Academic publishing companies make how much?!

Academic publishing is a 25.2 billion dollar a year industry. I’m not kidding.

Long ago in a land far far away, Forbes predicted that the academic publisher Elsevier’s relevance and lifespan in the digital age was going to be short. “Cost-cutting librarians and computer-literate professors are bypassing academic journals- bad news for Elsevier” the article proclaimed.

But here’s the thing. Elsevier hasn’t been run out of town. In fact, it’s thriving. So are Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley. In fact, Elsevier in 2013 had a higher profit margin than Apple Inc.

Why is this? Brian Nosek, a professor at the University of Virginia and director of the Center for Open Science, has an idea:

“Academic publishing is the perfect business model to make a lot of money. You have the producer and consumer as the same person: the researcher. And the researcher has no idea how much anything costs. I, as the researcher, produce the scholarship and I want it to have the biggest impact possible and so what I care about is the prestige of the journal and how many people read it. Once it is finally accepted, since it is so hard to get acceptances, I am so delighted that I will sign anything — send me a form and I will sign it. I have no idea I have signed over my copyright or what implications that has — nor do I care, because it has no impact on me. The reward is the publication.”