Tommi Mäklin
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themaklin.bsky.social
Tommi Mäklin
@themaklin.bsky.social
1.4K followers 410 following 110 posts
I do statistics, bacterial (meta)genomics and bioinformatics software development.

Researcher @ University of Oslo
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Reposted by Tommi Mäklin
hansonmark.bsky.social
The solutions of the past 3 decades have failed to change the incentives of #PublishOrPerish. As a result, researcher funding, time, control, and trust has been lost.

The ONE CONSTANT in the wake of the serial crisis, #PlanS and #OpenAccess reform has been publish profit margins.

2/n
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM