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.
{ 21 comments }
D. S. Battistoli 07.16.26 at 11:41 am
Wow, this is fascinating. Ages ago, I used to work in the academic publishing industry, but that was before the S2O movement had even launched.
A quick glance at Wikipedia shows that the Royal Society, Project Muse, and DeGruyter Brill are among those who have adopted it (though when I search PM’s website, 30 of 858 titles show up under their “open access” filter. . . .). The Wikipedia article’s data on DeGruyter predates its 2024 merger with Brill, while its data on the RS is from 2026. Which would suggest that this field is evolving at a nice clip.
(Reading between the lines of DGB’s own website, the merger would seem to have had a net positive effect on S20 uptake, with Brill, which had not been particular adept of S2O prior to linking up with DeGruyter).
MisterMr 07.16.26 at 1:24 pm
Since the ones footing the bill are universities anyway (through their libraries), couldn’t universities simply create a common entity that pays a certain number of academics to read an humongous amount of published stuff (on private blogs or similar) that is sent to them by the author (who can publish it werever, like in google blogger or other very simple formats).
Then these academics (who are not teaching and are not doing research, this is supposed to be a full time job) simply list and vote said articles, perhaps keep a copy of it somewhere, and other academics can simply read these reviews to know if there is something interesting on some argument.
I mean, this requires a whole new profession, but if you think how much useless work goes in academic publishing it would probably be cheaper overall, even for universities.
Also, at the base the problem is that academics are pressured to publish a lot, so there is probably simply too much stuff to read, one solution would be to remove the “publish or die” incentives, IMHO.
Charles Stewart 07.16.26 at 1:41 pm
Good that you’re giving attention to this matter. I was a scientific copy-editor from 2006 to 2022 (a post-doc before that, now in early retirement) and tried to encourage the emergence of scholar-owned journals in that time, with no successes.
The model I found most encouraging was the overlay journal, where the journal is a set of links to a publically available archive, such as ArXiV. Timothy Gowers founded a successful example of such a journal, Discrete Analysis, following his involvement in the Elsevier boycott.
Alex SL 07.16.26 at 1:56 pm
Agreed, for the most part, with the problem description, except:
But there is a growing movement towards new models, under the labels of “open access” and “open science.”
This beginning seems a bit odd to me. In established use of those terms, open access means that reading is free but publishing costs an open access fee, and open science means that the data underlying a study should be made publicly accessible. Neither of those implies non-commercial publishers. And indeed, as anybody with a minimum of two brain cells was able to predict when the open access movement was young, the success of that movement has done nothing to curtail the profits of Elsevier et al. but merely resulted in commercial publishers shifting their incentives from quality to accepting as many manuscripts as possible and in shifting the problem for poor researchers from inability to access literature (which was easily overcome by requesting a PDF from a colleague who had access) to inability to publish (which is much less easy to overcome). Great work, everybody.
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*
In nearly all cases, this is not “and” but instead “either… or”. If authors journal pay four digit fees to a journal, its articles are free to access. Otherwise, what’s the point of the open access fee? (Admittedly, I have published in one subscription journal that also had an article processing fee, but it was in the low hundreds.)
Regarding the solution space, first, I am associate editor for a small society journal that is production edited by a professor in his free time. The journal is hosted on a website supported by an institution. This is clearly not a model for a high-impact journal or a large and varied fleet of journals, and indeed our society journal is not even JCR-ranked.
Second, there are some journals I have published in that are run as public utilities by state governments. Again they are niche journals entirely for my field of research, not JCR-ranked, and unlikely to be a good model for something to replace Nature or PLoS.
But that at least shows that such a model is not unthinkable in practice. This is also my most realistic hope: somebody like the US government or the EU could, if and when not run by xenophobic, anti-enlightenment cranks, fund a PLoS-like fleet of journals without any publication or subscription fees just like they already fund DNA sequence repositories and biodiversity databases. They only need to realise that science publishing is already and will always be taxpayer-funded, and that the question is only if the taxpayer (1) funds subscription fees to for-profit publishers, (2) funds article processing/open access fees to for-profit publishers, or (3) funds non-profit publishers. A simple cost-benefit analysis would obviously favour the third option, because the taxpayer would save all the money that constitutes the profit made by the for-profit publisher.
