‘Why is publishing so expensive?’

For many of us who work in scientific publishing, the title of this Editorial is a question we hear all the time when we're out talking to academics. And it's a perfectly reasonable one. After all, researchers produce the content, for free, and act as peer reviewers to assess whether it's ‘worthy’ of publication – also for free [in most cases; our sister journal Biology Open (BiO) being a notable exception: https://journals.biologists.com/bio/pages/fast-fair]. ‘All’ the journal does is put the final version online, so how can that possibly cost US$4250 [the current Article Processing Charge (APC) for Disease Models & Mechanisms (DMM)]? In this Editorial, we (the Managing Editor of DMM and the Publishing Director of The Company of Biologists, our not-for-profit publisher) provide details and context on DMM's finances, and hope to dispel some of the myths around the economics of publishing.For those of you who want the take-home message up-front, the two key points we want to make here are firstly that quality editorial assessment and publishing involves a lot of people (meaning our largest costs are staff salaries and, to a lesser extent, Academic Editor stipends), and secondly that publishers have had to invest heavily in technologies to support professional and trustworthy online publishing – there's a lot more to it than just posting an article on a website. But before we get into the details, here's how a typical conversation with a researcher might go when talk turns to money:Preprint servers are fantastic, but they are not journals. Preprints don't incur the same costs because they don't go through the kind of rigorous screening that happens at a journal such as DMM – both through peer review and through the technical and integrity checks we perform, which help to ensure that readers can and will trust your work. Not only that, but by publishing in a community-centric journal such as DMM, you can maximise the chances of your paper being seen and used by your colleagues. Our post-acceptance processes (outlined in more detail below) will ensure it is in the best possible shape to be read by the community, it will get indexed in PubMed and other services, it will land in people's inboxes and on their social media feeds and, in some cases, it will get featured through a highlight, interview or press release. As discussed below, all these things take time and money and are key services that publishers can provide but preprint servers can't. Professional online publishing isn't as cheap as it might initially seem. DMM has been online-only for many years, but the actual process of printing our sister journals Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology (which we did until the end of 2024) was a very minor outgoing in the context of all costs incurred. And given that over 30% of full-text views to DMM articles are to the PDF version rather than the HTML, it's clear that readers still want to read in PDF format, meaning we still need to typeset each article. Not only that, but we, in collaboration with our online hosting partners Silverchair, need to make sure that articles are preserved in perpetuity, meet modern accessibility requirements and that the online reading experience provides the kind of functionality that readers expect. It may not all be visible, but a lot of work goes into maintaining and improving the website.Firstly, none of The Company of Biologists' journals have page charges, although some journals at other publishers still do. But article length is still relevant – we are charged for typesetting by the page, and a longer paper typically takes longer (and therefore costs more) to copyedit and proofread. That said, the reason we believe length limits still have a place is not because of the costs but rather because we want to encourage conciseness for the reader's benefit.APCs at well-established journals like DMM can vary from a few hundred dollars to over $10,000. There are many reasons for this variability, ranging from the economic model of the publisher (for-profit versus not-for-profit) and the scale of the operation through to the staffing model of the journal (professional versus academic editors; in-house versus outsourced production processes). One factor that's often under-appreciated is the selectivity of the journal, i.e. what percentage of papers received are eventually published. An Open Access (OA) journal that publishes the majority of its submissions receives income for most of the time and money expended in assessing those manuscripts. By contrast, a highly selective journal spends a lot of time processing papers that won't get accepted and therefore bring in no money. Many publishers have tried to get around this problem by providing trickle-down cascades to keep papers (and the income they represent) within the same publishing house, but at an individual journal level, the more selective you are, the more you have to charge to recoup your costs. Of course, you can argue about the value of such selectivity, but that's a whole separate conversation…In years gone by, the traditional subscription-based publishing model typically provided healthy revenues for publishers big and small. For The Company of Biologists (which publishes four journals in addition to DMM: Development, Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology and BiO), we ensured this surplus went back to the community in the form of charitable activities while also maintaining an investment pot to provide financial security to the organisation (see Box 1). But we are now in a very different world. Over the past two decades, the laudable push for OA publishing has led to an almost bewildering array of publishing options, business models and author-facing charges. Meanwhile, as discussed below, publishing has become a more complex (and costly) process. Given that revenues from OA streams are typically smaller than those from subscriptions, finances at small publishers like us are now significantly tighter: we now operate our journals at a close to break-even budget, and our investment pot is the primary source of our charitable funds.Box 1. The Company of Biologists' finances and charitable activitiesAs a UK-registered charity, The Company of Biologists exists to benefit the scientific community and not to profit shareholders. Our charitable activities include the following: organising and hosting scientific Workshops and Meetings for the biological communityproviding scientific meeting grants to help defray the costs of organising conferences and support scientific interactionsfunding early career researchers undertaking collaborative visits to other labsproviding travel grants for researchers attending conferences and training coursesblock grants to three UK-based societies (the British Society for Developmental Biology, the British Society for Cell Biology and the Society for Experimental Biology) to support their activities.We know from community feedback how vital