“in the past two years, Web of Science, an influential index of scholarly literature, delisted at least four high-volume journals for not meeting quality standards and placed four more on hold while it investigates their work. These are some of the latest signs of scientists’ mounting concern over the quality of research. Altogether, editors at nearly 40 journals have quit in the past decade over differences with their publishers, according to the website Retraction Watch. [..]
Scientific journals were once mostly produced by scholarly societies that circulated periodicals or meeting summaries for scientists who couldn’t attend their events. Some—including the top medical journals JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine—are still published independently by medical or scientific societies.
Today, most of the best-known journals are published by big, for-profit companies, such as Elsevier and Springer Nature. Institutions purchase subscriptions, typically for bundles of journals, to make the material available to faculty researchers, which can cost a university more than $1 million a year.
In addition, following demands from foundations and government agencies to make the research they fund publicly available, publishers now charge scientists to post “open access” papers outside their paywalls. These “article processing charges” can run from a few hundred dollars to more than $10,000 a paper.
A study recently estimated that the top five publishers earned nearly $9 billion in article-processing charges between 2019 and 2023. Elsevier alone collected an estimated $583 million in such charges in 2023, the authors calculated. [..]
Between subscription fees and article-processing charges, the largest commercial publishers post double-digit-percentage profit margins. Springer Nature reported a 28% profit margin when it went public in October. The next month it reported $1.5 billion in revenue for the first nine months of the year.”
N Subbaraman, Wall Street Journal, 2025.3.18