Since the mid-1600’s, researchers and scientists have shared their discoveries by publishing articles in scientific journals. Knowledge-sharing in this way allowed the scientific community to discover and refine new concepts and expand the community’s collective knowledge.
After World War II, the scientific discoveries made around the world helped build a burgeoning and profitable scientific publication industry. Publishers would source, peer review and publish articles and journals, and universities, libraries and other research institutions would pay the publishers to make them available to their patrons.
That model persisted into the 21st century. In 2025, one X user, upon asking why he had to pay to read research even if the work was taxpayer funded, concluded (archived), “I looked into this and it was literally Ghislaine Maxwell’s father who invented the paywall model for research papers. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
The claim circulated on Instagram (archived), Threads (archived), Bluesky (archived) and Reddit (archived) in recent years.
Ghislaine Maxwell, one of nine children of Robert and Elisabeth Maxwell, became a household name through her association with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell, a long-time friend of Epstein, is serving a 20-year prison sentence in Texas after a U.S. judge found her guilty of multiple charges, including sex trafficking of a minor. Epstein died in a Manhattan prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking of minors.
Her father, Robert Maxwell, was a publishing magnate mostly known for his ownership of the Mirror Group Newspapers and the eventual mismanagement of its pension fund. After World War II, he founded the Pergamon Press publishing house that published scores of scientific journals in its day, selling access to customers like libraries and societies. Maxwell grew both Pergamon Press and through it, the business of scientific publishing itself. He eventually sold Pergamon Press for $768 million in 1991.
Though it was unclear at the time of this writing whether Maxwell “invented” the paywall system for scientific publishing that existed in 2025, it was clear from biographies and literature about the publishing industry that Maxwell and Pergamon Press were instrumental in turning scientific publishing into a profitable business — and, in the process, entrenching the user-paid system that exists today.
A changing industry
Maxwell entered the scientific publishing industry at a watershed moment after World War II.
Before the war, publishers had sold scientific writings though the business did not net the profits Maxwell would later generate. In “Springer-Verlag: history of a scientific publishing house,” an account of the history of the German publishing house Springer, the author Heinz Sarkowski described pre-and postwar owner Ferdinand Springer’s attitude toward journal publication. Sarkowski wrote:
Ferdinand Springer viewed the publication of journals from its economic aspect as follows: one third of the journals make profits, with which the losses incurred by a second third can be covered; the final third break even. This means that, in any case, there were no great profits to be made with journals in general. Their advantage for the publishing company lay in their ideal importance and in their pioneer function, as described above. The growing economic significance of the journal business for the scientific publisher has changed this concept considerably.
Sarkowski’s research showed that a paid model for distributing scientific research did exist before Maxwell but faced considerable changes after World War II.
Springer was not alone on the pre-war scientific publishing scene. In the U.K., where Maxwell would eventually found his publishing empire, “learned societies” like universities or the Royal Society, which published one of the world’s first scientific journals, dominated pre-war scientific publishing. According to “A History of Scientific Journals,” a book that examined publishing at the Royal Society (page 476):
The handful of commercial firms involved before the war had tended either to mix short research papers with more marketable news and views (as did Nature) or treated their journals as loss-leaders that might bring contacts “with the prospective authors of profitable books”. The new players, on the other hand, were aiming to profit from the publication of research. They inspired other firms to move into journals.
Both “Springer-Verlag: history of a scientific publishing house” and “A History of Scientific Journals” suggested that Maxwell was not the first person to consider making a profit from publishing research. Where, pre-World War II, publishers mostly used scientific journals as a means to other publishing ends, Maxwell managed to transform his business into one that generated profits from scientific publishing by its own merit.
Maxwell seized post-war opportunities
According to “Maxwell,” Joe Haines’ biography written in consultation with Maxwell’s wife, Betty, Maxwell’s first work in the publishing world was with Springer.
As the publisher attempted to restart business after the war, it needed someone with Maxwell’s military connections and sway to obtain printing permissions, secure paper and transport stock from then-East Berlin and Austria to be sold all over the world. Maxwell had served as a British army officer in World War II.
Maxwell solved all these problems for Springer, including selling valuable back issues of scientific journals through the European Periodicals, Publicity and Advertising Corporation (EPPAC) he set up in London in 1947, Haines wrote.
According to both “Maxwell” and “Springer-Verlag: history of a scientific publishing house,” Maxwell distributed scientific publications for Springer from 1948 to 1958 through various London-based companies, creating a net turnover of more than 20 million Deutschmarks. Using the last fixed conversion rate for Deutschmarks, that would be the equivalent of around $45 million in 2025.
Striking out on his own
After spending his early years in the scientific publishing business working for others, Maxwell got a chance to strike out on his own when Butterworths, at the time the leading British scientific publisher, pulled out of a co-operation with its German counterpart Springer and sold Maxwell its shares in 1951.
Maxwell renamed the company Pergamon Press and began traveling the world to secure new, international journal titles for the publishing house.
Haines described Maxwell’s view of Pergamon Press as follows:
The original germ of an idea that the crying need of education in the future would be for international scientific publishing of all kinds now began to take commercial shape. Maxwell realised that scientists and academics were desperate to get their basic research work into print; the fees which they were paid were of secondary consideration. Other scientists were just as desperate to read the work their colleagues were doing. University and other libraries were only too eager to buy, at almost whatever price, the reports of the studies in which the scientists were involved.Â
Maxwell would continue this business model — buying the publication rights for scientific journals through Pergamon and selling them to libraries — until he sold Pergamon to the publishing giant Elseveir in 1990. Pergamon remained an imprint of Elseveir in November 2025.
According to Brian Cox, who worked for Maxwell and Pergamon Press for 31 years from 1960 and wrote about his time in the journal Logos in 1998, the company “published over 7,000 monographs and reference works, and launched 700 journals, 418 of which were still current titles when the company was sold.”
Cox described a system of selling subscriptions to journals, at that point physical publications, at different prices and rates determined by duration and whether customers paid directly to Pergamon in a system not dissimilar to the user-paid model still used in the 21st century.
Scientific publishing — time for another change?
In sum, while Maxwell grew the profitability of scientific publishing in a way that did not exist before World War II, he expanded on an existing model but did not invent a new one.
Before World War II, publishers like Springer were already publishing scientific journals and charging fees for access. Pre-war publishers did not view the business as profitable and did not expressly pursue profits in the field — Maxwell did. Thus, research was not free, even before Maxwell.
In recent years, the scientific community has attempted to move away from a subscription model that passes publication costs on to libraries, universities or individual readers. In this system, as one X user pointed out, readers can end up paying for research that is carried out with public grants funded by taxpayer money. Some publicly funded organizations like the National National Institutes of Health in the U.S. and the European European Commission have introduced plans to make all or some of their publicly funded research free.
There is also a growing open access movement across the scientific community. This system instead passes publishing costs onto governments, grant funders or authors, which can create its own accessibility issues in turn.
Sources
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Cox, Brian. “The Pergamon Phenomenon 1951–1991: A Memoir of the Maxwell Years.” Logos, vol. 9, no. 3, 1998, pp. 135–40. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.2959/logo.1998.9.3.135.
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