The four major scientific publishers — Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis — earned more than $7 billion in 2024, with profit margins unimaginable in almost any other industry, exceeding 30%, according to a new analysis led by British anthropologist Dan Brockington of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. This collective windfall is explained by the “publish or perish” system — which rewards improbably prolific scientists who produce a study every two days — as well as a shift in the industry’s business model. Previously, readers paid subscription fees to access quality journals. Now, amid the push for open access to science, it is the authors themselves who must pay to have their research published so that others can read it for free. This perverse incentive — whereby both scientists and journals earn more the more they publish, regardless of quality — has fueled a flood of millions of low-quality studies.

Elsevier is the publisher that publishes the most studies and earns the most, with a 38% profit margin ($1.5 billion in 2024), according to the analysis by Brockington and his colleagues.