More than 95 percent of the total investment in a published research article is typically made by the public, who then need to pay academic publishers for access to the findings, according to new research from the University of Sydney Business School.

Two new independent studies, released ahead of International Open Access Week, measure the public investment in scientific research and where the returns go. The findings allow, for the first time, researchers to measure the investment that goes into an article before it is submitted to a publisher.

“Every published article rests on substantial public investment,” said Professor Jane Andrew from the School of Accounting, Governance and Regulation.

“Prior research has estimated various components of that investment but never brought them together across the full research process. Our method does that, revealing the scale of the largely unaccounted-for public subsidy to private sector publishers.

“For example, examining one social science article at a US public doctoral university, we produced a conservative estimate of the cost of that research to be US$70,000. The public makes the overwhelming majority contribution to funding this research, but the published article is usually locked behind a paywall.”

Co-author Professor Max Baker, University of Sydney Business School, added: “The bigger issue that we should continue to explore is why publishers should substantially profit from a research process to which they provide only a minimum input.”

The studies focus on the four largest academic publishers: RELX (Elsevier), Informa (Taylor & Francis), Springer Nature, and Wiley.

Between 2005 and 2025, the four publishers returned US$38.8 billion to shareholders, and academic publishing contributed disproportionately to the profits that made those returns possible.

“This new analysis sharply highlights the way in which commercial companies inappropriately profit from the current academic publishing system and faculty labour,” said Nick Shockey, Associate Executive Director, SPARC.

“These findings quantify just how efficient these companies have become in removing billions of dollars from the research ecosystem and returning them as cash to shareholders.”

The first study, The Cost of Knowledge, introduces a method for estimating the resources that go into research before publication, from the first idea, through to grants, ethics approval, data collection, analysis, writing, and revision.

A free online calculator lets any researcher or institution apply the method to their own work, with the goal of bringing awareness to this public investment.

The second study, How Profitable Are the Big Four Publishers?, tracks the four largest academic publishers from 2005 to 2025 and found:

• Academic publishing was more profitable than the rest of the parent business in 68 of 69 company-years.
• In 2025, academic publishing margins ran from 24 to 38 per cent.
• RELX returned US$30.8 billion to shareholders over the period, including 95.9 per cent of its operating cash flow in 2025 alone. Over the past 20 years, the company increased the cash returned to investors more than tenfold, from US$349 million to US$3.63 billion.
• The largest publishers' combined operating margin rose from 14.9 to 27.5 per cent over the period studies.

“For twenty years, through a financial crisis and a pandemic, academic publishing has almost always been more profitable than the rest of these companies' businesses,” said Professor Baker.

“Over this time, a substantial proportion of profits is returned to shareholders rather than going back into building better systems for managing the research publication process.”

International Open Access Week advocates for the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results.

Declaration

This project has been supported by a University of Sydney Industry Partnership Grant in collaboration with SPARC. The research has been undertaken independently and is not subject to any funding-related caveats apart from making the outputs available openly.

About SPARC

SPARC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that supports open systems for research and education that enable everyone, everywhere to access, contribute to, and benefit from the knowledge that shapes our world.