The economics of scholarly publishing have typically been discussed through commercial publishers’ terms: subscriptions, article processing charges, read and publish agreements, revenues, and margins. But those costs describe only the final stage of knowledge production and dissemination—not the significant primary investment required to produce a publication.
SPARC has collaborated with accounting faculty at the University of Sydney to produce a set of independent analyses that reveal the scale of public subsidy to commercial publishers and quantify the billions of dollars that are removed from the research ecosystem as a result. These analyses provide important context to questions at the heart of this year’s Open Access Week theme: who pays for knowledge, who controls it, and who captures its value?
The project has three primary outputs that underpin its key findings:
Cost of Knowledge Accounting Analysis: Prior research has estimated the cost of specific publication inputs individually (e.g. peer review). This is the first analysis to bring them together across the full research process by providing a methodology that estimates the total public and institutional investment to produce a single peer-reviewed publication from first idea to acceptance. Comparing this figure with widely cited estimates of actual publication costs, more than 95% of the total investment in a published article is typically made by the public before submission to a publisher.
Interactive Cost of Knowledge Calculator: This interactive resource enables faculty to input their own variables into the model used in this study. The tool, hosted at costofknowledge.org, can help faculty quantify the investment in producing their work (largely in the form of their own labor), compare this with estimated publisher investment, and better understand the extent of public subsidy that commercial publishers capture.
Profitability Report: This report documents how efficient the four largest publishers (Elsevier (RELX), Taylor & Francis (Informa), Springer Nature and Wiley) have become at removing resources from the research ecosystem. Since 2005, the parent companies of these publishers have returned $38.8 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends, with academic publishing contributing disproportionately to their profitability. Over the past 20 years, RELX increased its annual payout to shareholders more than tenfold to $3.63b in 2025 (representing 95.9% of its operating cash flow). SPARC has produced graphics and data visualizations based on data from the report (files for download | slides).
Conversations frequently center on the question of “how much does it cost to publish an article?” This research can shift the conversation to “how much does society invest in producing knowledge, who pays for it, and who controls and captures the value it creates?” Today, the public makes the investment, and too much of the return leaves the research ecosystem. This work can help to change this dynamic and contribute to returning control to those who contribute most: faculty, institutions, and the public.
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.