The drain of scientific publishing: How we lose money, time, trust, and control to for-profit companies

The Drain of Scientific Publishing How we lose money, time, trust, and control to for-profit companies Stefanie Haustein uOttawa School of Information Studies (ÉSIS) & ScholCommLab @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca | ORCID: 0000-0003-0157-1430 Annual Reviews Salon Speaker Series, 18 November 2025 The Drain of Scientific Publishing 2 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 Haustein, S. (2025). The Drain of Scientific Publishing Infographic. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17594290 The Drain of Scientific Publishing 3 Time Average number of articles per researcher 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 Drain of Scientific Publishing 4 Time Turnaround times from submission to acceptance 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 Drain of Scientific Publishing 5 Trust The Drain of Scientific Publishing 6 https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/relx-2022-annual-report.pdf Control Elsevier’s “research intelligence” pipeline →Products →Scopus →SciVal →Pure →Digital Commons →analytical services →Acquisitions →Mendeley (2013) →Newsflo (2015) →SSRN (2016) →Hivebench (2016) →Plum Analytics (2017) →bepress (2017) →Aries Systems (2018) →Science-Metrix (2018) →SciBite (2020) →Osmosis (2021) →Interfolio (2022) The Drain of Scientific Publishing 7 https://clarivate.com/news/clarivate-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2024-results/ Control Clarivate 41.5% profit The Drain of Scientific Publishing 8 Data extracted from ARL annual reports 2020-2024 based on expenses from 168 ARL member libraries in the US and Canada. Money Library expenses: ARL member libraries 2020-2024 The Drain of Scientific Publishing 9 Revenue data derived from DeltaThink Open Access Market Sizing Updates 2020-2025 Money Journal publishing revenue The Drain of Scientific Publishing 16 What can we do? →13 action items for equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing →By career stage →Potential risk to career advancement Haustein, S. (2025). For Equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing | Pour un édition scientifique équitable et pérenne [Checklist]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17419313 The Drain of Scientific Publishing 17 What can we do? →13 action items for equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing Thank you scholcommlab.ca [email protected]