The term “predatory” was originally used to describe journals that charge authors high publication fees without providing genuine peer review or editorial services. Beal’s list of “potential predatory journals and publishers” includes titles like British Open Research Publications, which charges $300 to publish research from authors in high-income countries. These journals are also thought to have low editorial standards, since they are driven by a profit motive. Rather than being repositories of knowledge, they function as paper mills.

Journals owned by major academic publishers like Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley do not make the list, but are they any less predatory? On scrutiny, these journals are only marginally less financially and epistemically corrupt than those on Beal’s list. In this post, I will focus mainly on Wiley, but my arguments generalize to other neoliberal, profit-driven publishing houses. 

I argue that we should boycott these publishers and seize control of knowledge production to protect the epistemic integrity, accessibility, and public accountability of academic research.

Financial Corruption

Wiley’s open-access publication fees are amongst the highest in academic publishing – far higher than those of Beal’s ‘predatory’ journals. The average open-access fee for a Wiley journal is around $2,500-$3,000 USD per paper. Some high-impact journals charge as much as $5,000. 

Authors unable or unwilling to pay these fees must publish behind a paywall, restricting access to their work. The cost to download a single paywalled article from Wiley typically ranges from $20 to $50. For example, the Journal of Applied Philosophy charges $49 USD for PDF download and online access, and $20 for online-only access. If authors had to pay for every paper they cite, most could not afford to publish a well-researched article. While professors can download research articles through their academic library, independent scholars and the general public do not have access to this resource. Moreover, library catalogues are shrinking as more institutions refuse to pay publishers’ extortionate subscription fees. Hence the growing demand for online repositories like Sci-Hub and Library Genesis.  

Consequently, Wiley is trying to ban these websites. Recently, along with Hatchette, Harper Collins, and Penguin, Wiley sued the Internet Archive, a free e-book lending website, for copyright infringement. Wiley and other publishers have also jointly sued Sci-Hub and LibGen, which provide unrestricted access to copyrighted articles and books. These lawsuits infringe on our right to share knowledge, educate ourselves, and exercise academic freedom. 

Wiley’s subscription fees to libraries remain both opaque and unaffordable. Wiley charges anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars annually for subscription bundles. These fees are neither fair nor transparent, as, like private health insurance, they depend on the institution’s bargaining power. As a result, subscription contracts, according to an article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the Unites States (PNAS),  

show remarkable institution-specific price variation that cannot be explained by university characteristics such as enrollment and PhD production. Some institutions have been quite successful in bargaining for lower prices whereas others may not have been aware that better bargains can be reached. Perhaps this variation explains publishers’ desire to keep contract terms confidential.

Even the largest universities can no longer afford publishers’ fees. In 2019, the University of California system, despite its $27 billion endowment, announced that it would “stop paying to subscribe to journals published by Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher,” due to extortionate pricing. Similarly, Harvard stated in 2012 that “major periodical subscriptions cannot be sustained” due to “high prices and unreasonable publisher practices,” noting that its “expenses for online journal content from just two major providers had increased by 145%” in only six years. As Robert Darnton, then director of Harvard Library, explained,

I hope that other universities will take similar action. We all face the same paradox. We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices.

Harvard’s boycott sparked further action. In 2015, The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) asked “all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier to give up their post,” and planned to “ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier” next. Several professional organizations, including The Cost of Knowledge, have issued petitions to boycott Elsevier due to its predatory fees. While these boycotts targeted Elsevier as the largest academic publisher, similar objections apply to Wiley, which ranks third in terms of profitability, after Springer and Elsevier. In the last fiscal year, Wiley generated $1.62 billion in revenues. Out of these revenues, most authors, editors, and referees made $0. 

Some would argue that publishers do not need to pay their content creators because professors are paid a publication fee by their departments, but this is not entirely true.  Typically, tenured professors are expected to divide their time between research, teaching, and service on a 40/40/20 ratio: “40 percent research, 40 percent teaching, and 20 percent service.” Publishing, refereeing, and editing fall under ‘service.’ But the majority of professors – adjuncts and teaching faculty – receive no pay for research or service, nor do independent scholars and graduate students. Yet many of us publish and referee submissions regularly. As an adjunct, I personally receive referee requests on a weekly basis. 

As such, we are paying for Wiley’s executive bonuses with our free labor. The public is paying, too, since a significant proportion of research funding comes from the government, but the government is also financing library subscriptions. Thus, “the government funds all stages of research production, but must then pay again to access the research results.” Is it any wonder that the public is souring on the idea of paying for (inaccessible) research? Why should the public trust publishers that prioritize profits over people, refuse to pay for content despite billion-dollar revenues, and hire lawyers to ban public access to knowledge? 

