- The current academic publishing system is dysfunctional: universities pay for teaching, but promotions are based on research funded by external grants, and researchers often pay to publish in journals that then paywall the work.
- For-profit publishers like Elsevier and Wiley exploit the system by charging high subscription fees and article processing charges, with profit margins around 40%, while providing minimal services like formatting and hosting PDFs.
- Taxpayers indirectly fund these publishers multiple times—through research grants, subscription fees, and article charges—costing American universities an estimated $2.5 billion annually.
- The system persists due to a collective action problem: individual scientists cannot boycott publishers without harming their careers, and past reforms like open-access mandates have been co-opted by publishers through high processing fees.
- The proposed solution is for government grants to stipulate that research cannot be published in for-profit journals, cutting out the middlemen and forcing a shift to truly open-access models.
- Alternative approaches, such as the Navigation Fund's policy of not funding journal publications, have shown positive results in fostering creativity and collaboration among researchers.