Medical advances typically begin with a study. Now, universities are struggling to afford them

Biologist Terry Van Raay typically spends his days in the lab running different foods through an artificial intestine, trying to uncover the links between gut health and the nervous system. 

But like many scientists, the associate professor of cellular biology at the University of Guelph in southern Ontario has become irate with the business of academic publishing.

"Publishers are charging us to publish our work, then they turn around and ask you to do the peer review [for other researchers' articles] for free," said Van Raay. "There are really only five publishers that own [virtually] all the journals and they make billions of dollars. It has to change." 

Academic publishing is a unique enterprise. Researchers contribute studies, typically for free or paying for the privilege to publish; those draft studies are then peer-reviewed by other unpaid specialists to ensure the material is unique and academically sound. 

After reviewers suggest changes and agree on a suitable version, the final product is published in a for-profit academic journal, which is then sold back to university libraries.

The typical Canadian university library is now spending three-quarters of its budget for new material on journal subscriptions, said the head of a group representing the research institutions. 

Prices to access studies from peer-reviewed journals paid by universities — which are heavily subsidized by taxpayers — have risen more than 400 per cent over the past two decades, according to a study citing Statistics Canada data published in 2021. That's the latest national information tracking cost increases over time, four specialists said.

Those rising costs have implications far beyond the ivory tower. Academic studies are a lifeblood of knowledge creation: from improved cancer treatments to debates about foreign policy or charting the advances of artificial intelligence, new information enters the public domain through peer-reviewed research.

"On a basic level, this is taxpayers' money that is being extracted from the higher education system," Philippe Mongeon, an associate professor of information management at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said of the fees universities pay for journal access. 

"Tuition fees ... will be higher because we have to pay the publisher. There are less resources for research and social programs, as the publishers are extracting it, and that makes it harder to solve societal problems, to improve the lives of Canadians."

Known as the "big five publishers" — Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and Sage — control more than half of the global market for scholarly journals, according to a 2021 study (which was published by Wiley).

Officials with those companies say they are providing a crucial service by storing and advancing knowledge, and many say they are working with libraries to keep costs down in a business that has been altered by digitization and other trends.

The typical Canadian university library spends about 75 per cent of its acquisitions budget for new material on journal subscriptions, said Susan Haigh, executive director of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), an umbrella group representing this country's largest university libraries.

Her group's members spent more than $90 million on subscriptions to the largest journal packages in 2019, she said of her latest available data.