Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that | Arash Abizadeh

Giant publishers are bleeding universities dry, with profit margins that rival Google's. So we decided to start our own

• Arash Abizadeh is a philosopher and the Angus professor of political science at McGill University, Canada

If you've ever read an academic article, the chances are that you were unwittingly paying tribute to a vast profit-generating machine that exploits the free labour of researchers and siphons off public funds.

The annual revenues of the big five" commercial publishers - Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE - are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes of Google. Meanwhile, academics do almost all of the substantive work to produce these articles free of charge: we do the research, write the articles, vet them for quality and edit the journals.