Sadly, I am not very optimistic given that nearly all people including voters and politicians have “for-profit means more efficient” burnt into their brain somewhere in the exact same way that previous generations had “society will collapse without slavery” or “the spring floods will cease without the god-king” burnt into that same area.
SusanC 07.17.26 at 12:08 pm
Re: “use Western data”
In computer science, there is a genre of paper where the author has done usability testing of some product with both American and Japanese users, and compares results.
If I’m a reviewer of such a paper, I’m going to take the line that one of the paper’s contributions is to test that the results still hold with non-Western research subjects, and bump up its score for whether we should accept it. Definitely a plus rather than a minus.
[ The usability testing papers are the ones that first come to mind for where it might actually matter whether the data was Western or not ]
SusanC 07.17.26 at 12:18 pm
(In psychology, there is a concern that way too many results were based on a sample of psychology undergraduates at US universities, and there is a concern that such people might not be typical. Computer usability papers are usually a bit better than that, but still, in the into to your paper you can sell your contribution is that you present data from a different population to the one that’s usually tested)
I will redact which paper it actually was, but there’s one that compares CS undergrads vs non computer science people at some computer task, that got the audience comment on its graphs “if this was an animal experiment, you might doubt that those two populations were even the same species”
SusanC 07.17.26 at 12:27 pm
(In psychology, there is a concern that way too many results were based on a sample of psychology undergraduates at US universities, and there is a concern that such people might not be typical. Computer usability papers are usually a bit better than that, but still, in the into to your paper you can sell your contribution is that you present data from a different population to the one that’s usually tested)
I will redact which paper it actually was, but there’s one that compares CS undergrads vs non computer science people at some computer task, that got the audience comment on its graphs “if this was an animal experiment, you might doubt that those two populations were even the same species”
Michael Benton 07.18.26 at 9:19 am
I found this to be a thoughtful discussion of an issue that affects far more people than just academics. Research often relies on public funding, so the argument that its results should be widely accessible is compelling. At the same time, it’s good to acknowledge that maintaining rigorous peer review and high editorial standards requires sustainable support. Finding a model that balances openness with quality seems like one of the biggest challenges facing academic publishing today.
engels 07.18.26 at 12:55 pm
Also, at the base the problem is that academics are pressured to publish a lot, so there is probably simply too much stuff to read, one solution would be to remove the “publish or die” incentives, IMHO.
Not an academic but it seems to me the problem is the way academics in some fields outsourced the status hierarchy sorting that determines pay and perks to opaque commercial enterprises and decided the mechanism should be “which journal printed my paper,” something that shouldn’t have mattered to anyone with a modem since the 1990s.
John Q 07.19.26 at 6:04 am
In some fields, including economics and philosophy, the incentive is not “publish or perish”, but “publish only in the top journals”. In economics there is a literal “Top 5” list like those in High Fidelity. Not quite as tight in philosophy, I think, and a largely separate “continental” prestige hierarchy, but still the same story.
John Q 07.19.26 at 6:07 am
One option for avoiding commercial publishers is Open Journal Systems, produced by the Public Knowledge Project, explicitly devoted to making knowledge a global public good.. Huge in Indonesia, apparently because it fits their instituational structure.
Alternatively, it may be possible to build a lightweight bespoke system. I have done some preliminary investigation, and there appear to be no obvious technical obstacles to producing a web-based submission interface. The harder problem would be organising the transition for an existing society or small open-access publisher.
