Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google - and it was created by one of Britain's most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell. By Stephen Buranyi

In 2011, Claudio Aspesi, a senior investment analyst at Bernstein Research in London, made a bet that the dominant firm in one of the most lucrative industries in the world was headed for a crash. Reed-Elsevier, a multinational publishing giant with annual revenues exceeding 6bn, was an investor's darling. It was one of the few publishers that had successfully managed the transition to the internet, and a recent company report was predicting yet another year of growth. Aspesi, though, had reason to believe that that prediction - along with those of every other major financial analyst - was wrong.

The core of Elsevier's operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than 19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier's scientific publishing arm reported profits of 724m on just over 2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin - higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.