Neoliberalism, bureaucracy and Robert Maxwell: how scientific journals prioritized business over knowledge

The publishing market, until then in the hands of scientific societies, underwent a first change in the mid-90th century through the figure of Maxwell; The arrival of neoliberalism and the Internet in the XNUMXs finished transforming it.

Science was not always like this. There was a time when researchers did not pay to publish, when scientific journals were not a big business and they focused more on knowledge than income. But a rain of money, the increase in the volume of work and therefore the administrative burden and the ambition of Robert Maxwell in post-war Europe transformed the sector.

Today scientists have to pay for their own publications with funds that in theory are for research, they edit the work of their colleagues for free and, sometimes, they have to pay again – personally, the least, or their institutions – to read the work they They themselves generate so that others keep the benefits.

But Science was not always like this, insists Carlos Chaccour, ISGLOBAL researcher. “Since the first scientific publications and the dissemination of knowledge appeared in the 17th century, everything was in the hands of scientific societies. But it was just scientists telling their stories and sharing findings,” Chaccour recalls.

Then the magazines themselves would come, but the system remained under that model until the middle of the 20th century. So, in post-war Europe everything came together: an exhausted model, small, inefficient and incapable of providing an agile response in terms of publication to the growing scientific production, which was accumulating in societies waiting for its turn, a rain of money to the institutions and the emergence of the person who would change the market forever.

An ambitious guy with many ideas
Attributing all the change that has occurred in any sector to a single man is usually complicated – except for the Henry Fords of life –, and even more so such a big change, but those who know this story put a name and surname to the decline: Robert Maxwell.

Maxwell is an intriguing figure. Czech by birth and British by adoption, he died in the Canary Islands in 1991 after allegedly falling from his boat and drowning, a version questioned on many fronts. Although he was a multimillionaire, he died buried in debt and having emptied the pension fund of his employees. Suspicions have also weighed on his figure that he was an agent of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, and had a very close relationship with the USSR. This editor has gone down in books as a press magnate capable of rivaling Rupert Murdoch – they were business and also ideological enemies – and was even a British Labor MP. Among all these activities he found time to completely modify the structure of science publication and be considered the father of the current journal system.

Maxwell's is the story of an opportunist, a person with ambition, vision and talent who, after fighting in World War II with the British, found himself in Berlin in 1946, at the age of 23 and with the declared goal of becoming a millionaire, as he recalls. Guardian article. There he found himself in the right place at the right time.

After the war, the British Government was concerned about the poor state of the national ecosystem of scientific publications, several years behind a scientific body that included illustrious surnames such as Fleming or Darwin (grandson). So he decided to relaunch the historic national publisher Butterworths, uniting it with the solvent – ​​and German – Springer.

Maxwell, who was then living in the German capital and had collaborated with Springer, found his opportunity in that merger. He started working for the new company and ended up taking over both publishers. The moment was perfect. He called for the merger of both Pergamon Press – years later he would sell it to Elsevier – and set out to change the sector. The first big movement, which was actually started by his partner, Paul Rosbaud, was to convince the scientific societies, which had historically controlled their own journals, that they needed more, more specialized publications, each in its own little niche. To do this, it was enough to persuade the right person and, as a bonus, put them in charge. The next step was to sell subscriptions to these magazines to university libraries, which were flush with money at the time. The system was set up.

A new magazine per week
Isidro F. Aguillo, head of the Cybermetrics laboratory of the Institute of Policies and Public Goods of the CSIC, says that at his peak the editor opened a new magazine every week. He “he realized the business there was.” In 1959, Pergamon published 40 publications. In 1965 it had 150. It was the head of the market without a close rival. He perfected and expanded the method: he went from creating magazines to buying those that the societies still published, or managing them in exchange for a monthly fee.

It also changed ways in science. He approached scientists at conferences to sign them up and have them edit or publish exclusively with him. He did it aggressively or by offering them luxuries (parties, boat trips) to which they were not accustomed. He won scientists for his magazines, but lost his partner Rosbaud, who disagreed with his methods. The money he put forward could do everything. “It was very impressive,” Leslie Iversen, former editor of the Journal of Neurochemistry, once said. “We had dinner and a good wine, and at the end he gave us a check: a few thousand pounds for the society. “It was more money than we poor scientists had ever seen.”

