How the Avalanche of Academic Papers Threatens Scientific Research

Instead of compromising its peer-review process and rushing low-quality papers into print, then-Editor-in-Chief Anna Stilz at the University of California, Berkeley, led a revolt that culminated in the mass resignation of the journal’s entire editorial staff and board.

“Wiley told me if I didn’t publish more, I wouldn’t have a journal for long. These conversations were very hostile,” said Stilz, explaining the mass resignations. “I wanted to give our readers high-quality pieces. We were selective.”

The rebellion is one of the latest examples of the crisis engulfing the influential world of scholarly journals, which have been a foundation of research and learning for centuries. In recent years, Wiley and four other major publishers of academic literature, called the Big Five, have generated robust profit margins by ushering in large and unprecedented increases in the number of published papers. The globalization of research, with China emerging as the world’s leader a few years ago, and the ongoing ethos of “publish or perish” that’s the lifeblood of academic success, have generated an avalanche of scholarship. The Big Five has accommodated and encouraged it by launching new journals and special issues and fattening others.

Even scientists admit that much of academic publishing has run amok, overwhelming the quality-control methods of many of the 12,000 journals owned by Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and Sage. As RealClearInvestigations has reported, unscrupulous paper mills are exploiting the publishing breakdown, producing a growing number of fraudulent articles with fake data and AI-generated text that’s tainting the world of science. 

The publishing mess has consequences outside the hallowed halls of academia. The $12 billion in annual revenue that the Big Five and smaller publishers collect from research papers is also an issue for taxpayers. A sizeable chunk of this revenue comes from public universities and federal grants that pay fees to publishers for making scholars’ articles available to readers through either journal subscriptions or freely on the internet. The fees, coupled with the low production costs – journal editors typically work for free – have given the Big Five profit margins in the 30%-40% range, matching Microsoft and Alphabet and surpassing Apple last year.  

“The biggest problem is that taxpayer money that was supposed to be spent on research instead goes to these publishing companies,” said University of Ottawa Professor Stefanie Haustein, a leading researcher of the publishing market. “I’m not saying publishing should be free, but these companies are making an insanely high profit. They are price gouging taxpayers.” 

NIH Moves To Rein In Fees

The Trump administration is moving to rein in the fees. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said in July that the publishers’ article processing charges (APC) are “unreasonably high.” These charges are an increasingly popular alternative to subscriptions because papers become “open access,” or freely available to the public. To protect taxpayers, Bhattacharya said price caps or other restrictions will be placed on the publishing charges for NIH-funded papers starting in January. 

The Big Five oppose the caps, saying their fees fairly reflect the many costs involved in publishing. “An APC funding cap is a blunt instrument that would create more problems than it solves, restricting author choice, exacerbating inequities, and destabilizing the publishing ecosystem,” a Taylor & Francis spokesperson told RCI.

Some critics are looking beyond price caps for a “radical change in academic publishing,” according to a report by Cambridge University Press. It surveyed the views of 3,000 researchers, librarians, and funders and came to a conclusion that it admits is “surprising” for a publisher: The industry should churn out fewer articles, and focus on quality over quantity, while the academic community builds out lower-cost alternatives to commercial publishing. 

“[T]he sheer volume of publications threatens to overwhelm the ecosystem. Important work risks being lost or drowned out by a surge of low-quality or AI-generated content,” Mandy Hill, managing director of the press, wrote in the October report. 

Academic Publishing’s Secret Sauce

It’s hard to imagine a better business model than commercial academic publishing. The Big Five’s dominance, accounting for more than 50% of indexed published papers, has given them the market power to raise fees often above inflation, research shows. Universities are caught in a costly vicious circle: Although they often protest the fees that have increased to about $11 million a year on average, or about a third of a library’s total budget, they also pressure their scholars to publish at a brisk pace. That, in turn, ensures robust demand for space in journals, particularly the prestigious ones such as the Big Five’s Nature and Cell with the highest fees.

In addition to a captive market, academic publishers also enjoy a sizable cost savings particular to their industry. Publishers have various operational costs, but they don’t pay researchers who write the papers, editors who revise them (with the exception of a small honorarium for the editor-in-chief), and academic peer-reviewers who provide basic quality control. 

All told, the publication cost on average for a paper is about $400, while the average article processing charge collected by journals is $1800, according to a 2021 study by Alexander Grossmann of Leipzig University in Germany. 

“[T]he scholarly community must eventually make a number of decisions if it is to tackle the affordability problem,” writes Grossmann, a professor of publishing. “Are profit margins of 30-40% on taxpayer funds tolerable?”

The Big Five deny they are gouging taxpayers. A Taylor & Francis spokesperson told RCI that the charges are needed to cover “the full spectrum of publishing services, including submission and peer review management, editorial development, ethics checks and investigations, metadata tagging, indexing, metrics, content preservation, technology development and much more.” 

A Springer Nature spokesperson told RCI its article processing charges are in line with the expenses associated with publishing an article. “The outreach and editorial support we provide, the promotion of scientific work we conduct, and the infrastructure we maintain and invest in are all undertaken with one goal in mind: enhancing the reach and impact of research,” the spokesperson said.

Growth of the Big Five

The crisis in academic publishing has been decades in the making. In the 1970s, the Big Five controlled less than 10% of the market – sharing it with scientific societies and university publishers – mostly through journal subscriptions to libraries. The subscription model was controversial from the get-go, with the Library of Congress calling out the “sharp and alarming increases” in subscription prices – hovering between 5% and 12% in most years, well above inflation – that were “damaging to the development of the library’s” collections.

