Could the US government fix the journal cartel problem?

Yeah, maybe

I think most people are unfamiliar with how the scientific publication and prestige system works. It works like this:

• Scientists submit papers to journals for publication. This means they start the peer review process. The first step is whether the handling editor rejects it immediately, which is called a desk rejection. If not, the editor then picks some ostensible experts to review it, meaning that they read the manuscript and give their opinion about what to do with it. Generally, there are 3 options: accept, revise, and reject. When the editor sees the reviewers' opinions, they usually mix in their own opinion and make a decision. If the editor decides to accept, the paper is typeset and published. If the editor decides to reject, authors will have to try another journal (sometimes 5+ until it finds an outlet). If revisions are needed, then the process is repeated until it either is accepted or rejected. Typically a paper goes through 1-3 revisions before acceptance. This process takes about 6 months, depending on the journals (this 2023 study of genetics journals found a median submission to publication of ~150 days). All of this labor is unpaid, except the editors usually get a small salary.

• To read scientific papers, authors must in theory have a login to the journal websites. Usually, the universities pay for a subscription to a large set of journals published by the same publisher, e.g. Elsevier or Springer. These journal subscriptions are extremely expensive because it's a natural oligopoly with a few publishers owning most of the market. Universities try to negotiate a price, but ultimately, they are more or less forced to pay whatever the publisher wants. Due to the oligopoly, they can and do keep hiking the price, and the tax payer foots the bill.

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• Why don't scientists just avoid the expensive journals? They can't easily. Why not? To get hired and promoted in academia depends on publishing in so-called high-ranked journals (high "impact factor"). Those are the older, generalist journals that get a lot of attention (readership), and most importantly, citations (references from one scientific paper to another). As such, the journals that happened to get into an elite position tend to stay that way since the scientific want to keep publishing in them for selfish career reasons. The publishers know this, so they can keep arbitrarily increasing the price, which they do. Elsevier made 2 billion USD in profits in 2022, a profit margin of about 33%.

• Science published in the more highly ranked journals (again, by how often publications in them are cited) are assumed to be of higher quality. However, the objective evidence show this is actually false. So the scientific reputation system depends on publishing in a few journals that are difficult to publish in (since everybody wants to do so for career reasons, they keep an artificial high rejection rate, e.g. 95%). And the scientific reputation system cannot really move away from this because it's in everybody's self-interest to keep publishing in these highly ranked journals. The system is stuck in a local minimum. Science and scientists would be better off if science was just kinda published at random wherever is most convenient and efficient. All the while a few corporations pocked all the money from the public, and based on free labor from scientists too. It's a disgrace.

So since we are speculating about what good tings for science the incoming US government could do, we can ask: could it fix the journal cost disease? The USA publishes the most high quality science of all countries, though this is mainly due to the large population size, and not because American scientists are particularly productive. So given its dominant role, USA could try to do something about the issue, just as Elon Musk did for internet free speech by purchasing Twitter.

Perhaps the first idea you have is that open access for federally funded research should be mandatory. It sounds good. The public is sponsoring the research, so it is absurd they can't read it. The journals found a nice way to game this system too. Open access fees. If you want to publish in a high ranked journal (e.g. Nature), and you want the paper to be readable by anyone, you can choose to pay a fee for this. How much is the fee? Well, whatever Nature says it is (right now it's $12,290!). How could you decline, after having just gotten lucky enough to get accepted in one of the 'best' journals in the world? Who pays the fee? The tax payer of course (taken out of the research funding). So this solves only half the issue as the oligopoly still has a way to milk endless money but at least everybody can read the science.

My idea for solving this is that federal research funding comes with more stipulations to combat this oligopoly:

1. The research must be open access (from day 1). Many universities and research agencies across the world already have such mandates.

2. The publication fee must not exceed X USD, where X is e.g. 100. Importantly, the rest cannot be paid by 3rd parties. Otherwise, the universities would just pay this as a cost of doing business (they also want to publish in 'top' journals because university rankings depend in part on these).

3. The research materials must be public as well, including the data, questionnaires, computer code and whatever else is needed to evaluate the work. This is to make sure the public gets the most science for the money. Other scientists can reuse materials for other research. It also helps discover and prevent fraud because fraud is often proven when the data are analyzed by third parties.

The second stipulation removes the ability of the publishes to set arbitrarily high prices. Their current approach is to steadily increase the price as a given journal grows in reputation (e.g., new journals start off being free to publish in, then the fee becomes 200, then 500, then 1000 etc.). Of course, the cost to actually publish a given study is quite small and roughly constant across journals, so this pricing scheme is just to make more money. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money. The problem is that due to the above factors, journal publishing tends towards a natural monopoly or oligopoly, and there is seemingly no way for the science to 'evolve' its way out of this local minimum. The market cannot solve this problem by itself by any known means. The problem has been there for decades, and if anything has only gotten worse as more publishers merged to form even larger conglomerates (e.g. Nature and Springer merged in 2015).

The intended impact of the policy is to force publishers to either lower their publication fees to be below the limit, or if they refuse, scientists will publish their work elsewhere, and other or new journals will rise in reputability. Alternatively, they could also publish the work as preprints (without peer review) and ignore the legacy journals entirely (this is not so uncommon in economics, physics, and computer science).

It's possible to go further than this. For instance, the US government could set up its own journal ("Journal of American Science") and mandate publication in it when research is federally funded. Given the usual performance of government-run businesses, this is probably not a good idea.

It would appear the above plan could be accomplished with a simple executive order to the NIH, NSF, and whatever other organizations fund research in the USA. So theoretically, this could be done on day 1 of Trump's presidency. I don't expect this to happen of course, Big Publisher would lobby intensely against it. It would require a particularly bold administration to go forth with something like this. We know that special interests usually win in democracies, so this is mostly a wishful thinking blogpost. However, let a man dream.