We often think of science as a public good. We imagine it as a grand conversation where discoveries are shared freely so that humanity can advance. In the field of psychotherapy we imagine that when a new and effective treatment for trauma is discovered it is immediately broadcast to the clinicians who are treating suffering people.

We are wrong.

Science is not a public conversation. It is a private industry. In 2024 it is an industry that operates more like a feudal landlord system than a vehicle for truth. It is a system where the creators of the value do all the work for free while massive conglomerates set up toll booths on the road to knowledge.

I learned this the hard way.

The Six Hundred and Fifty Dollar Lesson

When I first became a psychotherapist I was eager to learn. I wanted to go beyond the basics I had learned in grad school and access the deep wisdom of the field. I was particularly interested in Jungian analysis so I decided to subscribe to the Journal of Analytical Psychology.

This journal is distributed through the Wiley Online Library which is one of the massive digital platforms that controls access to scientific literature. I paid $650 out of my own pocket for a one year individual subscription. For a new therapist that was a significant amount of money. I was not an institution with a massive library budget. I was just a guy trying to be better at his job.

For that $650 I expected access. I wanted to search through the back issues. I wanted to read the case studies and the theoretical debates that had shaped the field for decades.

Instead I got silence.

I did not receive my login information. I waited a week. Then a month. Then two months. I contacted Wiley support repeatedly. I told them I had paid. I showed them the receipt. They told me they were experiencing a large volume of subscription issues and that they would get back to me.

They kept me locked out of the library for six months. Half of my subscription period evaporated while I waited for them to generate a username and password.

When they finally let me in it was six months later. I told them that this was fine but I expected my subscription to be extended. I had paid for twelve months of access and I had only received six. I asked for the remaining six months I had paid for.

They told me no.

I escalated it. I went to the highest levels of customer support I could find. I explained that they had taken $650 for a service they had failed to deliver. They told me it was their policy. The subscription was for the calendar year regardless of when they actually granted access.

I realized then that I wasn’t a customer to them. I was a tenant. And they were a slumlord who didn’t care if the heat worked because they owned the only building in town.

From Society to Syndicate: A Brief History of the Trap

To understand how we ended up in a world where a PDF costs $650 we have to look at the timeline of how scientific communication was captured. It did not start this way.

The Card Catalog Era
Before the internet research was a physical act. You went to the university library. You pulled out a wooden drawer in the card catalog. You found the physical journal on the shelf. The system was slow but it was intentional. It was built by librarians for researchers. The citation system was designed to track the history of ideas so you could see who influenced whom. It was a map of discovery.

The Maxwell Turning Point
This changed in the 1950s. As government funding for science exploded a British media tycoon named Robert Maxwell realized something brilliant and terrible. He realized that scientific information is price inelastic. In a normal market if the price of a car goes up you buy a different car. But in science if the price of a journal goes up a university cannot simply buy a different journal. If their professors need Nature to do their work the university must pay whatever Nature asks.

Maxwell began buying up non profit society journals and turning them into for profit engines. He wined and dined scientists stroking their egos while quietly jacking up the prices for libraries. He created the model of the “Big Deal” bundling thousands of journals together to force libraries to buy everything to get anything.

The Metric Gaming Era
Then came the digital shift and the corruption of the citation itself. In the 1960s Eugene Garfield created the Science Citation Index to help trace the lineage of scientific thought. But corporate publishers realized they could weaponize this into the “Impact Factor.” They began to treat citations as currency.

This has led to the current crisis of “Meta-Analysis Spam.” Publishers realized that broad review articles and meta analyses get cited much more frequently than original research. They act like the clickbait of the academic world. So journals began incentivizing the publication of massive low quality meta analyses just to boost their Impact Factor scores.

It works exactly like Search Engine Optimization spam. Just as content farms churn out low quality articles to game Google’s algorithm academic publishers churn out quantitative reviews to game the citation algorithm. These papers are often “bunk” aggregations of flawed data but because they are “highly cited” they rise to the top of search results burying the genuine qualitative case studies that actually help clinicians.

The Most Profitable Business on Earth

If you think my experience was an anomaly you do not understand the business model of academic publishing. It is arguably the most profitable and cynical business model ever invented.

These companies like Elsevier and Wiley and Taylor & Francis are not publishers in the traditional sense. They do not pay authors. They do not pay editors. They do not pay peer reviewers.

In a normal magazine the publisher pays the writers for their content. In academic publishing the writers write the articles for free. In fact they often pay the publisher a fee called an Article Processing Charge which can range from $1,500 to over $10,000 just to have their work accepted.

Then the publisher relies on other scientists to do the quality control called peer review. These reviewers are also not paid. They do this labor out of professional obligation.

So the publisher gets the content for free and gets the editing for free. Then they take this content which was often funded by government tax dollars and sell it back to the universities and clinicians who created it at markup rates that would make a pharmaceutical executive blush.

In 2010 the scientific publishing arm of Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36 percent. For context that was higher than Apple or Google or Amazon posted that year. The Guardian has reported that these companies consistently outperform the tech giants we usually think of as rapacious monopolies.

They make more money than Google relative to their size because Google actually has to build things. Google has to hire engineers and build data centers. Academic publishers are essentially just large Google Drives. They are file hosting services. They sit on PDF files that other people wrote and other people edited and other people paid for. Their only innovation is the paywall that keeps you from reading them.

