Academic publishing as a public good

Academic publishing has long been dominated by commercial players. That fact is well-known, as are many of the problems. But there is a growing movement towards new models, under the labels of “open access” and “open science.” Until two weeks ago, I’ve held a role as co-editor of an interdisciplinary journal, which allowed me to see some of the problems from close. But I’ve also learned more and more about solutions.* What follows are some personal reflections on these issues – if you’re familiar with the problems, you might want to jump directly to the solutions part below.

The problem

Academic publishing is basically a mechanism for sharing knowledge among interested parties, whether other academics or the broader public. So why not put everything out on the internet, one might think? Well, because there is too much – one needs some kind of mechanism for directing attention to stuff that is really important, to offer readers decision support about what to read in any case and what to leave for later (e.g. if you at some point decide to write about a specific issue). I’ve often thought – but that’s speculation – that the problem is particularly great in fields that are large and whose boundaries are not clearly defined. Fields that are relatively small, where people know each other and the boundaries of the community are relatively clear, might have less trouble dealing with the attention economy. That’s maybe why astrophysics and linguistics were among the first fields to move towards open access publications, e.g. in arXiv. In the social sciences and humanities, where there is just *a lot* out there, and things from different fields might be relevant for each other, the question about mechanisms for “what to read” is harder to solve, arguably.

Beyond accessibility and signaling importance to colleagues, you also want some mechanism for what “the public” – e.g. science journalists or bloggers – take up. (Fun fact: as a humanities / social science person, I had no idea about the whole machinery that starts moving when an article gets published in Nature or Science, with preprints automatically, and under embargo, being sent out to journalists, university communication people being informed, the phone ringing all day before publication, etc.  I learned about all that when participating in a project on vaccine justice that led to such a publication – ask colleagues in the natural sciences if you want to know more… ).

Apart from that, academic publishing isn’t a very challenging business model. You want low costs, the possibility for everyone with relevant research to get published, and no fuss with technical systems, just a smooth and simple process. But you do want research from *everywhere* around the world to be discoverable for others, not only from those who happen to have networks with powerful editors. I’ve written earlier about Global science equity, and publishing remains a point of attention from that perspective, whether it is because research gets desk-rejected for “bad English” or whether editors insist that research needs to cite certain Western thinkers, and/or use Western data.

What I want to focus on here, however, is the commercial model that is currently still dominating in publishing. As academics, we basically get none of what we want. Costs are high (despite the fact that a lot of work gets outsourced to low-income countries):  libraries pay for access from behind paywalls, and if authors want to publish open access, they or their universities need to pay author-publishing fees (APFs) that are rarely below four-digit dollar numbers. Sometimes, there are “transformative deals” between universities or groups of unviersities, then the APFs for authors from participating institutions are automatically covered (until you get an email, around October, that the number of articles for certain publishers has been used up, and you need to wait for the new year for new slots).

But that raises new equity issues: the accessibility of certain publishing venues for scholars from poorer universities or countries or disciplines is basically cut off, and their research gets further marginalized because open access research gets read (or at least: downloaded and cited) more. Moreover, the open-access-with-APF model puts pressure on journals to publish more articles, because they earn money per article written – not quite a recipe for quality, and basically jeopardizing the gate-keeping function for quality and relevance I’ve described above.**

If you’re like me, you might also get angry at the fact that the publishers make pretty high profits from this whole business, which in my view should be a not-for-profit industry serving academia, not a way for managers to earn gigantic salaries. But one can get angry at the dysfunctionality of the whole system even if one has different views about the justifiability of high managerial salaries.

So academics are basically caught in a gigantic collective action problem: everyone wants to reach the top of the attention economy, and therefore we keep in place a parasitic, dysfunctional system instead of just collectively moving to something different.*** You’d think that the financial pressure on universities would accelerate change, but in certain fields, the pressure to keep publishing in the “top” journals is so high that people will fight tooth and nail against proposals that the university simply stops paying any of their outrageously high fees (that’s something I’ve seen at university meetings).

What adds to the problem is that for historical reasons, some journals are meant to make money. They belong to academic associations which, historically, sent out paper volumes to their members, and got good money from the publishing houses that they could use for cross-subsidizing their annual conferences or other activities. So you can get constellations where worthy goals, such as bringing together scholars in an otherwise marginalized field, can get entangled with the interests of commercial publishers, against the open access movement.

