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Although Kennedy has no experience with academic publishing, his comments echoed concerns voiced by the former New England Journal of Medicine editors Marcia Angell and Jerome Kassirer. Richard Horton, editor in chief of The Lancet, went further, calling the pharma-journal relationship “parasitic.” It was in that context that Kennedy floated — almost offhandedly — the idea of the government starting its own journals.
Kennedy’s proposal — government-run publishing — would be both impractical and risky, given the threat of political interference in academic speech. Still, his criticism highlights a deeper truth: The current model, dominated by for-profit publishers, is riddled with inefficiencies, inequities, and excessive profiteering. It’s time to reimagine scholarly publishing around the needs of science, not shareholders.
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.
The harm extends beyond universities. Agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation spend billions on research, only for the findings to be locked behind expensive paywalls. Authors are often required to surrender copyright to publishers, losing ownership of their publicly funded work. Taxpayers fund research, universities pay faculty to conduct it — and both must pay again to access the results.
This contradiction sparked a movement for reform. In the 1990s, the Nobel Prize-winning NIH director, Harold E. Varmus, was troubled that taxpayer-funded research was not freely accessible to the public. He proposed E-biomed, a digital repository for biomedical research. Although publishers strongly opposed the idea, it ultimately led to the creation of PubMed Central, a free archive of biomedical and life-sciences literature. Varmus later co-founded the Public Library of Science (PLOS) to offer high-quality, open-access publishing alternatives.
While open access made research freely available to readers, it didn’t fully solve the problem. As libraries cut subscriptions, publishers sought new revenue sources. Many turned to high open-access fees and new forms of paywalls. To offset this, the open-access model shifted costs to authors or their funders through article processing charges (APCs) — fees that typically range from $1,500 to over $10,000 per article. While meant to democratize access, APCs created new barriers for researchers and allowed commercial publishers to retain dominance, undermining the egalitarian vision Varmus had championed.
Other well-intentioned nonprofit models do not sufficiently cut costs. While JSTOR operates as a nonprofit and does not charge authors APCs, it shifts the financial burden to libraries through bundled subscription fees. Its model prioritizes access stability over cost reduction, offering no relief from the broader system of inflated publishing expenses or restricted access to research. The Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) and Project MUSE employ similar funding models and approaches to access and publication costs, but neither fully addresses the structural issues in academic publishing.
Second, APCs burden authors — especially junior scholars without grants — who may feel forced to pay to stay competitive in their careers.
Third, the proliferation of journals has created a maze of arbitrary formatting demands. Researchers spend countless hours reworking manuscripts to fit shifting templates — in 2021, that work resulted in an estimated $230 million of lost research time in the United States alone. It’s a waste that adds nothing to the science.
Fourth, paywalls restrict access, limit readership, reduce impact, and diminish the public value of publicly funded work. Researchers want their work read and cited. Publishers profit by locking them away.
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.
A university-managed system could be built around four core principles:
This model will require investment, but the funds already exist — locked up in excessive publisher fees. Universities and research institutions currently spend hundreds of millions annually on subscriptions and APCs. Redirecting even a portion of that spending to support in-house publishing could drastically reduce costs and improve access. Commercial publishers enjoy profit margins of 30-40 percent. By eliminating those margins, a university-based system could offer high-quality publishing at far lower cost.
What’s needed now is the collective will to build a publishing system that serves science rather than exploits it.
One possibility is a pro rata funding model, where universities, research institutions, and professional societies contribute based on their level of usage. Discounts could be offered to under-resourced institutions or to those that take on a larger share of editorial and peer-review responsibilities. Individuals outside academe might gain access by purchasing articles at cost.
Oversight could be entrusted to a respected nonprofit body — perhaps modeled after the National Academies — ensuring that decisions are guided by a commitment to scholarly communication rather than corporate profits. The details will be complex, but with leadership rooted in academic values, the system could serve the needs of research far more effectively than today’s profit-driven model.
Kennedy’s suggestion that the government take over scientific publishing was misguided, but reflected a deeper truth: The current system no longer works for anyone except corporate publishers. Rather than replacing private publishers with a government-run platform — which raises concerns about political interference — we should empower academic institutions to reclaim control over scholarly communication.
The technology exists. The expertise resides within universities. The economic rationale is clear. What’s needed now is the collective will to build a publishing system that serves science rather than exploits it. Science thrives on openness, scrutiny, and shared knowledge. Let’s stop building walls around our most important discoveries. It’s time to tear down the paywalls — and rebuild a publishing system that serves both scholarship and the public good.