Financially speaking, Wiley is predatory enough to be on Beal’s list. But does it have rigorous editorial standards? Recent data suggests otherwise.

Epistemic Corruption

In May, the editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs resigned en masse in protest of Wiley’s business model – specifically, the publisher’s attempt to pressure editors to publish more open-access content to increase revenues. Former editor Anna Stiltz explained,

Their current company-wide strategy for maximizing revenue is to force the journals they own to publish as many articles as possible to generate maximum author fees. Where Editors refuse to do that, they exert all the pressure they can, up to and including dismissal, as in this case… All political philosophers and theorists who care about the journals in our field have an interest in showing Wiley that it can’t get away with this.

The former editors have since launched a new diamond open-access journal called Free and Equal, which provides free access to all content without charging authors or readers. 

The advisory board of The Journal of Political Philosophy (JPP), another Wiley publication, also resigned en masse after Wiley fired Robert Goodin from the editorial board for protesting the journal’s move to an open-access model, accompanied by a demand that editors publish more content. The shift to an author-pay model means that publishing more content generates more revenues, whereas the library-pay model sells bundles of journals for a negotiated fee. Thus, profit-driven open-access journals prioritize quantity over quality.  

JPP’s former editors have since created a new journal called Political Philosophy, which is a diamond open-access journal with no fees for authors or readers.

Daily Nous blogger Justin Weinberg predicted at the time of Goodin’s firing that “If Wiley’s obstinacy continues, the journal will die and Wiley will earn a reputation as a journal killer.” Although Wiley’s revenues are indeed declining, it continues to make over a billion dollars a year due to its reliance on free academic labor and academia’s reliance on research papers. To accelerate Wiley’s death spiral, we need to boycott this predatory publisher immediately. This means refusing to do any unpaid labor for them, whether editing, refereeing, or publishing.

Although editorial firings are rare, Wiley’s lack of epistemic integrity is not a recent development. According to Retraction Watch, Wiley has retracted over 11,300 “compromised” papers over the past two years alone. Jay Flynn, executive vice president and general manager of the research division at Wiley, indicated that the publisher plans to retract still more papers, stating that Wiley is “designing a new retraction process that will help us, and potentially others, accelerate and deal with this new era of mass retractions fairly.” Further, Wiley announced that “it is closing 19 journals amid a massive influx of fake papers.” While some retractions are inevitable, Wiley’s high volume of retractions suggests that the for-profit publishing model leads to systemic failures of editorial integrity and epistemic responsibility. 

Another issue with for-profit journals like Wiley is that their popularity relies heavily on impact factor, which biases people’s research priorities. To publish in high-impact journals, researchers often favor novelty over replication, cherry-pick data to support more publishable conclusions, focus on publishable/popular topics, and use popular research methods. In philosophy, this means publishing on Anglo-American philosophy using analytic methods. As a result, Continental, Eastern, Marxist, intersectional, feminist, decolonial, queer, and crip philosophy, amongst other non-LEMMING subjects,^[1] are all marginalized. As Maeve McKeown puts it, when academics are pushed or incentivized to publish in high-impact journals by neoliberal market pressures, “this is detrimental to our field, marginalizing people, topics, and methodologies these journals do not support (which usually align with already structurally marginalized peoples and modes of knowledge).” Academic philosophy’s reliance on impact factor for hiring and promotions reduces epistemic freedom and demographic diversity in the profession, generating what I have elsewhere called Sad Beige Philosophy: safe, familiar research using the standard methods. 

In sum, Wiley’s business model is not only exploitative but also epistemically harmful.

Boycott Predatory Journals

Academics should not wait for editors to resign from predatory publishers like Wiley and Elsevier before boycotting them. These journals exploit academics’ free labor, undermine epistemic integrity by prioritizing profits over knowledge, publish large volumes of fraudulent content, reward clout-chasing for impact scores, and harm academia in myriad other ways. There are many other venues in which to publish – diamond open-access journals, blogs like this one, social media; anything is better than publishing in predatory journals! We need to reclaim control over our collective knowledge and make it accessible to all. 

^[1] As Helen de Cruz notes, journals that “avow themselves generalist… in practice tend to publish a narrow range of specializations, with a heavy focus on analytic philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind, the so-called ‘Lemming’ subdisciplines. This leaves many areas of philosophy underrepresented in these journals.”