Insatiable pursuit of the two currencies of science publishing—money and publications—have corrupted scientific: time for a major rethink

Luca de Fiore, the managing director of Il Pensiero Scientifico Editore, an Italian scientific publishing company, has written a book entitled “Scrivere e Pubblicare in Medicina” (Writing and Publishing in Medicine) that has just been published in Italian. He asked me to write the foreword, providing me with an English translation. Luca’s powerful and readable book taught me much, and I hope that it might be possible for it to be published in English. In the meantime, here is my foreword in English. (I bet it reads better in Italian.)

On 5 November 1991 the huge naked body of Robert Maxwell, one of Britain’s most successful businessmen, was found in the Atlantic Ocean off the Canary Islands and taken to Las Palmas. He had last been seen just after 4am that morning on his luxury yacht. Whether he fell (it was his custom to urinate over the side of the boat), committed suicide, or was murdered has been debated ever since with no clear conclusion. On the 10 November Maxwell was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem in what was effectively an Israeli state funeral. Presidents Bush and Gorbachev and many other world leaders sent messages of condolence and admiration. Days after the funeral the Fraud Squad visited Maxwell’s office in London, and it emerged that he had stolen over £500 million from his many businesses.

This story is relevant to Luca’s wonderful but disturbing book because Maxwell made his initial fortune from publishing science. He was among the first to grasp that huge profits could be made from valuable information that publishers were given for free and which they could charge a high price for what was must-have information to researchers and universities. That Maxwell was eventually exposed as a fraud also fits with the story of science publishing because, as Luca describes, sophisticated fraudsters have infiltrated science publishing.

Maxwell was born into a poor family in Czechoslovakia in 1923. Many of his family died in concentration camps, but he had a heroic war, moving through multiple incarnations to become an officer in the British Army, winning one of its highest awards for bravery. A gifted man, he spoke nine languages and spoke English like an aristocrat with no discernible accent.

At the end of the war he had a senior position in ruined Berlin and was visited by Ferdinand Springer whose company Springer-Verlag published science. The company had not been able to publish during the war and had a huge backlog of articles and books. As a German national, Springer could not make large shipments to other countries. Maxwell, who had long fantasised about how he might become rich, saw his opportunity. He secured worldwide rights to distribute Springer-Verlag’s publications. Maxwell shifted tons of books and journals to London. 

At that time Britain did not have a big science publisher. Maxwell set up Butterworth-Springer, later changing its name to Pergamon Press—perhaps after the town that may have been the model for ‘the seat of Satan’ in the Book of Revelations. In one year profits doubled from £250 000 to £600 000 (from more than £12m to nearly £30m at 2024 prices.) Maxwell transformed the genteel world of science publishing.

As Mark W Neff has written: “Maxwell understood that scientific publishing was a market unlike others because there was an almost ceaseless growth of demand, and free labour.” As I like to say, science publishers are like oil companies that are give oil for free. They don’t need to spend money and take risks to extract the “oil” from inhospitable terrains. The “oil” is sent to them for free in a neatly packaged form that often can be sold on for high prices with minimal intervention. The value of a randomised controlled trial is in the long and complex process of raising funding and doing and writing up the research; the value added by publishers is minimal and could even amount to subtraction of value if they restrict access to the research.

The huge profits that can be made from science publishing

Pergamon Press was sold to Elsevier in 1991 for £440 million, and Elsevier is the world’s largest science publisher with over 2900 journals, including the Lancet and its associated journals. Elsevier is now part of RELX, a company with a market capitalisation of $82bn. In 2023 it published more than 630 000 articles from almost three million submitted. The company has four business segments, but scientific, technical, and medical (what was Elsevier) is more than a third of the company with sales of £3062 million and profits of £1165, a profit margin of 38%. This is an extremely high profit margin, unsurprising when the company gets its “oil” for free. RELX now describes itself as an analytic company: it uses data, including the data included in the tens of millions of articles it owns, to make further profits. “Data” has been called “the new oil.”