The Cartel of Knowledge

We are not the only ones noticing this. There is a growing movement of legal and economic critics who are calling this system what it is.

Dr. Lucina Uddin is leading a 2025 antitrust class action lawsuit against six major academic publishers including Elsevier and Wiley. The lawsuit accuses them of operating as a cartel that misappropriates billions of research dollars and exploits unpaid academic labor.

The argument is simple. If these companies are making profit margins higher than Google while relying on unpaid labor and government funded research that constitutes price gouging of the taxpayer.

Stefanie Haustein at the University of Ottawa argues that these insanely high profit margins redirect funds that should support research into the pockets of shareholders. Journalist George Monbiot has labeled academic publishers as some of the most ruthless capitalists in existence criticizing the racket where they charge premium prices for research funded by the state.

This is not just about money. It is about the integrity of science itself.

Elisabeth Bik a microbiology consultant identifies fraudulent research and critiques paper mills that sell fake authorship for profit. Jeffrey Beall pioneered the critique of predatory journals that prioritize profit over peer review standards. Timothy Caulfield calls the industry a cynical money grab that spreads misinformation like false 5G COVID links because it is profitable to do so.

Academic critics like Devon Price describe the system as an exploitative farce and a pyramid scheme that drains money from early career researchers while excluding talented scientists who cannot pay the paywalls.

The Neoliberal Capture of Psychiatry

In psychiatry specifically this profit motive has disastrous consequences. It creates an environment of institutional corruption where research agendas are skewed toward profitable drug treatments rather than public health.

This is what sociologists Slaughter and Leslie call. They argue that commercialization forces scientists to redefine public interest science to fit entrepreneurial goals.

Dr. Marcia Angell the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine has famously criticized psychiatry as being under heavy influence from drug companies. She argues that journals and meetings are almost entirely supported by industry advertisements and sponsorship.

This influence shapes the very guidelines we use to diagnose patients. Dr. Lisa Cosgrove has documented the deep financial ties between pharmaceutical companies and the experts who write psychiatric diagnostic guidelines like the DSM. In a study on financial conflicts of interest researchers found that the majority of panel members for the DSM-5 had financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

This creates a chilling effect on innovation. Dr. Joanna Moncrieff has critiqued the medicalization of mental health and the pharmaceutical industry’s role in promoting the chemical imbalance theory despite a lack of robust evidence. But these critiques are marginalized because they threaten the revenue streams of the major journals.

Why the System Loves CBT

The profit motive also explains the obsession with the Biomedical Model and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. These approaches fit perfectly into the logic of the market. They are short term and manualized and easy to measure quantitatively.

Academic hierarchies place meta analyses and systematic reviews at the top of the evidence pyramid. But as critics note these analyses often report effect sizes three times larger than rigorous replication studies. It is a case of garbage in garbage out.

Qualitative research which explores how and why people experience mental distress is viewed as anecdotal because it cannot be easily quantified or sold to an insurance company. The dominance of these models makes it difficult for researchers to get funding for work that critiques the biomedical paradigm or uses slower qualitative methods.

The Copyright Trap

It gets worse for the individual clinician. When you publish in these journals you generally have to sign over your copyright to the publisher.

This means that if you write a brilliant paper on a new technique you are often legally forbidden from sharing it on your own blog. You cannot email it to a mailing list of colleagues. You cannot sell it. You have done the work but the Landlord owns the building.

This creates a perverse incentive structure where the most innovative thinkers are punished for participating in the academic system.

I have found that my blog reaches more people in a month than many of these prestigious journals reach in a decade. I can share ideas freely. I can link to resources. I can engage in a dialogue with other clinicians.

But according to the Academy this blog is less valid than a paper buried in a Wiley journal that costs $650 to access and hasn’t been read by anyone except the author’s grad students.

The Way Out: A New Architecture for Science

We do not just need to tear down the old system. We need to build a new one that returns ownership and power to the people doing the work.

1. The Return of Copyright The first step is simple legal refusal. Authors must stop signing over their copyright to publishers. If you wrote the paper you should own it. We need a universal adoption of Rights Retention Strategies where researchers grant journals a license to publish but retain the right to share their work freely on their own websites immediately upon publication.

2. Diamond Open Access We need to shift our prestige to Diamond Open Access journals. These are journals that charge no fees to authors and no fees to readers. They are often funded by universities or non profit societies as a public service. They return science to its original purpose which is a conversation not a transaction.

3. Direct Patronage and Co-ops We need to experiment with new funding models. Imagine a Spotify for Science but owned by the scientists. A cooperative platform where clinicians and universities pay a flat subscription fee but that money goes directly to the authors and reviewers based on usage and value rather than to a private equity firm in London.

If I pay $650 a year I want that money to go to the researcher studying dissociative disorders not to a shareholder dividend.

4. The Wikipedia of Clinical Practice Finally we need to value the wisdom of the clinician. We need open source living repositories of clinical knowledge. We need a system where a therapist in Birmingham can document a successful somatic intervention for complex trauma and that observation is treated as a valid data point.

We need to reward smart people for dedicating their lives to understanding the human mind not for their ability to navigate a corrupt publishing game.

The current system is a cynical money grab that spreads misinformation and stifles innovation. It is time for the tenants to take over the building. We have the data. We do the work. We should own the science.