WASHINGTON, DC, October 14, 2026 — For the first time, researchers can count the investment that goes into a research article before a publisher ever sees it, and it shows who really pays for knowledge: the public. Set against independent estimates of publishing costs, more than 95% of the total investment in a published article is typically made by the public before submission to a publisher.
Two new independent studies from the University of Sydney Business School measure that public investment and where the returns go. Released ahead of International Open Access Week (October 19–25), whose 2026 theme is “The Cost of Knowledge,” the studies focus on the four largest academic publishers: RELX (Elsevier), Informa (Taylor & Francis), Springer Nature, and Wiley. In 2025, academic publishing earned margins of 24% to 38% at these companies. Between 2005 and 2025, the four returned US$38.8 billion to shareholders, and academic publishing contributed disproportionately to the profits that made those returns possible.
“This new analysis sharply highlights the way in which commercial companies inappropriately profit from the current academic publishing system and faculty labor. These findings quantify just how efficient these companies have become in removing billions of dollars from the research ecosystem and returning them as cash to shareholders,” says Nick Shockey, Associate Executive Director, SPARC.
An Invisible Subsidy, Counted
The first study, The Cost of Knowledge (Alam et al.), introduces a method for accounting for the resources that go into research before publication, from the first idea through grants, ethics approval, data collection, analysis, writing, and revision. A free online calculator, available at costofknowledge.org, lets any researcher or institution apply the method to their own work with the goal of raising awareness of this public investment.
“Every published article rests on substantial public investment. Prior research has estimated various components of that investment, but never brought them together across the full research process. Our method does that, revealing the scale of the largely unaccounted-for public subsidy to private-sector publishers,” says Jane Andrew, Professor, School of Accounting, Governance and Regulation, University of Sydney.
Where the Return Goes
How Profitable Are the Big Four Publishers? (Alam et al.) tracks RELX (Elsevier), Informa (Taylor & Francis), Springer Nature, and Wiley from 2005 to 2025 and finds:
- Academic publishing was more profitable than the rest of the parent business in 68 of 69 company-years.
- In 2025, academic publishing margins ran from 24% to 38%. Elsevier’s was 38.1%, against 31.7% for RELX as a whole.
- RELX returned US$30.8 billion to shareholders over the period, including 95.9% of its operating cash flow in 2025 alone. Over the past 20 years, the company increased the cash returned to investors more than tenfold, from US$349 million to US$3.63 billion.
- The largest publishers’ combined operating margin rose from 14.9% to 27.5%, through the era of open access mandates, read and publish agreements, a financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“For twenty years, through a financial crisis and a pandemic, academic publishing has almost always been more profitable than the rest of these companies’ businesses. Over this time, a substantial proportion of profits is returned to shareholders rather than going back into research that could discover the next cancer treatment or energy breakthrough,” says Max Baker, School of Accounting, Governance and Regulation, University of Sydney.
What Comes Next
Public investment in research pays off in better healthcare, cleaner energy, stronger economies, and a clearer understanding of how our societies work. Every dollar that flows to shareholders is a dollar that isn’t funding the next vaccine, the next energy breakthrough, or the open infrastructure that helps research reach the people who need it. During International Open Access Week, SPARC is inviting those involved in research to find their own number with the calculator, and to keep their rights, deposit their work in open repositories, and back community-owned publishing in order to keep these returns working for the public.
Notes to Editors
- Studies:
- The Cost of Knowledge (preprint) by Nurul Alam, Jane Andrew, Max Baker, Janine Coupe, Tai-Joo Koh, Ben Lay, Chang Yuan Loh, Farzana Tanima, available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23030223.
- How Profitable Are the Big Four Publishers? (working paper) by Nurul Alam, Jane Andrew, Max Baker, Janine Coupe, Tai-Joo Koh, Ben Lay, Chang Yuan Loh, Farzana Tanima, available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23311549.
- The Cost of Knowledge illustrates its method with one social science article at a US public doctoral university, producing a conservative estimate of approximately US$70,000.
- The 95% figure compares the study’s estimate with independent publishing-cost estimates (Grossmann & Brembs, 2021).
- For more information: https://sparcopen.org/our-work/cost-of-knowledge.
- 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.
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About SPARC
SPARC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that supports open systems for research and education that enable everyone, everywhere to access, contribute to, and benefit from the knowledge that shapes our world.