One of the keys to Maxwell's success was that he was able to see (or create) a key fact: the scientific publishing market is infinite. When it is understood that each article is unique, that it reports an exclusive discovery and that it cannot be replaced by another, he comes to the conclusion that creating a new journal does not take away business from its theoretical competitor. He just expands it. When a new journal appears, scientists will simply ask their institution to subscribe to it to be informed. And continue billing.

The arrival of neoliberalism
Maxwell is also related, explains Chaccour, with the creation of the impact factor, the most used bibliographic index in Science and which measures the frequency with which the average article from a journal has been cited in a particular year. “He did not accept everything, only certain articles, which favors more citations, more people wanting to publish in his journals and he can select,” explains the researcher.

According to this theory, this modeled the impact factor, which is used today to evaluate the quality of a journal. Sometimes publishers also use this index to justify their prices, both for subscribing and publishing. And to index a journal in the Web of Science (WoS) or Scopus, the two reference sites, companies have more capacity than scientific societies. Join this whole trend with the arrival of neoliberalism in Science and the total commercialization of magazines and the ingredients for the next great change in the scientific publishing sector emerge.

Vicenzo Pavone, from the Institute of Policies and Public Goods of the CSIC, explains that towards the end of the 80s “the reference journals were managed by the communities or scientific societies themselves, and they followed the same quality protocol that is followed today.” The costs of editing the journals were covered by the membership fees of the scientists who belonged to these societies.

But starting in the 1990s, Pavone continues, “scientific societies began to subcontract or directly sell their journals to companies like Elsevier. That is to say, the scientific management (offered free of charge) remained in the scientific society, but the technical and commercial management of the magazine became the task of the publishers.”

In parallel came the replacement of paper with the internet. Before this, magazines already applied a particular subscription policy, which was not based on the value of the product they sold, explains Aguillo. “There were different prices for magazine subscriptions. One was the individual, which could be 40 or 50 dollars a year. But if an institution bought it, the price multiplied by 20 or 30 to 900 or 1000 dollars.” For the same product, a paper magazine.

And the internet arrived: another support, same business
The Internet changed everything, also in this sector. “Although what [magazines] charged for paper was not real even then, it definitely stopped being true [without the costs of paper and printing],” explains Aguillo. But it still seemed natural to publishers to continue charging for subscription; The format may have changed, but the product was the same.

However, given the proliferation of magazines, some of the most powerful North American universities (Harvard, Stanford) stood down, Aguillo recalls. They paid a lot of subscriptions and their scientists asked them for more. There were no funds for everything. “This was one of the origins of open access,” says the CSIC researcher.

Faced with the backlash of many clients and the push from “open science” institutions, another model was created. Instead of charging for reading articles through subscriptions, journals charged the costs to researchers who wanted to publish. They were charged an amount for “article processing” (APC), which varied depending on the impact factor of the journal (currently it can go up to $10.000 in the most prestigious ones) – even though All the technical work is done, free of charge, by the scientists themselves – but they opened access to everyone.

Pavone regrets that institutions like the EU have opted for open science, but without considering another model than the pay-to-publish model that has ended up being imposed. “There has been no effort, nor even a debate, to find an alternative model. I believe that the solution is not to create new journals” with free access and at no cost to the researcher, he rejects the idea proposed by some scientists. “There are very good ones and they are the ones that people read. But if the EU pays me [through research projects] to pay a publisher, why don't they pay the academies directly to manage their journals?” he asks.

Aguillo recalls that “the mercantilist spirit of magazines is not new, perhaps it is more evident. But before it was the library that paid and was pressured by the researchers to have the subscriptions and now the cost has been passed on to the researchers, who have become more aware of what it entails." An evolution that is reminiscent of that of so many sectors, which little by little have been shifting costs to the end user.

What overall balance has the model change left? “The end user in developing countries has won because they now have access to magazines that they couldn't before,” she believes. “But the researchers who do not have a project have lost (either structurally or temporarily) and the young people have lost and of course the private researchers, who do not have an institution behind them that pays to publish.”

Read the article on the original website, clicking on the button below this text.

Source: elDiario.es, Authorship: Daniel Sánchez Caballero