What If Academic Publishing Took a Different Path?

The Actual History

Academic publishing traces its roots to the 17th century with the establishment of the first scholarly journals: the French Journal des Sçavans and the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, both launched in 1665. For nearly three centuries, academic publishing remained primarily in the hands of professional societies and university presses, operating essentially as non-profit endeavors focused on disseminating knowledge rather than generating significant revenue.

The landscape began to shift dramatically after World War II with the exponential growth in research funding and output. Commercial publishers recognized an opportunity and entered the academic publishing market at scale. Robert Maxwell, who would later build Pergamon Press into a publishing empire, was among the first to identify this market potential in the 1950s. By acquiring existing journals and launching new specialized publications, commercial publishers established themselves as central players in the ecosystem.

The 1960s-1980s saw significant consolidation in the industry, with companies like Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley expanding their journal portfolios. These publishers introduced a transformative business model: researchers submitted work for free, other academics reviewed it for free, and then the publishers sold the finished journals back to university libraries at increasingly higher subscription rates. This created what economists would later call a "price inelastic market" – libraries could not simply cancel subscriptions to important journals without harming their institutions' research capabilities.

The digital revolution of the 1990s, rather than democratizing access to knowledge, further entrenched commercial publishers' power. Publishers digitized their collections and introduced the "big deal" – bundling hundreds or thousands of journals into a single subscription package. While this initially provided access to more content, it also locked libraries into expensive, long-term contracts.

By the early 2000s, the "serials crisis" had become acute, with journal subscription prices rising at rates far exceeding inflation. University libraries found their budgets increasingly consumed by journal packages, with some major research libraries spending over $10 million annually on subscriptions.

The open access movement emerged as a response to these conditions. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), Bethesda Statement (2003), and Berlin Declaration (2003) articulated principles for making research freely available online. New publishing models emerged, including open access journals (which shifted costs from readers to authors through Article Processing Charges) and institutional repositories where researchers could self-archive their work.

Commercial publishers adapted by launching their own open access options, often charging substantial fees ($2,000-$11,000 per article) while maintaining their subscription business. This "hybrid" approach allowed them to effectively double-dip – collecting both subscription fees and open access charges.

By 2023, despite two decades of open access advocacy, commercial academic publishers continued to report profit margins of 30-40%, among the highest of any industry. Elsevier's parent company, RELX, reported an adjusted operating profit of £2.91 billion on revenue of £7.66 billion in 2022, with its Scientific, Technical & Medical division maintaining a 37.1% operating profit margin.

Meanwhile, many researchers continue to measure their careers by publications in high-impact journals owned by these major publishers, perpetuating the system despite growing criticism of its costs, inequities, and inefficiencies. The academic publishing landscape of our timeline remains dominated by a small number of highly profitable commercial entities controlling the primary channels of scholarly communication.

The Point of Divergence

What if the academic community had recognized and responded differently to the commercialization of research publishing in its early stages? In this alternate timeline, we explore a scenario where the academic world made different choices in the critical period of the late 1960s to early 1970s, when commercial academic publishing was still in its formative phase.

The point of divergence in this timeline occurs in 1968, when major university libraries and academic societies across North America and Europe recognized the potential long-term implications of transferring control of research dissemination to commercial entities. Rather than each institution negotiating separately with publishers, several influential university presidents and library directors called an emergency summit at Stanford University.

This divergence could have manifested in several plausible ways:

First, the academic leadership might have recognized the power of collective action earlier. In our timeline, university libraries negotiated individually with publishers for decades before beginning to form consortia in the 1990s. In the alternate timeline, earlier collective action fundamentally changed the power dynamics.

Alternatively, the technical vision for sharing scholarly information could have emerged earlier. While our timeline's early internet pioneers did envision scholarly communication networks (with projects like ARPANET having roots in research networking), the specific application to publishing might have been prioritized differently.

A third possibility involves different economic incentives. The alternate timeline could have seen academic institutions develop different metrics for scholarly impact and promotion, reducing reliance on specific journal prestige and citation counts that became entrenched in our timeline.

What makes this divergence particularly credible is that many academic leaders were already expressing concerns about commercial publishing in the late 1960s. The Association of Research Libraries documented growing alarm about journal price increases during this period, but in our timeline, these concerns didn't translate into coordinated systemic action.

In this alternate timeline, the Stanford Summit of 1968 resulted in the formation of the Academic Publishing Cooperative (APC) – a non-profit consortium committed to maintaining scholarly publishing as a community-controlled enterprise. The APC's founding charter, signed by representatives from 60 major universities, explicitly stated: "The channels of scholarly communication must remain under the stewardship of the academic community that creates, evaluates, and uses this knowledge."

