Publicly funded research should be free to publish and access: Australia Institute

The oligopoly which controls global academic publishing is as rapacious as big tech, says the Australia Institute.

Publicly funded research should be free to publish and access, says an Australia Institute report.

Australia’s research funding agencies must act to reduce the high price of publishing and accessing academic papers that cost universities and other research bodies up to $1bn a year, according to the Australia Institute.

In a new paper, the institute says the large global academic publishing houses generate profits of up to 40 per cent of income – on par with tech giants such as Apple and Google – but “perverse incentives” in research grants forced researchers to continue publishing in costly prestige journals.

“Until grant conditions – which are largely determined by commonwealth grant bodies – offer academics alternative avenues to attain prestige and receive promotion, private publishers will continue to benefit,” says the paper, titled Ending Profiteering from Publicly Funded Research: Tackling the Academic Publishing Oligopoly.

The paper says Australian universities and research institutions pay more than $300m a year for scholarly journal subscriptions as well as expensive “article processing charges” for research papers that are made available free outside the publisher paywall.

“It is estimated that Australia is funnelling as much as $1bn into the pockets of academic publishers every year,” says the paper, authored by postdoctoral research fellow Kristen Scicluna.

The big five global academic publishers – Elsevier, Black & Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature and SAGE – hold more than half of the estimated $36bn global academic publishing market. In 2022 Elsevier reported a profit mark-up of 37.3 per cent, Dr Scicluna’s paper says.

Although many government funding agencies worldwide – including Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council – require papers funded by their grants to be publicly available without charge, academic journals have responded with “article processing charges” that must be paid by researchers to have their papers processed for publication. “For instance, in the ‘prestigious’ science journal Nature, the current APC is $US12,290 (around $19,000),” the paper says.

Dr Scicluna said government funding agencies needed “different methods to assess academic excellence, to disincentivise publication in exploitative, ‘prestigious’ journals and ensure better value for taxpayer money”.

In her paper she suggests several ways to award research grants. One is a “modified lottery” in which successful grant applications are chosen randomly from a group of contenders that meet a quality threshold. It reduces the emphasis on a researcher’s publications in prestige journals. Similar systems have been used in New Zealand, Britain, Germany Austria and Switzerland.

Other ways include rewarding researchers for publishing in open access journals, or offering some research grants available only to researchers who publish solely in open access journals.

Dr Scicluna also urged more use of preprint servers, which many researchers use to make preliminary versions of their papers available for free before publication, as well as the development of institutional repositories that would publish their researchers’ work free online.

She said it was an important principle that, where research was funded with public money, it should not be behind a paywall.

“As disinformation becomes an increasingly significant problem, it is essential that scientific information be freely available to the public, especially if they have paid for it,” Dr Scicluna’s paper says.