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The Audio Long Read

From the archive: Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

The Audio Long Read

The Guardian

Society & Culture

4.32.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We are raiding the Audio Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2017: It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell by Stephen Buranyi. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is the Guardian.

0:10.3

Hi, my name is Stephen Burrani.

0:12.2

I've been writing for the Longread for about five years.

0:15.2

And this piece about science publishing and the way that Baron named Robert Maxwell took it over

0:21.2

for his own profit and turned it into a multi-billion dollar empire.

0:25.5

It's about five years old now, it's from 2017.

0:29.4

And it was a piece that I really love deeply.

0:32.4

And it was something that I'd wanted to do for a very long time.

0:35.2

Because I actually used to be a scientist in a previous life.

0:39.2

And something that scientists are well aware of, but almost nobody else knows, is that

0:44.5

the business of science publishing, the business of scientists publishing their articles and journals,

0:50.2

is actually a massive multi-billion dollar industry with profit margins higher than Apple or Google

0:56.4

that extracts hundreds of millions, billions of dollars out of universities and scientists

1:02.4

for the profit of these massive megacorporations.

1:06.0

And scientists are really frustrated about this because these corporations control,

1:11.0

in some ways, the direction of their research and certainly the direction of their careers.

1:15.6

Because in order to have a career, you have to publish and you have to publish somewhere,

1:19.8

quite prestigious, ideally.

1:21.7

And so there's this entire internal world that nobody knows about, and it's very cutthroat

1:25.8

and scientists care a lot about it.

1:27.5

But we sort of struggle to find a way to make an average person care about it.

1:32.1

You know, this is the sort of thing that if I start ranting about it to you at a dinner party,

...

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