Luca rightly starts his book with the facts and figures of the business of scientific publishing. The total scientific, technical and medical market is now around £30 billion with 36 000 journals and 5 million papers published every year. Profits have grown steadily. Academics long ago recognised that they were being exploited by companies like Elsevier, and have made various attempts to wrest power from them—by boycotts, resigning as editors, starting their own journals, promoting open access, and creating open research suppositories. But while they have being doing so the share price of RELX has grown from $7 a share in 1994 to $41 in 2024. In other words, the academics have been ineffective.

The two currencies that drive science publishing

Money is the currency of business, but, as Luca points out, publishing is the currency of academia. The status, value, and productivity of academics is measured by how much—and where—they publish. You cannot now flourish as an academic without substantial publications, preferably in high impact journals. Peter Higgs who conceptualised the Higgs boson particle and won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2013 when he was 84, has described how he published so few papers that he became an “embarrassment” to his department and would never get a job in academia now. Quantity of publications has come to trump quality, explaining why, as Luca writes, there are more than 9000 authors who have published 72 articles (the equivalent of one article every 5 days) in a year between 2000 and 2016.

It’s an academic tradition when introducing a speaker to say that “X has published over 500 peer-reviewed papers” with the implication the more the better and the superior the academic. My usual thought when I hear such numbers is “I bet X had nothing to do with at least half of them.”

Reading Luca’s book made me realise that these two currencies—money and publications—are the forces that drive science publishing and can explain much of what has happened with science publishing in the past 45 years that I have been part of this world. I want to try and tell the history of science publishing in those years based on these two forces.

From a genteel to a business-driven world

Although Maxwell had his insight into the potentially huge profits to be made from science publishing, it was comparatively genteel world when I joined the BMJ in 1979. The BMJ was owned by the British Medical Association (BMA), and the association was generally proud of owning a major scientific journal. It didn’t rely on the journal and its associated publications for income and wasn’t concerned whether the group made a profit. I was wholly naïve about the business of science publishing, but I remember one editor saying to me. “The ideal profit is one penny a year.” In other words, we wouldn’t make a loss and would spend all our income on publishing the best journals we could. I remember as well having lunch with the managing director of Hodder and Stoughton, which then owned the Lancet: he was an old-fashioned English gentleman publisher interested more, it seemed to me, in the quality of what his company published than how much profit it made.

Subsequently the Lancet was sold to Elsevier and the BMA came to depend on the profits of the BMJ Publishing Group and thought of it more as a money-making machine than a contribution to science and medicine. Other medical associations around the world have sold their journals to commercial publishers or fired editors unwilling to go along with budget cuts.

Exploiting the brand

Owners of journals also came to recognise the value of the brand of major journals. Jerry Kassirer and Marcia Angel, editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, tried to resist the move of the Massachusetts Medical Society (owners of the journal) to create new products with the New England Journal of Medicine brand in front of everything from primary care to, as Kassirer joked, “fried chicken.” Their contracts were not renewed as a result. The Lancet, BMJ, Nature, and JAMA have all spawned a range of journals, some more successfully than others.

Another memory I have is of a publisher of JAMA pointing out that it should think of a way of publishing the large proportion of articles it rejected. This was sacrilege to the editor, who thought it nonsense to publish rejected studies, and, as I remember it, the publisher was fired. But he was a man ahead of his time because many journals have now recognised the value of the articles that they rejected. The Public Library of Science (POLS) developed PLOS One, which when considering articles didn’t ask, as journals traditionally did, if the articles were original or important but simply whether the methods and results supported the conclusions. The result was that PLOS One could publish most of what it received and because of the business model whereby authors pay for publication became very profitable and saved PLOS, which lost money on PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine.

The model worked for both currencies in that authors could get published and add to their CVs and the publishers could make bigger profits. Inevitably other publishers saw the profits from PLOS One and produced their own versions. Luca describes how there are now many “megajournals.”

The megajournals could only work because of the move to open access, meaning not only that articles would be free for everybody everywhere to access but also ideally that the articles could be reproduced and used in various ways—“to make a film or database”—simply with acknowledgement of where they were first published. I was a great supporter of open access and still am, but the move has had unintended consequences.

