外刊阅读 | 卫报 | 学术期刊：光鲜背后的盈利迷局

Any experience of awe, such as hiking to a mountain top or watching the moon rise or swimming in the ocean, can take you out of your mind. Your focus is not on everyday worries, but more on the big picture.  

任何敬畏的经历，比如徒步登上山顶、观看月亮升起或在大海中游泳，都能让你忘却烦恼。你的注意力不再集中在日常的烦恼上，而是更多地关注大局。

Academic journals are a lucrative scam

学术期刊是一个有利可图的骗局

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If you’ve ever read an academic article, the chances are that you were unwittingly paying tribute to a vast profit-generating machine that exploits the free labour of researchers and siphons off public funds.The annual revenues of the “big five” commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes of Google. Meanwhile, academics do almost all of the substantive work to produce these articles free of charge: we do the research, write the articles, vet them for quality and edit the journals.

Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to these journals to the very same universities and institutions that fund the research and editorial labour in the first place. Universities need access to journals because these are where most cutting-edge research is disseminated. But the cost of subscribing to these journals has become so exorbitantly expensive that some universities are struggling to afford them. Consequently, many researchers (not to mention the general public) remain blocked by paywalls, unable to access the information they need. If your university or library doesn’t subscribe to the main journals, downloading a single paywalled article on philosophy or politics can cost between £30 and £40.

The commercial stranglehold on academic publishing is doing considerable damage to our intellectual and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda spread freely online, genuine research and scholarship remains gated and prohibitively expensive. For the past couple of years, I worked as an editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, one of the leading journals in political philosophy. It was founded in 1972, and it has published research from renowned philosophers such as John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Peter Singer. Many of the most influential ideas in our field, on topics from abortion and democracy to famine and colonialism, started out in the pages of this journal. 

We were sick of the academic publishing racket and had decided to try something different. We wanted to launch a journal that would be truly open access, ensuring anyone could read our articles. This will be published by the Open Library of Humanities, a not-for-profit publisher funded by a consortium of libraries and other institutions. When academic publishing is run on a not-for-profit basis, it works reasonably well. These publishers provide a real service and typically sell the final product at a reasonable price to their own community. So why aren’t there more of them?

To answer this, we have to go back a few decades, when commercial publishers began buying up journals from university presses. Exploiting their monopoly position, they then sharply raised prices. Today, a library subscription to a single journal in the humanities or social sciences typically costs more than £1,000 a year. Worse still, publishers often “bundle” journals together, forcing libraries to buy ones they don’t want in order to have access to ones they do. Between 2010 and 2019, UK universities paid more than £1bn in journal subscriptions and other publishing charges. More than 90% of these fees went to the big five commercial publishers (UCL and Manchester shelled out over £4m each). It’s worth remembering that the universities funded this research, paid the salaries of the academics who produced it and then had to pay millions of pounds to commercial publishers in order to access the end product.

Career advancement depends heavily on publishing in journals with established name recognition and prestige, and these journals are often owned by commercial publishers.

职业发展在很大程度上取决于在具有知名度和声望的期刊上发表文章，而这些期刊通常归商业出版商所有。

This is why, as editors of one of our field’s leading journals, we feel a strong responsibility to help build collective momentum towards a better arrangement: a publishing model that no longer wastes massive amounts of public resources feeding profits to private corporations, secures editorial independence against the pressures of profit-making and makes research available to everyone, free of charge. 

翻译练习，欢迎大家文末留言打卡，下期推送文章公布答案哟，一起阅外刊学英语吧！

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