Land of Milk and Money, by Misha Angrist

Like anyone else, I receive spam emails from sweepstakes purveyors, princes from faraway lands, and myriad other phishermen. But occasionally there will be a real show-stopper, rising above the fray by dint of its perverse language and awkward come-ons. This one from 2023 might be my all-time favorite.

How did Grace Hopper manage to get a glimpse of my incandescent smile? How did word of my “eminence” reach her? What I really love is that she concludes with the one-two punch of a movie-villain threat (“We hope you won’t disappoint us”) and a command (“Acknowledge this email within 24 hours”). Tell Blofeld to come issue his ultimatums to me in person, Ms. Hopper!

---

Most anyone with a .edu address has received many emails like this one. It is from one of the so-called predatory journals: you pay them to publish your “scientific paper,” and never mind about that pesky peer review. They’d love nothing more than to provide a home for your fake study on how dark chocolate leads to weight loss. All they need is a website and a way to accept payment; all you need is a credit card and a manuscript, however rudimentary.

Remarkably, the origins of this deeply enshittified ecosystem were well-intentioned, perhaps even noble. Twenty-five years ago a group of Nobelists and other highly decorated researchers contended that too many papers were behind paywalls; “unimpeded access,” they argued, would help researchers and further the cause of science, just as the sharing of genomic data had accelerated the transformation of biology.

Great—but wouldn’t such access deny journals the subscription revenue they needed to survive? The answer (or an answer) was “open access publishing”—authors would pay a fee to the journals for peer review, editing, and distribution, and in return the journals would make their papers freely available to all. The money to pay for publication would come, in other words, not from increasingly exploitative and monopolistic publishers, but from scientist-authors’ research grants—and soon, researchers began building the cost of “article processing charges” (APCs) into their grant proposals. 

The obvious problem of predation mushroomed almost instantly. Any unscrupulous bandit can start a journal and dupe unsuspecting researchers into submitting their work and publishing it, fudging the peer review and editing steps. As I write this, the anonymous volunteer-run site predatoryjournals.org lists 2,780 predatory journals produced by 1,363 predatory publishers. Earlier this year, the commercial database Cabells Predatory Reports crossed 20,000 predatory journals.  

The deeper problem, though (and to be clear, I am not breaking news here), is the entrenched corruption in conventional academic publishing. If you are an academic researcher fortunate enough to have a paper accepted in Nature, arguably the world’s top science journal, you will currently have to pony up $12,850 to make that paper open access and available to anyone. And then? The library at your institution will have to pay Nature (very handsomely) for a subscription, so that your own work will be available in the library at your own institution.

In my view, no one has summed it up better than Ned Potter did here, in response to a reader asking, “Explain academic publishing to me like I am Five.”

The poster child and arguably the greatest beneficiary of this lunatic system has been Elsevier, which is owned by Anglo-Dutch conglomerate RELX. Last year its Scientific, Technical & Medical unit posted a profit margin of 38 percent (see page 16). This is what happens when the cows pay you for access to the milk they gave you for free. 

---

There have been many attempts to right these wrongs over the last quarter-century. Preprints are scientific papers that have not yet been peer-reviewed and are freely available to read. Preprint repositories, such as arXiv, don’t shake scientists down for their lunch money and, since they’re unedited and unreviewed, work can be posted quickly there. But in the age of large language models, preprint servers, like traditional journals, can get overwhelmed with slop. Meanwhile, some institutions, including mine, have negotiated “all you can eat” transformative agreements with publishers, whereby faculty can publish in open-access journals without incurring fees. 

Is this system sustainable? Color me skeptical. 

And then there’s good old-fashioned piracy. Find a Kazakhstani graduate student to illegally download 88 million papers and share them with the world. She will become a folk hero. Also, she will get sued, and she will become a fugitive from the law. 

The Malevolent Broken Clock 

In late May, Trump and his henchmen released a “proposed revision to Uniform Guidance” via the Office of Management and Budget. This innocuous-sounding document would upend the way science has been conceived of and governed in this country since the end of the Second World War. Briefly, it proposes that:

• Political appointees will be in charge of all federal research grants
• All such grants should advance the president’s policy priorities
• Peer review is to become “advisory” and should not supersede “agency discretion”
• Federal grant funds should not be used to support partnerships with “our foreign adversaries” 

There’s a lot more—I will spare you, but note that early on in this 400-page proposal the authors, led by OMB director Russell Vought, argue that this wholesale eradication of the scientific establishment is necessary because the Covid years of Sleepy Joe Biden were marred by federal grants being used to “promote a ‘woke’ policy agenda that did not reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public.” 

The net effect of these proposals is to reify the DOGE scorched-earth decimation of American science of early 2025. The scientific community has reacted—finally—with alarm. The American Association for the Advancement of Science called it “a brazen power grab” by OMB that will “make future discoveries less likely.” The American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy worries that it will “slow scientific innovation, weaken workforce development, and delay patient access to future therapies.” The American Society for Cell Biology described it as “a massive threat to American science.”

Grassroots advocacy group Stand Up For Science found that thousands of NIH-funded clinical trials could be discontinued, should the proposal succeed. Its director told Nature a few weeks ago that this is “the big one… if it gets through, we’re screwed.” I don’t disagree—the OMB diktat makes clear that, in the eyes of the current administration, we can’t have scientists in charge of science. It feels like the radioactive dawn of American Lysenkoism. 

But. There’s one provision in this otherwise heinous document that I would in fact keep. “Open access fees for professional journal publications and other peer-reviewed publications are unallowable [emphasis mine] under Federal awards.” Why?

• American taxpayers have already paid for American research. Demanding that scientists use taxpayer money—to the tune of thousands of dollars per paper—to make the results available to the people who have already paid for it once is utterly reprehensible. 
• APCs perpetuate a class system: well-funded senior researchers can tack a few grand onto every proposal and move on with their day. Junior researchers, students, and researchers from low- and middle-income countries, however, are already behind the eight ball. Which is easier to justify: an extra $12,000 for APCs, or the same amount for a graduate student’s stipend?

For all our bloviating about “unimpeded access,” we haven’t really meant it, and that’s part of why we’re in this hot, dark mess. Despite some slippage, university libraries continue to bend the knee to the big science publishers, which charge institutions millions of dollars for their subscription bundles (so-called “big deals”). Those afford access for the elites (and handsome rewards for RELX shareholders). Meanwhile, absent a university affiliation, the parents of a child with a rare disease cannot read paywalled papers about their child’s condition—research findings that were subsidized by their own tax dollars.  

Preprints, pirate access, transformative agreements with publishers, and sites like unpaywall offer a modicum of hope, but each is imperfect and incomplete. Until scientists fight fire with populist fire—that is, until they recognize who their true benefactors are, and prioritize sharing their work with them—the current grift will persist. 

Right now, though, at the end of the night, the bill will come, and the cows will pay it. 

---

Misha Angrist teaches at Duke University and serves on its Library Council. The opinions he expresses here are his own.