Traditional scientific publishing is a very lucrative business. For example, it has been reported that for-profit publishers (such as Elsevier, Springer-Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis) have profit margins of up to 40%. This profit margin is as big, or much bigger, than many other businesses, such as Pfizer, Hyundai, or the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (see this – https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502 – paper in PLOS ONE. A quick disclaimer – I’m an editor at PLOS ONE. They pay me no money, but editing for them is an ‘indicator of esteem’ so you could see me citing this, and saying some nice things about PLOS below, as a COI).

However, in contrast to companies like Pfizer or Hyundai (who presumably spend lots of money on employing people to work out what medicines will work, or how to make a better care battery), traditional scientific publishers (at least as far as I can tell), don’t add huge value to the publishing process. That is, as academics, researchers, clinicians, and/or people with lived experience, we run research, generate knowledge, write articles to disseminate that knowledge, and check that what others have written is sensible/passes quality checks (via peer review and editing). And we do that as part of our jobs, and the traditional scientific publishers do not pay us to do that. It is hard, therefore, to understand why traditional scientific publishers make such large sums from publishing our work. And this is, at least in part, why some – like James Heathers here: https://jamesheathers.medium.com/the-450-movement-1f86132a29bd – have argued that publishers should pay us to do peer review, why some people are using pre-prints more, and why people like Bjorn Brembs have gone as far as supporting the use of sci-hub (see this – https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/02/sci-hub-as-necessary-effective-civil-disobedience/ – blog).

But it is important to note that not all publishers are the same. For example, some publishers (such as PLOS) are not-for-profit, and so the revenue they make from charging article-processing fees goes back into making publishing better (at least in theory. Their high-level staff [not me!] do get well-paid: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/680492065).

Elsewhere, some journals run a Diamond Open Access model, whereby authors do not pay a fee to publish (unlike at PLOS journals), but readers also do not pay a fee/subscription to access articles. These journals are often funded by a reasonably large grant, by a university’s publishing arm, or by a learned society, and costs might be kept low by providing very little (if any) copy-editing and employing a free-to-use system for management of peer review (e.g., see: https://open.lnu.se/index.php/metapsychology/about). There are a whole bunch of Psychology-related Diamond Open Access journals published by PsyOpen, and they are listed at this – https://psychopen.eu/journals/ – site.

It might seem, then, that we should all start publishing solely with not-for-profit and/or Diamond Open Access journals. From my point-of-view, in an ideal world, this is what I would like to do. But, we don’t live in an ideal world, and many not-for-profit and/or Diamond Open Access journals don’t have very high impact factors and/or are not historically prestigious. And so compromising a bit is probably the best thing to do. E.g., if you are a PhD student or a postdoc, you may need to compromise a bit and publish some work in a journal owned by a traditional scientific publisher, and some work in not-for-profit/Diamond Open Access journals. So that when you apply for a new job or a grant, it is clear that you can publish in ‘traditional’, historically prestigious journals, but you can also feel like you are doing the ‘right thing’ b publishing with not-for-profit and/or Diamond Open Access journals.