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How to start a journal and beat the academic publishing racket -

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Academic publishing is a multi-billion pound industry, with profit margins reportedly higher than those of Apple, Google and Amazon. It has always struck me as a racket: academics sign over their work to private businesses for free, and then their universities pay the same businesses hefty fees in order to read what they publish. Academics are also responsible for editing these journals and providing the peer-reviews, usually for free. It hasn’t always been this way. In a remarkable brief history of the academic publishing industry, Stephen Buranyi highlights the key role of Robert Maxwell, a brash business tycoon whose greatest desire was to “be a millionaire”. Maxwell arrived on the scene just after the Second World War, which was a key turning point in academic history. The post-war years saw a huge growth in the number of people attending higher education and also in the academic publishing trade. In 1950, there were 10,000 journals published worldwide, but by 1980, this was had re

Academic publishing is a multi-billion pound industry, with profit margins reportedly higher than those of Apple, Google and Amazon. It has always struck me as a racket: academics sign over their work to private businesses for free, and then their universities pay the same businesses hefty fees in order to read what they publish. Academics are also responsible for editing these journals and providing the peer-reviews, usually for free. It hasn’t always been this way. In a remarkable brief history of the academic publishing industry, Stephen Buranyi highlights the key role of Robert Maxwell, a

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