Immediate Aftermath

Institutional Response and Organization

The immediate aftermath of the Stanford Summit saw rapid organizational development. By 1970, the Academic Publishing Cooperative established its operational framework and technical infrastructure:

Governance Structure: The APC developed a federated governance model with representation from university libraries, academic societies, and research institutions. This multi-stakeholder approach ensured that publishing policies would serve research communities rather than commercial interests.
Funding Model: Participating institutions redirected a portion of their library acquisition budgets into the cooperative. Stanford economist Kenneth Arrow, who had recently won the Nobel Prize for his work on market failures, helped design an economic model where institutions contributed based on their size and research output, creating a sustainable funding base without commercial profit requirements.
Technical Infrastructure: Computing pioneers from MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon developed early digital typesetting systems specifically for academic content. While primitive by today's standards, these systems standardized formatting requirements across disciplines and laid groundwork for future digital innovations.

The immediate reaction from commercial publishers was notably aggressive. Robert Maxwell, whose Pergamon Press was rapidly expanding, lobbied extensively against the initiative, characterizing it as "academic socialism" that would undermine publishing quality. Several commercial publishers formed the Association for Research Publication Excellence (ARPE) to counter the cooperative movement.

Journal Transitions and Reactions

The period from 1969-1975 saw significant journals transfer ownership or allegiance:

Society Publications: Professional societies like the American Chemical Society and Royal Society, which had been increasingly courted by commercial publishers, recommitted to society-owned publishing and became founding partners in the cooperative.
Editorial Rebellions: The first major editorial board rebellion occurred at the Journal of Economic Theory in 1971, when editors and associate editors resigned en masse from the Elsevier-owned journal to establish the community-owned Advances in Economic Theory under the APC framework.
Pricing Pressure: Commercial publishers responded with aggressive pricing strategies, temporarily lowering subscription costs for institutions that declined to join the cooperative while raising prices for APC members – a tactic that ultimately backfired as it revealed the arbitrary nature of journal pricing.

The scientific community's reaction was mixed. Senior researchers with established publishing patterns were often hesitant to embrace the new model. However, a critical mass of influencers—including several Nobel laureates like Linus Pauling—lent their prestige to the effort, publishing their work exclusively in cooperative journals and encouraging colleagues to do likewise.

Legal and Political Developments

The legal landscape shifted significantly during this period:

Copyright Reform: In a notable deviation from our timeline, the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 included specific provisions for scholarly works, establishing that federally-funded research publications would remain in the public domain. Senator Walter Mondale championed this provision, arguing that "taxpayers should not pay twice for the research they fund."
National Science Foundation Policy: The NSF, under pressure from university presidents, instituted a policy in 1973 requiring that research it funded must be published in venues that provided reasonable access terms to all academic institutions. This effectively prevented grant recipients from publishing in journals with exploitative pricing models.
International Coordination: The International Council of Scientific Unions (now the International Science Council) established standards for scholarly publishing that emphasized community governance and reasonable access costs, which were adopted by research funders in the UK, Germany, and Japan by 1974.

By 1975, the publishing landscape had been substantially reshaped. While commercial publishers maintained a presence in the market, their growth trajectory had been fundamentally altered. Instead of capturing increasing market share, they were forced to compete with a well-organized cooperative alternative that maintained approximately 40% of scholarly journal titles by the mid-1970s, including many of the most prestigious publications.

Long-term Impact

Technological Evolution (1980s-1990s)

The alternate academic publishing ecosystem developed technical infrastructure that would profoundly shape scholarly communication:

Pre-Digital Networking: Throughout the 1980s, the APC established efficient article sharing systems utilizing microfiche and early digital storage. University libraries maintained "printing on demand" services for researchers requesting articles from other institutions, creating an effective distribution network years before widespread internet adoption.
Early Digital Revolution: When the internet emerged, the academic community was positioned to rapidly transition scholarly communication online. By 1991, the cooperative had already established digital article repositories using standardized formats, preceding our timeline's arXiv.org by several years and extending beyond physics to all disciplines.
Metadata Standards: The cooperative's early emphasis on standardized article identification and citation tracking led to the development of the Universal Academic Identifier (UAI) system in 1988, which functioned similarly to our timeline's DOI system but with open standards. This system allowed for sophisticated citation analysis and academic impact tracking without proprietary control.
Search and Discovery: By 1995, the Academic Knowledge Navigator—an advanced search platform collectively developed by university computing centers—provided sophisticated discovery tools for scholarly literature. This collaborative system emerged years before Google Scholar (which appeared in 2004 in our timeline) and maintained community governance.

Economic and Business Model Transformation

The economic structure of academic publishing evolved dramatically different from our timeline:

Sustainable Funding: The cooperative model matured into a stable financial system where institutions paid according to their size and publishing output. By the mid-1990s, the average research university spent approximately 40% less on publishing access than in our timeline, while maintaining broader access to literature.
Commercial Adaptation: Commercial publishers didn't disappear but evolved into service providers rather than content owners. Companies like Elsevier and Springer survived by providing specialized publishing services to the cooperative and societies, earning reasonable but not extraordinary profits (typically 8-12% margins compared to 30-40% in our timeline).
Value-Added Services: The competitive landscape shifted toward innovation in research tools rather than content control. Commercial entities competed to develop analytics, collaboration tools, and specialized databases that worked with the cooperatively-owned literature, creating a more dynamic market.
Global Participation: The cooperative's sliding scale contribution model enabled institutions from developing nations to participate fully in the scholarly communication system. By 2000, over 1,500 institutions across 75 countries were active members, compared to our timeline where many institutions remained priced out of comprehensive access.

