The Drain of Scientific Publishing Infographic

Infographic accompanying the "The Drain of Scientific Publishing"

Beigel, F., Brockington, D., Crosetto, P., Derrick, G., Fyfe, A., Barreiro, P. G., Hanson, M. A., Haustein, S., Larivière, V., Noe, C., Pinfield, S., & Wilsdon, J. (2025). The Drain of Scientific Publishing [Preprint]. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.04820

The four-fold drain of scientific publishing

Money: For-profit publishers charge unreasonable fees for reading and publishing that are disconnected from journal production costs. Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis made  close to $US 15 billion in profit from 2019 to 2024.

Time: Researchers spend enormous amounts of time in their roles as authors, reviewers, and editors, to maintain a scholarly publishing system that prioritizes quantity over quality. These time pressures undermine rigor and drive burnout.

Trust: Commercial pressures to publish more and faster allow low-quality and fraudulent papers to flood academic journals.
The erosion of rigor undermines public confidence in science and damages its credibility.

Control: Rankings and metrics like journal impact factor and h-index dictate academic success. Assessment infrastructures are biased towards English journals and controlled by for-profit companies such as Clarivate and Elsevier.

Stop the drain: Funders and institution must intervene and change incentives and ownership of scientific publishing. We propose that scholarly publishingneeds to be re-communalized. Universities, libraries, and funders need to build asystem that is communityled and managed. Private organizations may provide services but not extract unreasonable profits.

Build on open: The alternative publishing models already exist: preprints, diamond journals, open peer review, publish-review-curate. And so do the open infrastructures: OJS, SciELO, Redalyc, Latindex, African Journals Online, Érudit, etc. We need to align research assessment with open and community led publishing.

The visual elements of this infographic were generated with the help of an LLM.