without having journals at all, which is an even bigger issue that we can think about.

I feel proud actually to be surrounded by colleagues that feel this strongly, that we need to make active steps toward dismantling this publishing culture that sort of surrounds science and feeds off it like some kind of organism, but contributes really very little of value.

Speaker 1: So what would you like to see change in the world of scientific publishing? I mean, is there still a place for the prestigious journal and peer reviewers we know it, and all those things that publishing companies will claim to do, and do do to some extent, to add value and justify these charges.

Speaker 2: There is a place for peer review in my view, but I don't see that it needs to have anything to do with publishers. It's kind of a quid pro quo system. I review your articles, you review mine. The system kind of works. It's under a lot of pressure, but basically it works.

Which leads us to ask, what can academic publishers provide? And I think academic publishers do have a role. It has to be something actually, genuinely additive to the process. So for example, signposting particular research of notes, writing news and views commentaries, interactive ways of presenting data and for allowing readers to interact with information that they're getting. There's all of this kind of innovation that academic publishers could do, which they're not doing.

I do think they have a place, but I think they won't potentially for very long. I think the time of the dinosaur is coming to an end, I think, when we look at the role of academic publishers and also if we look beyond that to even the role of journals.

Speaker 1: In response, Elsevier told us, we value very highly our editors and are disappointed with the decision of the Neuro Image Editorial Board to step down from their roles, especially as we have been engaging constructively with them over the last couple of years as we transition Neuro Image to become a fully open access journal. In line with our policy of setting our article publishing charges competitively below the market average relative to quality, the fee that's been set for NeuroImage is below that of the nearest comparable journal in its field. Euroimage has appointed an interim internal editorial team. They added, we want to reassure all authors that we will continue to work together with the outgoing editors to ensure all submissions already in process are handled to a final decision. NeuroImage has implemented measures to ensure high service levels for authors of new submissions.

How do we get better at this? Hannah, we've heard from Chris about open access and alternatives of what a new system could look like, but do you see things actually changing? I mean, is this a business model on its last legs or is this just a group of academics feeling they've had enough, they all resign, another bunch will step in and things will just carry on as they have done for a long time now.

Speaker 0: Yeah, I think it's a really open question of whether this is going to trigger a whole cascade of other editorial boards stepping down. You know, actually, not every editorial board is going to have the same mindset. You know, not everyone is as well set up to kind of make this wholesale shift to another publisher. But I do think that, you know, things also do feel in flux. You know, 1 of the things that really changed the way publishing was working was COVID, the pandemic, there wasn't the time to go through that normal peer review process.

And, you know, a lot of papers were just immediately put up online as preprints, not peer reviewed, you know, immediately available for everyone to see. And perhaps sidestep some of the other problems that you have with peer review where sometimes you get scientists who are holding up publication or people get trapped in this process for months and months when they just want to get their work out there. I think, you know, when it comes to, you know, this sort of really big generalist journals, there probably is an important role for someone external to kind of be scanning the horizon and looking at what's really going to make a big difference in a particular field and maybe spill over into related areas. But I think whatever your view is on scientific publishing and the value that publishers add, something probably does need to change because there's this ongoing sense of frustration that the model we've got at the moment isn't working for everyone, especially scientists often. It's not always in the interest of their careers.

It's not always leading to the most high quality, reliable science. I'm not sure how we're going to get there, but I think there is a sense that something needs to change.

Speaker 1: Thanks to both Professor Chris Chambers and Hannah Devlin. Chris and his colleagues are setting up a non-profit open access journal and we've put a link to that on the podcast web page at theguardian.com and that's it for today the producer was Madeline Finlay the sound design was by Joel Cox an executive producer was Ellie Burie We'll be back on Thursday. See you then.

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Is it the beginning of the end for scientific publishing?