Scientific publishing - it's all a scam

"Publish or perish"

We've all heard that publish or perish is the scientist's way of life. At every step in our career we are asked that fateful question: how many papers have you published in the past 5 years? Your publication list is the public record or your research. If you haven't published a piece of research, it might as well not exist, for no-one else will know about it. Any fewer than 1 publication a year in a top-flight scientific journal, and you have no chance of finding a job, be it a teaching or a research position, to be promoted, or - more importantly - to receive funding for your research.

Publish or perish is a very competitive system, granted. This essay is not so much about the problems inherent in the system itself, however. Here I am more concerned about the way the system is milking us dry, financially.

Say you have done an amazing piece of research, you have found a new result that absolutely needs to be published. You have spent a year or two on the work, and now you spend around two months writing the paper, crafting it into a thing of beauty, with text that flows nicely despite the technical jargon, with pictures that capture the essence of your method and your result, and are esthetically pleasing as well. You make sure that all your arguments are complete, that you have clearly introduced, explained, discussed and concluded. Finally you submit your manuscript for publication, having chosen the journal which is most appropriate for you work, and which will give you the best exposure.

Your manuscript then lands on an editor's desk (or in his email if the journal you've selected has modernized and uses an on-line submission system). After a cursory look at the abstract to judge the subject matter of your manuscript, the editor will pick two or three reviewers from his/her list of other scientists who have recently published in the same subject area, and send your manuscript for them to review.

These reviewers will, if they accept to review the paper, take valuable time out of their own research / teaching / administration schedules to painstakingly review the content of your manuscript, the quality of the research, the implications of your results and also the form and quality of the presentation (are the pictures clear?, is the manuscript written in correct and understandable English?). Producing a good review can take a lot of time, and none of this time is remunerated either financially or by community recognition.

Once the editor has received the reviews, he/she will decide whether to accept your manuscript for publication, ask you to make minor modifications before accepting it, tell you that major modifications are required but that should you re-submit the paper he/she would be interested in receiving it a second time, or simply reject your manuscript.

Let's be optimistic, and say your manuscript has been accepted for publication with minor modifications. You make these changes, taking care not to upset the balance of your paper, and send in the final version, with print-ready versions of the figures and often of the text as well. You then receive two documents: a copyright form, in which you often have to cede the copyright of your work to the journal that will publish it, and a payment form, in which you are asked to cover part of the costs of publishing your paper. Depending on the journal and on the number of color figures you have included in your manuscript, these costs can go from $100 to $3000 (yes, I do mean several thousand dollars).

You have to publish, or you will perish, remember? So you fork out, and deplete your (often meager) research fund. Sometimes you will not have enough money to pay for a publication in a top-flight journal, so you may have to chose a journal which will give you less exposure. But with less exposure comes less funding, come fewer funds for research, etc... So if it all possible you find the money for the publication, because your scientific life depends on it.

As an author you usually get a free copy of your published work, most commonly in the form of a pdf file. Everyone else has to pay to access the published version of your work. Research institutions and universities have to fork out tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to receive copies of all the major journals in your field, or even only online access to the journal archives. And where does this money come from? It comes from the overheads universities charge their scientists, i.e. it's an (often large) percentage of the research funding that every scientist obtains. And it happens every year that some universities do not have the money to allow their scientists access to the latest journals, which means it will be harder for them to access the latest research, to keep up to date, and to make their own research relevant and publishable....

It's a never ending circle... and it sucks, mightily!

Over the past few years, the scientific community has begun to rebel against this state of affairs. Funding for science keeps diminishing, while publication costs keep rising, despite the transition to online versions of scientific journals. A suite of new "free" online journals is appearing. The idea behind these journals is that both publication and subscription are free, but that the review process is as rigorous as for a print journal. As these journals have mostly just started up, it is up to us scientists to sacrifice some exposure at the beginning, and to build up the reputation of these journals by submitting top quality work to them. In a few years, perhaps, we will have created enough market pressure on the large scientific publishing companies to force them to lower their prices... maybe.