For decades, scholars have navigated a system that no longer serves them. To advance professionally, they must publish in peer-reviewed journals — most of which are controlled by commercial publishers whose profits depend on restricted access and high fees. Nature’s flagship journal charges authors up to $12,000 for an article to be freely accessible, while other Springer Nature journals charge between about $2,000 and $5,000. Similar fees are levied by Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and Sage.

In short, commercial academic publishing is built on exploitation. It wasn’t always this way. Up until the mid-20th century, scholarly communication happened through society meetings, personal correspondence, and journals published by professional organizations or university presses. After World War II, Vannevar Bush helped build the modern research university, advocating generous federal support for shared infrastructure like laboratories and libraries from his perch at the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. For many years, overhead on federal grants allowed university libraries to acquire nearly every relevant journal. To fix this broken system, we must disentangle scholarly publishing from corporate interests.

That changed in the 1960s, when entrepreneurs like Robert Maxwell began launching for-profit journals across countless academic niches. Over time, subscription costs ballooned beyond what libraries could afford. Poorer institutions canceled subscriptions while publishers enjoyed enormous profits by selling to wealthier universities. In 2023, Elsevier’s business group posted a 38-percent profit margin for its parent company — a figure higher than that of Apple or Alphabet. This is rent-seeking at its purest: extracting profit from work they neither fund nor meaningfully enhance.

To fix this broken system, we must disentangle scholarly publishing from corporate interests. The solution is not federal control as suggested by Kennedy, but rather university-led publishing grounded in academic values and supported by modern infrastructure.

This is now more feasible than ever. Peer review already relies almost entirely on volunteer labor from academics. Technical publishing tasks — copy editing, formatting, metadata tagging — can be handled by university libraries and support staff who would be supported by the savings that result from reducing journal subscriptions. Software tools now make it easy to manage submissions and publish open-access PDFs. The tasks that once justified the use of commercial publishers, such as printing, binding, warehousing, and mailing, have become obsolete with the expansion of the Internet.