Today, a handful of large, listed publishers have turned knowledge the most public of goods into one of the world’s most profitable subscription services. Universities generate the product, give it away, then buy it back at a premium, while their own data is packaged and sold to them a second time. It is the intellectual version of paying three times for the same book.
Academics research, write, peer review, and edit millions of pages every year. None of this specialised work is paid by publishers. The real cost is covered by universities, public grants, and the researchers’ own evenings and weekends. Publishers receive polished, camera ready content without salaries, benefits, or pensions attached.
After giving away the content, universities then pay to read it. One international consortium alone universities spends around millions of dollars a year on subscriptions and article processing charges. That is a new library, new lecture halls, new laboratories, new innovation hubs, several hundred scholarships, or a small research institute, redirected annually into the coffers of a few global firms.
Every click, search, download and citation generates behavioural data. Publishers harvest it, enrich it, and sell it back in the form of analytics dashboards, ranking tools, and “research intelligence” platforms sometimes even to agencies whose names make academics uneasy. The academy is not just supplying content; it is feeding a surveillance and scoring ecosystem it does not control.
The result? Profit margins that would make a venture capitalist blush. A major publisher like Elsevier, embedded in a larger data conglomerate, can post margins nudging 34 percent higher than many of the tech giants that dominate headlines. Apple sells hardware. Amazon moves physical goods across continents. Academic publishers primarily move PDFs.
So how did universities get here?
Partly through prestige addiction. Hiring and promotion still orbit around journals these publishers own. The “right” masthead on a CV can feel more valuable than the actual social impact of the work. When careers depend on branded gatekeepers, bargaining power evaporates.
Partly through path dependence. Library contracts grew incrementally bundles, big deals, platform add ons until cancellation felt like amputation. Shifting to alternatives requires coordination across departments, institutions, even countries. That coordination has been slow, but it has started.
Behind the scenes, librarians, open science officers and scholar activists are already pushing back. National consortia are walking away from predatory “big deals.” Funders are mandating open access. Overlay journals and scholar led presses are proving you can run rigorous journals on modest budgets, with transparent costs and non extractive models. Preprint servers and institutional repositories are quietly eroding the monopoly on access.
The real question is no longer, “Are there alternatives?” It is, “Do universities have the courage to bet their prestige tenure rules, promotion metrics, and assessment systems on those alternatives?”
Because until that happens, the business will remain as sweet as ever for publishers. And the bill for labour, for access, for data will keep landing on the same desk: the public university, whose mission was never to maximise margins, but to maximise knowledge.
If the academy wants a different future, it has to stop being just the unpaid factory floor of a few global firms and start acting like what it actually is: the rightful owner and steward of the knowledge it creates by having its own journal.
Dr. Yusuf Muchelule is a Senior Lecturer & a Consultant.
