Before the big business of scientific publishing, papers were often produced by scientific societies on a bit of a shoestring and more afterthought. In the 1940s there was a shift from science being more of an amateur pursuit or pursuit of wealthy gentlemen that could afford it to being a respected profession. So this scientific publishing system we have now, I mean, it's critical. It's a crucial part of academia and industry. And if you take something like Elsevier, which is the biggest science publisher, it's got nearly 3000 journals that are publishing more than 600,000 articles each year. so it's a massive enterprise.
More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the ‘greed’ of the publisher. Ian Sample speaks to correspondent Hannah Devlin about the remarkably lucrative business of scientific publishing, hears from Prof Chris Chambers about what was behind the recent mass resignation, and finds out why researchers are demanding change. Help support our independent journalism at
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