The Doomed Attempt to Create Academic Journals That Nobody Pays For

Reports of the death of the academic publishing industry have been greatly exaggerated for many years. Potential assassins over the decades include photocopying, the internet, email, CD-ROMs, Google Scholar, university repositories, Wikipedia, SciHub, open access (OA), Plan S, preprints, AI large language models, academic fraud and the increasing number of retractions. Now it is ‘diamond OA‘.

The predicted obituary always reads the same: ‘This time the system cannot survive.’ Yet publishers adapt, pivot, monetise, rebrand, restructure, partner or simply wait for the panic to blow over.

Diamond OA is a publishing model whereby authors do not pay to publish, and academics do not pay to read. Frankly, it is the least sustainable model of academic publishing, unless those involved in editing such journals have a sugar daddy behind them, either a large professional society or, in some cases, a university.

A good example of a professional body which supports a diamond OA journal is the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, which publishes The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. This is supported financially by the college which, in turn, is supported by fellows’ subscriptions. Examples of universities supporting diamond OA journals are few and far between. Being unsustainable, such ventures do not last long. I have been consulted by several universities about establishing their own academic journals and my advice, universally, is not to do it (as I explained with a colleague in Journal of Advanced Nursing).

Another Year, Another Apocalypse for Academic Publishing

Enter the latest harbinger of doom, Professor Caroline Edwards of Birkbeck University. Professor Edwards appears to be the unofficial leader of a sustained campaign against the academic publishing industry. Specifically, she targets the ‘Big Five’ – which includes Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and Sage – for their “obscene profits”.

Professor Edwards is the founder of the Open Library of Humanities and is a leading figure in the forthcoming Open Journals Collective to be launched in 2026. These are entirely worthy ventures but will hardly be a match for the Big Five. Professor Edwards can be followed on Bluesky.

It is true that the Big Five make profits, but whether they are obscene or not is unclear. There are definitions of ‘profit’ and ‘obscene’ but not one of ‘obscene profit’. In 2024 Elsevier made a profit of £1.17 billion, Springer £389.7 million, Wiley £39.8 million, Taylor & Francis £255.7 million and Sage £323 million. The reader can judge the level of obscenity.

But, before passing judgement, consider the number of people gainfully employed in the academic publishing industry and that academic publishing is not the sole means by which these companies earn money. These publishers also maintain niche low-profit journals due to their importance to particular fields. Academic publishing is one of the UK’s most successful exports.

Professor Edwards’s recent missive titled ‘Chaos is coming for scholarly publishing’ and subtitled ‘Buckling of commercial models alongside maturing of community-led efforts promises major shifts’ draws on the dire financial straits of many UK universities and, thus, their libraries, which she predicts will lead to many pulling out of the bundle deals they have with the Big Five. The publishers have tried to accommodate the dwindling budgets of UK universities by offering between 5 and 15% reductions in the £112 million spent annually on subscriptions. This has been rejected, “decisively” claims Professor Edwards.

Cash-strapped universities are, indeed, looking for new deals and alternative models, and the possibility of working with emerging “mission-driven scholarly societies and non-profit publishers”. But that is not enough to satisfy Professor Edwards who is pushing for diamond OA. So, let’s consider what could possibly go wrong.

What could go wrong?

As alluded to above, the problem with diamond OA is unsustainability. This is probably best illustrated by explaining what the academic publishing industry, including the Big Five, offers authors, editors and universities. Academic publishing companies provide online ‘one-stop shop’ platforms for the submission, review and editing of academic manuscripts.

These platforms are continually adopting new features that allow editors to check the level of similarity to published articles, to check if the article has previously been submitted (and rejected by) the journal, how well the manuscript fits the scope of the journal, the selection of peer reviewers for manuscripts and, with the development of bespoke AI platforms, assistance with the review process, automated personalised responses to authors and reviewers and detecting the use of generative AI in writing manuscripts.

The sheer volume of manuscripts received by journals these days is orders of magnitude bigger than that received in the days when editors would receive a large bundle of manuscripts by courier on a Friday night, to be reviewed over the weekend and returned to the publisher with decisions about whether to send out for review, to publish or to reject.

Those selected for review would then be sent out manually to reviewers with a pre-paid reply envelope for return to the publisher and the cycle was repeated weekly. Such a system simply could not cope with the present volume of manuscripts. A fleet of vans would be required to ferry manuscripts up and down the motorways of the UK and editors would need the assistance of a fork-lift truck to move manuscripts around their offices.

Rolls-Royce expectations, Morris Minor realities

I speak from experience; I worked for many years as an editorial board member of a diamond OA journal, the WikiJournal of Medicine. This was a delight and a privilege and, while no hard copy was exchanged at any point in the working processes of the journal, there was no platform for checking similarity or processing manuscripts.

It was very hard work and required considerable knowledge of the working of Wikipedia type platforms, not easy to master, and each step was done separately and manually. Everything was complex and it proved hard to carry out the work as an editorial board member, hard to encourage reviewers to look at manuscripts and, ultimately, very hard to attract authors. The journal still exists but, sadly, has not published an article since 2024.

Diamond OA advocates like Professor Edwards need to realise that this is what they are facing. Moreover, they are expecting authors and reviewers, accustomed to Rolls-Royce publishing platforms, to join them in their Morris 1000 vision of the future of academic publishing.

I declare what may be considered a conflict of interest here, which is that I have worked as an editor-in-chief for two of the Big Five and currently work for one of them. I spent nearly 30 years with Wiley editing two of their journals and launching one open access journal. I have worked with Elsevier as an editor-in-chief of one journal for five years.

Paywalls, Paranoia and Persistent Myths

But lest the diamond OA advocates think I am an uncritical mouthpiece for any of the Big Five then they are wrong. In terms of editing, I think the amounts of money editors-in-chief and associate editors get paid is paltry compared with the amount of time they put in and the amounts of money some journals earn. The profits of the Big Five and beyond are earned on the back of a considerable amount of free labour; reviewers are not paid.

I fought with Wiley to have the reviewers of open access manuscripts paid as the cost could be accommodated within the APCs they charge. ‘Not the model’ was the reply. The outcome, against a background of millions of submissions to academic journals annually, is that the peer review system is on its knees. Always the rate-limiting step in the publishing process, it is now a genuine cause for concern.

I have been vocal. My exhortations to Wiley not to become involved with the publisher Hindawi failed. I predicted problems and I was proven right. Having acquired Hindawi for £227 million in 2021, the partnership was over by 2023 following thousands of retracted articles and the complete loss of some formerly reputable Wiley journals which were briefly managed by Hindawi.

I am aware of the profits my current publisher makes and have covered the issue in my review of Paywall: the Business of Scholarship, an online film which ‘exposed’ Elsevier’s paywalls and the damage this was allegedly doing. But I also indicated the inaccuracies, exaggerations and half-truths used by the filmmakers to support their case.

I believe that there are many problems associated with the academic publishing industry and have long been an advocate of reform. But diamond OA will join the long procession of photocopiers, CD-ROMs, email lists, repositories, Wikipedia, Sci-Hub, Plan S and a hundred other phenomena that failed to bring the academic publishing industry to its knees.

The industry will adapt – as it always has – while its harshest critics continue to insist, year after year, that this time collapse is finally inevitable. Perhaps, one day, they will be right. But if the past 50 years are any guide, I would advise the pallbearers not to book the hearse just yet.

Dr Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.