Baking Bad: The Academic Publishing Model
How public money, free labor, and paywalls create a triple tax on scientific knowledge.
Last month, I published an article in Undark Magazine about the academic triple tax — the deeply flawed system where taxpayers fund scientific research, academics provide unpaid peer review labor, and for-profit publishers then charge the public to access that very same work. It’s a serious problem with real consequences for transparency, equity, and public trust in science.
To illustrate just how absurd this model is — and how completely incompatible it would be with any other business — I wrote the following allegory. It’s a satirical look at how academic publishing turns public funding into private profit.
It’s not a perfect analogy (no metaphor ever is), but I hope it makes the point. If academic publishing worked like a school bake sale, we’d all be broke… and still hungry.
Tax 1 – The Startup Costs
There’s a public school called Taxfunded High. At this school, a teacher named Mr. Tenuretrack wants to do something meaningful for the community — and also get promoted.
He notices a local crisis: a severe shortage of delicious baked goods. So he pitches a solution to the Town Council. He’ll start a baking initiative to bring joy and nourishment to the neighborhood.
The council is intrigued. Mr. Tenuretrack submits a proposal requesting $100,000 in public funds to cover ingredients, baking tools, and wages for student assistants.
His principal is enthusiastic — but raises a concern. The school’s kitchen, ovens, electricity, cleaning crew, and administrative staff will all be used, and none of those are free.
To cover these indirect costs, the principal adds $50,000 to the budget. This, he explains, can pay those other costs and also help fund a new woodshop program, which the school’s been eyeing for years. Mr. Tenuretrack isn’t thrilled about this, but it doesn’t directly cut into his baking project, and he’s grateful for the support.
The Town Council approves the full $150,000 request. Mr. Tenuretrack gets to work — baking muffins, cookies, and a very ambitious banana cream pie with the help of his students.
Tax 2 – Free labor
Once the baked goods are ready, Mr. Tenuretrack faces another problem: the school doesn’t have a cafeteria equipped to serve baked goods. Instead, he submits his creations to Spinger’s Natural Pub, one of several prestigious food halls in town.
Spinger’s is known for its high artisanal standards. Only the finest baked goods are accepted through a double-blind tasting panel. But the reviewers who maintain those standards aren’t employees. They’re teachers like Mr. Tenuretrack, volunteering their time to “give back” to the culinary community.
These peer reviewers could be teaching, grading, or baking their own treats, but instead they spend nights sampling muffins and writing detailed critique notes – all to ensure the essential quality control standards are met.
Mr. Tenuretrack submits his baked goods. The volunteer reviewers carefully critique his wares:
Reviewer 1: “The lemon blueberry muffins are great, but need granulated sugar on top. The carrot cake slices are too small. Minor revisions.”
Reviewer 2: “The chocolate chip distribution is uneven. The cacao content of the brownies is 3% too high. Also, the banana cream pie doesn’t match the chocolate theme. Consider replacing it with a peanut butter pie. Major revisions required.”
Tax 3 – Distribution Costs and Paying to Eat
Distribution Fees
Mr. Tenuretrack makes all the changes — even trashes his beloved banana cream pie and develops a new peanut butter version (despite his original concerns about peanut allergen exposure). The volunteer reviewers approve the updated goods.
Spinger’s Natural Pub agrees to display them. But there’s a catch: the food hall is not a public service — it’s a for-profit business. If Mr. Tenuretrack wants his goods available to the public, he has to pay a $2,000 processing fee just to pay for the infrastructure that supports Springer’s Natural Pub.
He sighs and pays it — with the town council’s money. “A small price to bring joy to the town,” he tells himself. “Plus, it’ll look great on my résumé.”
Paying to Eat
Spinger’s now offers Mr. Tenuretrack’s baked goods to the world — but they’re not free. The muffins, cookies, and pie are now for sale.
There are two target markets:
Schools that need baked goods to keep their students and staff happy.
Members of the public, who also like muffins.
Spinger’s offers schools two pricing tiers:
Item Subscriptions – $10,000/year for each baked good (e.g., lemon muffins).
Package Subscriptions – $40,000/year for a bundle of goods. But if you want the peanut butter pie, that’s a separate $15,000 add-on.
Mr. Tenuretrack realizes the irony: he used $150,000 of taxpayer money to produce these baked goods, and now the school has to pay again to access them.
And what about the general public — the very people who funded all of this? They can enjoy the baked goods too… for $42 per piece.
Yes, they helped fund the ingredients, the labor, the utilities, the review process, and the infrastructure. But if they want a slice of the pie — literally — they’ll have to pay again.
In the end:
Mr. Tenuretrack gets promoted.
Everyone gets access to delicious baked goods (at a price).
And Spinger’s Natural Pub reports record profits.
From Muffins to Manuscripts: The Real Cost Remains
If this all sounds ridiculous, it should. But it’s not far from reality. In academic publishing today, researchers receive public funding to conduct studies, spend unpaid hours peer-reviewing each other’s work, and then hand the results to for-profit publishers who charge up to $25-50 per article — even to the very taxpayers who funded the research.
If you’d like a more in-depth analysis, including details on the hundreds of millions of dollars that the U.S. government sends to for-profit publishing companies every year, check out my UnDark Magazine article on this topic (free to read).
This system slows down innovation, restricts access for clinicians, students, and educators, and places enormous burdens on universities, especially those in low-resource settings.
Reform is possible — through public pressure, funder mandates for open access, and institutional choices that reward sharing over prestige. But it starts with awareness. If a bake sale operated this way, we’d call it a scam. In science, we’ve come to call it normal.
I’d love to hear your thoughts — especially if you’ve navigated this system from the inside. Have you felt the weight of the triple tax? Seen reforms that actually work? Or do you have your own metaphor for how strange this all is? Drop a comment below — and feel free to share this with someone who’s paid $42 for a muffin.
This problem has been around for a LONG time. My father got his PhD in 1957 and taught college. He saw the sins of Publish Or Perish immediately, and wrote a parody using a grocery store metaphor. His parody was published in an obscure journal. He never wrote anything else. Eventually his stubbornness cost him a tenure-track job, so he downscaled to a small Christian college where he could simply teach.
I listened to his advice in 1957 and eventually got into technical work, not professoring.
I don't regret the decision!
This analogy was great and I lost it at "it will look good on my resume." The things we tell ourselves to make it through are really something ha articles like this really help bring awareness to the public because otherwise just explaining the system sounds outright crazy. Nice work!