Want to invest in a profitable business? You might consider one of the five publishers of academic research. They’re highly profitable — or at least they have been.

In today’s Martin Center article, Richard Phelps looks at the academic-publishing oligopoly, past and future. “For decades,” he writes, “academic publishers at least bore the considerable expense of compiling, printing, marketing, and mailing physical copies of journals. With digitalization, however, even that burden has diminished. Soon, academic publishing may approach a state of pure ‘economic rent’ — selling a close-to-cost-free (for them) product that customers want and can buy nowhere else.”

Phelps identifies several problems with the status quo, the most serious of which would appear to be that it leads to skewed results: In olden days, academic journals run by scientific societies served as repositories of research results: “They were scientific archives rather than product-promotional businesses. Today, by contrast, editorial boards selected by profit-seeking publishers prefer new or provocative research findings that grab the attention of readers and journalists. This produces both ‘publication bias’ and ‘p-hacking,’ whereby publishers prefer positive results and scholars keep running statistical tests until they get them. Thusly, the scientific process runs backwards, with results determining the research hypotheses.”

There is some good news on this front. For one thing, the oligopoly is starting to confront price resistance. The University of California, Phelps reports, recently said “no” to Elsevier demands.

And with almost everything now digitized, it’s impossible for the publishers to keep papers from circulating. Phelps concludes, “The availability of electronic copies and so many workarounds to find them reduces publishers’ actual customer base to law-abiding academic libraries and those individuals who purchase individual articles at prices far above marginal cost. Once academic libraries can negotiate with academic publishers on equal terms, the academic publishing market will become entirely different.”