Academic Publishers As Parasites

This is just a quick post to draw attention to From symbiont to parasite: the evolution of for-profit science publishing by UCSF's Peter Walter and Dyche Mullins in Molecular Biology of the Cell. It is a comprehensive overview of the way the oligopoly publishers obtained and maintain their rent-extraction from the academic community:

"Scientific journals still disseminate our work, but in the Internet-connected world of the 21st century, this is no longer their critical function. Journals remain relevant almost entirely because they provide a playing field for scientific and professional competition: to claim credit for a discovery, we publish it in a peer-reviewed journal; to get a job in academia or money to run a lab, we present these published papers to universities and funding agencies. Publishing is so embedded in the practice of science that whoever controls the journals controls access to the entire profession."

My only criticisms are a lack of cynicism about the perks publishers distribute:

• They pay no attention to the role of librarians, who after all actually "negotiate" with the publishers and sign the checks.
• They write:
  

  we work for them for free in producing the work, reviewing it, and serving on their editorial boards

  We have spoken with someone who used to manage top journals for a major publisher. His internal margins were north of 90%, and the single biggest expense was the care and feeding of the editorial board.

And they are insufficiently skeptical of claims as to the value that journals add. See my Journals Considered Harmful from 2013.

Despite these quibbles, you should definitely go read the whole paper.