It's Time to Pay the People Who Actually Make Academic Publishing Work
Wiley just announced the acquisition of Emerald Publishing for £337 million — nearly half a billion US dollars. The deal adds almost 500 journal brands, 8,000 book titles, and decades of archived case studies and backfile content to Wiley's already formidable portfolio. Wiley's CEO called it an "outstanding strategic fit," pointing to complementary portfolios, compatible cultures, and — crucially — the proprietary content value that can now be leveraged in AI and data analytics.
It is an impressive deal by any measure. But pause for a moment and ask a simple question: who actually created that £337 million worth of content?
Not Wiley. Not Emerald. Not their shareholders.
It was the researchers, academics, and scholars who spent months — sometimes years — writing, revising, and refining their work. It was the peer reviewers who donated their expertise and evenings to evaluate manuscripts, often completing detailed reviews within tight deadlines and without a cent of compensation. It was the associate editors and editorial board members who coordinated the entire process, managing submissions, handling revisions, and making final calls on what gets published. Every journal article, every case study, every book chapter in that £337 million deal was produced by people who were never paid for producing it.
That is not a minor footnote. That is the foundational contradiction at the heart of academic publishing.
How the Model Actually Works — and Why It Is Deeply Unfair
Here is how academic publishing typically functions. A researcher — funded by a university, a government grant, or a public institution — conducts a study and writes it up. They submit it to a journal. The journal sends it to two or three peer reviewers, who are also academics, also funded by universities or public grants, who read the paper carefully and write detailed feedback. An editor, again typically an academic working voluntarily or for a token honorarium, manages the process. If accepted, the paper is typeset, formatted, and published by the journal.
The publisher then charges the researcher's institution — the very university that funded the research in the first place — a subscription fee to access the published article. In many cases, the researcher also pays an Article Processing Charge (APC) of anywhere between $1,000 and $5,000 to make their own work open access. The publisher profits at both ends.
The author receives nothing. The reviewers receive nothing. The editors receive a fraction of what their time is worth, if anything at all. Meanwhile, the publisher accumulates a content portfolio valued at hundreds of millions of dollars and sells it, licenses it, and now — as Wiley explicitly stated in its press release — uses it to fuel AI and data analytics products.
This is not a sustainable ethical arrangement. It is a system in which public money funds research, academic labour produces content, and private publishers capture the value.
The AI Turn Makes It Worse
The Wiley-Emerald deal is not just about journals and books. Read Wiley's own words carefully. The acquisition "strengthens its scale advantage in terms of proprietary content that can be used in AI and data analytics." The CEO stated plainly: "our proprietary content and data fuels AI."
In other words, the decades of academic writing that researchers produced for free is now being positioned as premium training data and AI content infrastructure — a revenue stream that will compound over years as demand for quality research content accelerates among AI models and applications.
Authors did not consent to this use. Reviewers did not consent. The academics whose intellectual labour fills those 500 journals had no say in whether their work would become the raw material for AI products generating returns for shareholders. And they will receive no share of those returns.
The music industry fought this battle and, imperfectly and incompletely, won some ground. Musicians now receive streaming royalties — fractions of a cent per play, yes, but a recognised principle that creators deserve a share when their work is used commercially. Academic authors have not won that battle. In fact, they have barely begun to fight it.
What a Fairer Model Could Look Like
The good news is that the alternative is not complicated to imagine. The infrastructure and precedent already exist in other creative industries. What is needed is the will to apply it to academic publishing.
Pay authors a royalty per download. Even a nominal amount — one cent, five cents per full-text download — would establish the principle that authors have a commercial stake in their own work. For highly downloaded papers, this would accumulate into meaningful income. For the broader research community, it would signal a fundamental shift in how academic labour is valued.
Compensate peer reviewers fairly. Peer review is skilled professional work. A thorough review of a complex quantitative paper can take four to six hours or more. Publishers who charge thousands in APCs and generate hundreds of millions in revenue can afford to pay reviewers a reasonable honorarium — $150 to $300 per review would be a reasonable starting point. Some platforms are already experimenting with reviewer recognition and compensation. The major commercial publishers, who profit most from this labour, should lead, not lag.
Reform the APC model. Charging authors to make their own publicly funded research freely available is a policy that deserves far more scrutiny than it currently receives. Open access is a worthy goal; extracting thousands of dollars from research budgets to achieve it is not the right mechanism.
Regulate AI licensing of academic content. If publishers are going to license academic content to AI developers and data analytics companies, there should be a clear, transparent mechanism for distributing a share of that revenue to the authors whose work is being used. This is not radical. It is standard practice in music and visual art licensing.
The Bigger Picture
Wiley acquiring Emerald for £337 million is not inherently wrong. Publishers do provide services — platforms, distribution, discoverability, editorial infrastructure. Those services have value. The problem is the extraordinary imbalance between what publishers extract and what the people who actually create the content receive.
The next time a major publishing deal is announced, and the numbers are staggering, and the CEOs talk about scale advantages and AI-driven knowledge economies, remember who is not in that press release. The PhD student who spent a year on that study. The professor who reviewed three papers last month between teaching and supervision. The editor who handled 200 submissions this year on top of their own research load.
They built that £337 million. They deserve more than a thank-you in an acknowledgements section.