this support is to researchers across the globe.In the past, funds for these activities came from the surplus made by our publishing programme. However, our publishing costs have grown significantly in recent years (by 22% in real terms – after accounting for inflation – between 2015 and 2024). We have worked hard to avoid passing these costs on to our community and, as noted elsewhere, OA-based revenues are typically lower than those from subscriptions. Given these challenges, our income has decreased by 10% in real terms over the same period despite continued growth in R&P participation powered by successful relationships with libraries. Consequently, while in 2015 our surplus was able to fund all our charitable activities, in 2024 it represented less than 40% of our charitable spend, with the rest coming from the growth in our investments.We remain committed to supporting the scientific community well into the future and are fortunate – thanks to prudent investments over the past 100 years – to be in a position to do so despite the challenging financial circumstances that small publishers are facing.Academics also tend to be much more aware of the money side of things these days because they are often required to pay publishing fees from grant funds. In this context, publishers have a responsibility to be more transparent about where that money goes. So, let's start with the revenue coming in. Until recently, DMM's sole income stream was the APC payments made by authors. Over the past few years, however, we have begun to include DMM (and our other fully-OA journal, BiO) in our Read & Publish (R&P) agreements with librarians. These allow fee-free OA publishing for authors of participating institutions (see https://www.biologists.com/library-hub/read-publish/) and many institutions have chosen to opt in to our five-journal agreement. As seen in Fig. 1, many of DMM's papers are now published through the R&P route. Note also that we strongly believe that no author should be deterred from publishing with us due to financial considerations; we therefore offer a generous waiver scheme for authors unable to cover the costs of the APC or benefit from an R&P agreement.Given DMM's history as an APC-based OA journal, and because the APC level also feeds into R&P pricing (becoming an increasingly significant contributor as the proportion of OA articles grows across our portfolio), we ideally want to set the APC at a level that would cover our costs per article. For DMM, this is a particular challenge given the relatively small size of the journal and high proportion of ‘front section’ content (Reviews, Editorials, Interviews and other community pieces, for which we receive no revenue but which are important to DMM's ethos as a community journal). At present, therefore, DMM's APC does not fully cover its costs and the journal is partially subsidised by income from the rest of the business.It is important to note that as a small not-for-profit publisher of only five journals, we do not benefit from any of the economies of scale that can be achieved by larger organisations. We publish our journals ourselves (rather than partnering with a larger publisher, as many society and non-profit journals do) because this gives us full control of how we operate and the quality of our product. These are significant benefits to going it alone, but the financial challenges are exacerbated by not being part of a large stable of journals with common resources and opportunities for collaboration.Our biggest direct cost area is in salaries and stipends (Fig. 2). The DMM in-house team consists of six people (5.1 full-time equivalents) – the Managing Editor, two Reviews Editors, two Production Editors and one Editorial Administrator. Producing the journal also requires work from our Technical Operations department, including graphics and proofreading teams. Without these committed staff members, manuscripts wouldn't move through the assessment and peer review process, accepted papers wouldn't get copy-edited (checked and corrected for accuracy, clarity and compliance with key journal policies) or scrutinised in-house for integrity issues and there would be no review-type articles in the journal. In short, DMM just wouldn't get published. Equally important are our team of Academic Editors, who are modestly compensated for their time and dedication to the journal – reading submissions, selecting peer reviewers, making decisions on which articles to publish, supporting authors through the publication process and contributing to the overall strategic directions of the journal.It's all very well producing a journal and papers to go in it, but we also need to make sure that people can find and read them, and this is where our Sales and Marketing department comes in. As mentioned earlier, The Company of Biologists has been very successful in growing its OA content through R&P agreements, but this has required significant investment in our Sales team. Meanwhile, we rely on our Marketing staff to help us promote the journal and its papers, to reach new readers and authors and to gather feedback on what we do well and where we can improve. Finally, of course, there are all the general expenses and overheads – like any organisation, we need to manage and develop the business and its people, we need finance and HR support, and we need to keep the lights on and the laptops running.As well as our people and facilities, we are also reliant on a host of technology partners and platforms – from our manuscript submission system to our typesetting service provider to our online hosting platform. And it's not enough just to put up a PDF: as noted above, we need to keep on top of emerging standards and evolving expectations from readers and librarians, providing, amongst other things, fully accessible XML, play-in-place movies, archiving, indexing and appropriate linking to relevant databases. Increasingly, we've also had to invest in software solutions and staff time to detect and address publication integrity issues, including plagiarism, inappropriate image manipulation and papermill submissions. The age of AI will only exacerbate these issues.Publishing, done well, is an expensive business. For every paper you read in DMM, at least five different in-house staff – an Editorial Administrator, the Managing Editor, a member of our graphics team, a Production Editor and a member of our proofreading team – have been involved in its journey from submission to publication, as have at least one Academic Editor, two or three peer reviewers and the (outsourced) typesetting team. And, across the whole organisation, we employ 62 full- or part-time staff whose roles support our publishing operations (not counting those solely dedicated to our charitable activities). We are proud to be a people-centric organisation, and while we're actively assessing options to streamline processes and reduce costs, the quality you expect from DMM will continue to be at the forefront of our thinking.