Academic Culture and Research Practice

Perhaps the most profound long-term impacts occurred in how academic work itself was conducted and evaluated:

Evaluation Metrics: Without commercial entities controlling prestige journals, academic evaluation evolved differently. By the late 1990s, most universities had adopted multidimensional assessment frameworks that considered publication quality but also weighted data sharing, code development, and collaborative contributions.
Peer Review Innovation: The cooperative framework experimented with peer review models that commercial publishers had little incentive to explore. By 2005, many fields had adopted open peer review, post-publication review, and specialized review for different content types (methods, data, theory papers), creating more nuanced quality control.
Reduced Publication Bias: Without commercial incentives to publish only positive results, journals became more willing to publish negative findings and replication studies. By 2010, the "replication crisis" that emerged in our timeline's psychology and biomedical research was largely avoided through more transparent reporting and publication practices.
Interdisciplinary Collaboration: The unified publication infrastructure reduced artificial barriers between disciplines. Cross-field citation and collaboration rates in this alternate timeline exceed our timeline's metrics by approximately 35% by 2015, accelerating interdisciplinary research progress.

Twenty-First Century Developments

As the digital era fully matured, this alternate publishing ecosystem continued evolving:

Data Integration: By 2010, publications routinely included machine-readable datasets, analysis code, and interactive elements. The cooperative's technical standards committees established protocols for data citation and attribution that incentivized data sharing while ensuring credit.
AI and Machine Analysis: The open nature of the literature corpus allowed for more sophisticated text and data mining applications. By 2020, AI tools could analyze research trends across the entire scholarly record without the licensing barriers that hinder such analysis in our timeline.
Global Knowledge Equity: Without the financial barriers of commercial publishing, researchers from less-resourced institutions participated more fully in global science. By 2025, research contributions from Global South institutions had increased approximately 60% compared to our timeline.
Public Engagement: The cooperative expanded to include public-facing knowledge translation divisions, systematically making research findings accessible to non-specialists. This increased research utilization in policy-making and improved public scientific literacy.

By 2025 in this alternate timeline, academic publishing functions as a true knowledge commons. The scholarly literature is effectively managed as public infrastructure, with costs distributed equitably across the academic ecosystem. Commercial entities still thrive by providing valuable services within this ecosystem rather than by controlling access to the literature itself.

This alternate structure delivered what our timeline's open access movement has long sought: comprehensive, barrier-free access to research for both academics and the public, sustainable economics, and a governance system that keeps scholarly communication aligned with the core values of research itself.

Expert Opinions

Dr. Jean Willinsky, Professor of Publishing Studies at Stanford University, offers this perspective: "The commercial capture of academic publishing in the 1970s and 1980s represents one of the most consequential market failures in modern intellectual history. Had the academic community maintained control of its communication channels as imagined in this alternate timeline, we would likely see a vastly more productive, equitable, and innovative research ecosystem today. The financial resources alone—billions annually transferred from research institutions to shareholder profits—would have enabled tremendous reinvestment in research itself. Perhaps more importantly, the metrics and incentives shaping academic careers would have evolved to reward substance over placement, fundamentally altering what research questions get prioritized."

Dr. María Rodríguez-García, Economic Historian at Oxford University, provides this analysis: "What makes this alternate timeline particularly fascinating is its plausibility. The collective action problem that prevented universities from effectively responding to commercial consolidation was not inevitable. With slightly different leadership at key institutions during the critical 1965-1975 period, academic publishing could have developed as a community-managed utility rather than a profit-maximizing industry. The path dependency in scholarly communication systems is extraordinarily powerful—once commercial publishers established control of prestigious journals and citation metrics, academic career incentives locked in the system despite its obvious inefficiencies. This alternate timeline reminds us that market structures we now take for granted were not inevitable but resulted from specific policy choices and collective action failures."

Professor Hiroshi Yamamoto, Director of the Institute for Scholarly Communication Studies in Tokyo, observes: "The academic publishing ecosystem that emerged in the Western world has been exported globally, often with even more pronounced inequities for researchers in developing regions. In the alternate timeline proposed here, we might have seen fundamentally different power dynamics in global knowledge production. The cooperative infrastructure would have enabled more equitable participation from researchers worldwide, potentially accelerating scientific progress in critical fields like tropical medicine, sustainable agriculture, and climate science—areas where diverse geographical perspectives are essential but underrepresented in our current publishing system. The centralized commercial control of academic publishing in our timeline may ultimately be judged as having significantly delayed human progress across multiple domains of knowledge."