D. S. Battistoli 07.19.26 at 2:46 pm
John Q @10,
Obviously it does not counter your point to acknowledge that it is not only niche work that might not get published in a Top 5 journal, but also work which challenges a Kuhnian paradigm: Marx and Engels did not have the kinds of ideas that would ever have gotten them tracked for tenure in their lifetimes. Many radical feminists of the 1970s–1990s, like Kate Millett, tended to sit at the precariate edge of the academic world for nearly the entirety of their careers.
For academics, there are several interlocking questions here. Are you looking to work sufficiently within or congenially with the current paradigm as to make Top 5 publication an appropriate choice? Are you socially or geographically situated in such a way as to make such publication goals realistic? Where are you with regard to equilibrium points in your career at which you may tell proponents of pre-existing status norms to sod off?
You are certainly aware of all these points already, but it’s worth postulating them openly here, hopefully to the benefit of the overall discourse.
Jef Delvaux 07.20.26 at 11:58 pm
Whenever Open Access is discussed, I am surprised to see that law reviews, esp. in their US-incarnation, absent from the conversation.
While I am aware that they have their own problems, it seems that many of them have at least figured out a way to make their articles available to the wider public, without compromising the signal function internal to the profession.
It is all but obvious to me why this could not be replicated by other fields.
Given the state of the world, I don’t have much hope that universities would make resources available to pursue something like this, but I will indulge myself for a second.
Many (if not most) universities already have the required in-house expertise for creating the digital infrastructure needed to create a journal. A coalition of computer scientists, librarians, web designers and (perhaps?) marketing experts should suffice I would think.
Now you can imagine universities making funds available for departments who wish to hire an editorial board for their journal.
To counter the concern that these journals would not have the prestige of, let’s say, The Monist or Noûs universities could incentivise publishing in these university-run journals by indexing them accordingly in their internal rankings that inform tenure decisions and the like.
Granted, the last point would be fruitless if this would be done piecemeal, one university at the time. But the so-called Bologna treaty has shown that EU-wide educational reform is not impossible.
So perhaps it isn’t unreasonable to hope that creating a more sane academic publishing industry is something that the EU could contribute to. Presumably that would have ripple effects outside of its borders too.
Gar Lipow 07.21.26 at 12:18 am
If academic publishing is a public good, and I agree that it is, then with all these alternative approaches being discussed, maybe one approach to consider should be some form of public funding?
Alex SL 07.21.26 at 11:22 am
Gar Lipow,
Academic publishing is all public funding already, either from direct appropriation funds to research agencies and universities or from grant funding, see the second-to-last paragraph of my comment at 4. It is just that we then hand that funding over to for-profit companies instead of handing it over to not-for-profit ones.
Jef Delvaux,
This is the usual collective action problem of getting an entire community to agree to change its habits at once. If you are rewarded for having a Nature paper, you will try to get a Nature paper, and you will people who can get Nature papers because that will make your group or institution look better, so you are also rewarding others for having Nature papers. If you are the first to defect from that behaviour, you are punished. If the entire community defects from that behaviour, everybody wins, but that is effectively impossible to coordinate outside of a massive crisis affecting the entire research field at the same time.
engels 07.21.26 at 12:10 pm
Is it possible that AI will make journal archives less important, just as its already reducing traffic to news sites etc?
Maybe when Musk buys Philosophy and Public Affairs the Rawlsian mandarins will jump aship.
Alex SL 07.22.26 at 11:38 pm
engels,
I am not really sure what you are saying.
Because Google makes it more difficult for users of its search engine to find original sources in the hope of maximising its own ad revenue, scientists will stop publishing journal articles? Those two are entirely unrelated. Scientists are still expected to publish their findings, otherwise, what are those findings good for if nobody sees them?
And billionaires buy up all journal publishers and shut them down? Sure, that might happen. A nuclear war might happen, or a global pandemic that kills 90% of us. I think the question is still, assuming we continue to be able to conduct academic research, how do we want to publish it?
engels 07.23.26 at 11:25 am
scientists will stop publishing journal articles?… billionaires buy up all journal publishers and shut them down?