The unintended consequences of open access

Traditional publishers resisted the trend initially, worrying that it would undermine their traditional business model of selling subscriptions to journals that were inaccessible to those who didn’t have a subscription. But then came the hybrid model, whereby authors could chose to pay for particular articles to be open access but the rest of the journal would still be behind a paywall. The journals now had two sources of income, and instead of open access undermining profits—as activists hoped it would and publishers feared—open access increased profits. The publishers of high-impact journals also discovered that they could charge large sums for articles to be open access. Again this is a model that works in both currencies: the authors have open access articles in prestigious journals and the publishers have profits.

Enter the criminals

With such large profits being made by science publishers it was inevitable that criminals would join in. The initial result was “predatory journals,” journals that are nothing more than financial scams: they invite authors to submit papers and publish them quickly after no peer review (or don’t publish them at all), charging much less than orthodox journals. They have plausible titles and come and go rapidly. I’ve been marking as spam every invitation I receive for years, but I still receive about two a day. Looking at a list of journals it can be hard to tell which is an orthodox and which a predatory journal. Originally we thought that authors who published in these journals had been deceived and many had, but then we realised that it worked well for many authors in that they had a publication they could list on their CV, were bound to have their paper published by the predatory journal, and wouldn’t have to pay as much as for an orthodox journal. Both currencies were satisfied: the authors got their publication, and the predatory publishers their profits.

The most sophisticated criminals have moved on from predatory journals to running what have been called paper mills. I knew about paper mills but learnt more about them from Luca’s book. The criminals recognised that bigger profits could be made by selling publications in high-impact journals, but how could they do that? They certainly didn’t want to spend years doing research. Instead, they manufacture (fabricate) articles, submit them to a journal, and if they are accepted sell them at a high price. (This deception is helped by peer review being largely useless at detecting fraud.) The next development is to bribe editors to increase (even guarantee) acceptance of the fabricated paper. Yet again the authors have a paper published, and the publishers, the criminals, have a large profit. Even the orthodox publishers that publish these fabricated papers have their fee, although they would clearly prefer not to publish a fabricated paper.

A shortage of integrity

All of these scams would be impossible if researches were 100% honest, and I assumed that was the case when I joined the BMJ in 1979. Even if the 1990s when I sat on a panel investigating one of Britain’s most famous examples of fraud, I remember the statistician say that although he had found multiple errors in the fraudulent study it had never once occurred to him that the study might be fraudulent. There were concerns about scientific fraud in the US in the 1970s, and there had been dramatic historical cases of scientific fraud—not least that of Piltdown man where a researcher claimed in 1912 to have found fossilised remains of a new type of human; but the assumption in the 1980s was that scientific fraud was vanishingly rare, no one was harmed, didn’t matter anyway because science was self-correcting, and was usually due to mental health problems with the researcher. All those assumptions proved to be false: fraud is common and takes many forms; people are harmed, not least by the study that claimed to link the MMR vaccine and autism; even orthodox science has problems with replication; and far from being mentally unwell many fraudsters know exactly what they are doing—advancing their career through the currency of publication.

Pursuit of the two currencies accounts for many problem in science publishing

Many other problems in science publishing—like guest and ghost authorship, undeclared conflicts of interest, and redundant publication—can be explained through one or both of the currencies. There’s a saying in English (and perhaps in Italian) that misconduct is usually the result of either money or sex, but in science publishing it’s money or publications. Luca quotes Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, that: “The state of scientific publishing has never been more precarious than it is today.” I agree, and I also agree with Luca’s conclusion that science publishing “should be rethought from its foundations.” This important book provides a platform from which to begin that rethinking.

Competing interest: RS was the editor of the BMJ and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group from 1991 to 2004. He has a pension from the BMA, the owners of the BMJ, which has produced profits for the association. He served unpaid on the board of PLOS for nine years and is the chair of Open Pharma, which seeks to encourage more modern ways of publishing among pharmaceutical companies. He is not among those who decide on the direction of Open Pharma, but he is paid for his time ( a few hours a year).