Why scholarly publishing might be a bubble

Scholarly communication began as an interpersonal exchange of findings between fellow researchers (1). In time, the need arose for a structured, comprehensive, and pragmatic means of communicating scientific knowledge in the form of scholarly journals. Scientists did research for the sake of progress, and journals strived to catalyze the dissemination of research as widely as possible. In the age of the Internet, virtually all barriers to interpersonal communication, including scientific, have collapsed. Rather miraculously, major publishers managed to survive in the virtual environment, without suffering much harm. Not only did they survive, but they also continued to grow ever stronger, defying the new reality of a digitized, effortless scientific communication. In 1995, the Forbes magazine made a gloomy prediction Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific journals, would be “the Internet’s first victim“ (2). Twenty years later, in 2015, Elsevier reported an exceptionally high profit margin of 34%. Here lies the paradox: factors that justify the high costs of scholarly publishing (largely secondary to science itself ) are progressively fading while, concurrently, the same new circumstances provide the necessary infrastructure for scientific communication to become cheaper, circumventing intermediaries. Still, the price of publishing services increases, and the high-quality supply is funneled to a small number of big players.