I’ll admit I wasn’t thinking of science primarily but the hypotheses are:
-scholars publish wherever they like, AIs hoover it all up and repackage and transmit the content rather than the verbatim copyrighted text (as textbooks often do for undergrads at present)
-billionaires buy up journals on politically contentious topics to exert pressure on what they publish or to shut them down, as they’re doing with newspapers today.
I think the question is still, assuming we continue to be able to conduct academic research, how do we want to publish it?
I agree, I’m just providing speculative support for the answer “not in traditional prestige journals”.
Harry 07.23.26 at 2:36 pm
Until the 1970s a great deal of academic publishing was not at all in the hands of corporations but in the hands of scholarly societies that didn’t make profits. That’s how the otherwise incomprehensible practice of nearly all the intellectual labour of writing articles, refereeing them, and editing them, more or less for free comes from. (Refereeing in particular: there are lots of reasons to do some refereeing pre-tenure, but it isn’t going to help you get tenure!). These societies were typically based at particular universities in which they collaborated with the university library in both production and dissemination. Libraries which anchored a journal often had reciprocal arrangements — giving free subscriptions to 150 other libraries each of which, in return, gave you free subscriptions to their journal/s. This all broke down starting in the 60s as corporate publishers realised that they could gain control of the journals cheaply, that a lot of the labour would be cheap or free, and that libraries would be under huge pressure to pay whatever it takes to subscribe. Scholarly societies and academics gave stuff away, and librarians, who understood exactly what was at stake, couldn’t stop them and were (in my experience, though obviously I am so young that I only saw the very end of all this) seriously, and rightly, pissed off. What Lisa is suggesting is very roughly a return to the status quo ante.
Alex SL 07.25.26 at 5:58 am
engels,
Ah, I see. As I wrote, moving away from prestigious top journals is a collective action problem that is hard to solve outside of a deep crisis. Maybe a combination of oligarchy and AI slop overwhelming journals that don’t care because they already received the fees will be that crisis.
But in addition, my frustration with the academic community in the last two decades or so is that well-meaning colleagues have shown an unerring instinct for working towards change that has no chance whatsoever of solving the problems they have identified. The open access movement was the most obvious example, leaving exploitative publishers not only intact giving them another way of being exploitative. Now, we have a massive campaign for paid peer review, which will predictably double publication fees and lead to the rise of mercenary reviews who accept all offers regardless of how qualified they are and then let a chatbot write the report.
What is missing again? Any serious attempt at moving away from exploitative publishers.
PQuincy 07.28.26 at 2:21 am
Brief background: academic career in history (a field with myriad subfield and cross-field journals as well as multiple ‘flagships’), publication in various US, British and Continental journals which operated very differently, and part of a very large public university system on the West Coast that you have heard of.
Lots of food for thought here, but I wanted to add on bit: universities (mostly pushed by their librarians but also by faculty) trying to fight or game or transcend the chokehold of the Elsevier-Brill-Routledge etc. oligopoly. My large university system has been working on various ‘open source obligatory’ repositories for years. On the one hand, they pressured publishers during journal purchase negotiations (and occasional boycotts) to allow authors to post their work in the open source University repository; on the other hand, they generated (vague, poorly implemented, and ineffective) pressure on faculty authors to in fact make use of this repository. I retired a few years ago, so I’m not up on the latest state of play, but I never could figure out whether, and more importantly, how I was supposed to conform to the broad diktats from the administration about putting faculty research in the University repository. And frankly, because History articles are rarely the stuff of patents or competitive reading, the University actually didn’t care much whether I did. They obviously were more interested in the computer science, bioscience, and engineering research where more concrete interests were at stake. But the whole episode did make me see how hapless the university was in the face of intransigent publishers; they were better at haggling over subscription package prices (where the faculty energetically supported the libraries — I was certainly willing to refuse to referee for publishers that were trying to strong-arm my institution, since refereeing was never going to get me a merit increase, much less a promotion. But the university never really asked us to boycott, and the sort of journals that ask me to referee are not high on any science administrator’s subscription priorities, anyway.
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