With stagnant university library budgets crushed under with weight of increasing subscription prices, a rebellion of academics and librarians gave rise to the open access movement in the early 2000s. It sought to both lower publishing costs and freely share papers with an expanding global research community in the developing world whose universities couldn’t afford multi-million-dollar subscriptions. Under open-access deals, universities or researchers would pay a one-time article-processing charge for each published paper, which would be freely available to the public forever, made possible by the internet.

The Big Five, having expanded their market share almost fivefold after two waves of consolidation in the 1990s, resisted the new open-access model first rolled out by a few smaller publishers, such as BioMed Central. But as open access gained steam, Springer gobbled up BioMed in 2008, a first step in the Big Five’s embrace of the model, giving it a second revenue stream. Today, researchers applaud the growth of open access, which accounts for almost half of all published papers globally, as a triumph for the dissemination of knowledge. But rather than reducing the costs of publishing, they keep going up. 

In an extensive study of fees from six major publishers for the period 2019-2023, Haustein, who codirects the Scholarly Communications Lab at Ottawa, found that researchers paid $2.5 billion in article processing charges to these publishers in 2023, triple the amount in 2019. Almost 90% of the journals had increased the charges, often above inflation. The average charge was about $2,900 per paper, with a high of $11,700 for high-profile journals.

“Our analysis demonstrates that there is a massive amount of money spent on APCs and that this amount is growing at a rate that is almost certainly unsustainable,” co-author Haustein wrote.

When publishers are paid by the article, it provides an incentive to maximize production and helps explain the boom in papers. The total number of indexed articles soared 47% between 2016 and 2022 to 2.8 billion, according to a study by University of Exeter’s Mark Hanson. 

The publishing spike was led by MDPI, a big publisher devoted to open-access papers. It made most of its revenue from article processing charges for special issues built around a research theme. They epitomize the crisis of quantity over quality. For special issues, guest editors drive demand by soliciting articles from researchers, breaking with the standard practice of allowing researchers to submit papers when they are ready. The turnaround time from submission to acceptance is also sped up, according to Hanson’s study, allowing less time for editors to scrutinize articles for weaknesses and even fraud. And MDPI stood out among the publishers for having lower rejection rates of papers.

“If a publisher lowers its article rejection rates, all else being equal, this will lead to more articles being published,” Hanson wrote. “Such changes to rejection rate might also mean more lower-quality articles are being published.”

The blowup at Hindawi, another publisher focusing on special issues, alerted the publishing world to the magnitude of its fraud problem. Wiley bought Hindawi for $298 million in 2020, calling it an “innovator in open access publishing,” to expand into that fast-growing market and reap the article processing charges. Three years later, Wiley discovered that Hindawi had been heavily infiltrated by paper mills, forcing the retraction of 8,000 suspect articles and ending the Hindawi brand. It lives on as Exhibit A for an out-of-control publishing industry.

Detecting Fraudulent Paper Mills

The Big Five now say they are serious about curbing the publication of fraudulent papers, which are growing at an even faster rate than legitimate publications, according to a 2025 study. Springer Nature, which received 2.3 million submissions last year, has invested many millions in technology and a team of 75 experts to identify suspicious articles, such as AI-generated text and images, before publication and ensure the credibility of its research, the spokesperson said. Taylor & Francis says its integrity team prevents “thousands of fraudulent articles from being published every year.”

But plenty of flawed and fake papers continue to be published, which raises the question of whether the Big Five could be investing more in the battle against paper mills. For example, it can take years for journals to retract junk science articles after they have been flagged as suspicious, and by then it’s often too late, said Nancy Chescheir, chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which recently issued new guidelines to speed up the retraction process. “Editors need to act more quickly in retracting papers before they get included in systematic literature reviews and clinical care, which is happening,” Chescheir told RCI. 

Cleaning up the scientific literature, however, is at loggerheads with the exponential growth of papers each year. Busy editors, particularly at less prestigious journals that are most vulnerable to paper mill infiltration, don’t have the time and resources to promptly handle the complexities of figuring out if a paper should be retracted, said Chescheir, who has served as the editor in chief of two biomedical journals. 

Chescheir says publishers do need to devote more resources to protecting integrity, particularly for underfunded journals in the developing world. Wiley, for example, owns journals in China through its acquisition of Hindawi.

“The globalization of research is a wonderful thing, but as for providing resources that are adequate to deal with integrity problems across the globe, we are far away from that,” Chescheir said.

Breaking Away From the Big Five

A small number of journals have decided that the best way to protect their integrity is to break away from commercial publishing. Since the 1980s, the editorial boards of about 38 journals have declared their independence, mostly from the Big Five, and gone on to operate, typically under a new name, says Saskia van Walsum, a Ph.D. student researching this trend at the University of Ottawa. In the recent wave of breakaways, including Stilz’s philosophy journal, the push by publishers for more papers was a major complaint. 

Stilz’s successor journal, Free & Equal, embraces an alternative approach to academic publishing called “diamond open access” that harkens back centuries to a time when scholars were in charge. It’s a growing movement of thousands of small journals based on the principles that scholars shouldn’t pay to publish papers and the public shouldn’t pay to read them. 

The Open Library of Humanities (OLH), a nonprofit that publishes Free & Equal, started in 2013 to address the rising fees of the Big Five. Some 350 libraries, including the Ivies and major public universities in the U.S. and U.K., are backing OLH because they only pay a relatively small fee to the nonprofit, compared to what the Big Five charge, to enable the publication of its 34 titles.

While the economics of nonprofit publishing can work, breakaway journals like Free & Equal, founded in 2024, face a significant reputational challenge. Younger scholars need to publish in prestigious journals to build careers, and it can take several years for new titles like Free & Equal to receive an Impact Factor rating that signals their influence among researchers. Stilz says her new political philosophy journal has started strong, getting almost as many submissions as her former Wiley title.

“You have to trust that your community will come with you when you do a mass resignation,” she said. “You don’t have a brand.”