Infographic titled “The Drain of Scientific Publishing,” describing four problems in scholarly publishing: Money, Time, Trust, and Control.
Money: Illustration of flying dollar bills and buildings beside a bank. Text explains that for-profit publishers charge unreasonable reading and publishing fees disconnected from production costs, noting that Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis made $US 12 billion profit from 2019–2024.
Time: Illustration of a stressed researcher surrounded by stacks of papers and a clock. Text states researchers spend enormous time as authors, reviewers, and editors, maintaining a system that prioritizes quantity over quality, causing burnout and reduced rigor.
Trust: Text describes commercial pressures to publish quickly, enabling low-quality and fraudulent papers, eroding public confidence.
Control: Text explains that rankings like journal impact factor and h-index dictate success, with infrastructures biased toward English journals and controlled by for-profit companies.
At the bottom, a stop-sign graphic reads “Stop the Drain.” Additional text calls for altering incentives and ownership of publishing, re-communalizing scholarly publishing, building community-led systems, preventing unreasonable profits, and using existing open models and infrastructures (e.g., preprints, diamond journals, OJS, SciELO). A final statement urges aligning research assessment with open, community-led publishing.