The solutions

Luckily, more and more people are aware of the problems (some have worked on it for decades!) and there are now many genuinely great solutions out there. By “genuinely great” I don’t mean the author-publishing-fee model described above, where open access remains within the commercial arena and the equity problems get worse. I mean models where publishing is brought back to the academic community and done without commercial intentions, as a service to the community.

But – you still have certain costs to cover. Articles need to be copy-edited and type-set, and someone needs to maintain the website where articles are put online. There are now several platforms, and many university presses now offer such services, allowing academics to run their own journals. While I have a lot of sympathies for that approach, I see two problems: 1) One has to do a lot of work oneself. It’s a kind of Do-It-Yourself approach where basically all steps, from submission to publication, are completely in the hand of the editorial team. It’s a labor of love that many overworked academics are not in a position to do. 2) Precisely because the threshold to opening new journals in this way is low, almost everyone can do it and it takes time and effort to build the reputation of such a journal. So far, many of these journals seem to be in rather small niches of scholarship (where people know each other and no other attention-economy mechanisms are needed). So that model may function well for specialized journals, but not so well for somewhat broader or interdisciplinary journals.

But there is also another model, which I find really exciting, and which, in my view, doesn’t get the attention it deserves in the whole open-acces debate: “subscribe to open.” This is a model in which publishers basically gather a coalition of the willing among libraries who commit to paying a certain amount for supporting an open-access journal (or set of journals). It’s a bit likely a cooperative model, but with a positive externality: a few actors who want to see a certain good produced chime in to have it produced, and others can then benefit from its provision as well. In subscribe to open, the first set of actors are university libraries of academics who are involved with the journal or who would read articles from it, and the beneficiaries are readers worldwide. Through this funding, a professional organization (with editorial support, typesetting, etc.) can be run, which eases the burden on academics. And my working hypothesis (and hope, really) is that subscribe-to-open might also help with the attention economy issue, through the reputation of publishers and/or editorial boards, so that it can be a model also for generalist journals. While it is hard to imagine the flagship journals of big disciplines, with their attention-economy logic, to move to Do-It-Yourself models, it’s well imaginable that they might move to subscribe to open models (though of course the commercial publishers that currently run them will fight hard against this…).

Why would university libraries be willing to chime in, though, you might ask – why not free-ride in the hope that others will pay? Well, many librarians are *really* angry about the dysfunctionalities and high costs of the current model. They understand their job as providing access to knowledge, and are committed to its public-good character. Moreover, if they can switch from what was previously an expensive subscription to what is often a somewhat cheaper contribution, they even save money.****

On my pessimistic days, I see how long the open access movement has already been in this fight, and how difficult it continues to be – university leaders in many countries seem to be hopelessly caught up with private money, on so many levels (don’t get me started on “EdTech”…). On my optimistic days, I think that the combination of platforms for specialized journals run by university libraries, and the subscribe-to-open model for more generalist journals, might be the institutional breakthrough that is needed to crack the status quo. Of course, there are still open questions, e.g. about the best legal forms for running such journals, about how to prevent abuse of funds, etc. But my sense is that this might be a model that provides the right balance between financial viability, professional support, and academic self-management to  be a real alternative to the commercial model. And it is a model which, while not addressing all problems by itself, is better compatible with global science equity as a goal than any of the alternatives.

 * In our case, the solution will very likely be to start a new journal, at the intersection of social economics, economic sociology, and political philosophy. More to follow soon, I hope! Big thanks to Roberto Veneziani, Amitava Dutt, and Natascha van der Zwan, as well as many others, for all that I learned from them on that journey, and to these three for feedback on a draft of this text.

** What makes things worse are the predatory journals out there – I currently get about 5-10 emails per day from predatory journals or conferences that would be so glad to publish my work. Luckily my spam filter has become good at filtering them out…

 *** I personally also wouldn’t shed tears about the fact that all the commercial citation indexes and other types of bean counting might then disappear, or be replaced by something a bit less dysfunctional…

 **** What makes this a bit more complicated is the fact that subscriptions at commercial publishers are typically bundled, so that the costs of specific journals are hard to estimate (and the role of librarians in curating subscriptions is considerably reduced). Complete lack of financial transparency towards editors and owners of journals is another reason to get angry with the current commercial model…