Opinion
This is the first article in a two-part series on academic publishing by UNSW DVC (Academic Quality) Professor Merlin Crossley. Part 2 is available here: ‘The System is Creaking’: Where To for Academic Publishing.
When I was a postdoc in Boston, I used to wait for friends in Harvard Yard, and browse through the magazines at an old newspaper stand that was near the university gates. There were just two rows of magazines, and they were arranged in alphabetical order. The lower shelf started at the letter N, and contained, Nature and Science. This is the only time I have ever seen them sold at a newsstand. Between the two sat Playboy.
I got paper copies of Nature and Science delivered each week to an apartment, that I shared with two other postdocs. This was before the internet. In those days the business model for publishers involved selling subscriptions. This meant that publications had to be good, they needed some quality to survive. I’ll return to this point later.
In addition, to selling subscriptions to readers and libraries, publishers also often charged ‘page charges’. It cost a fortune to publish a colour figure in a paper. Many journals also charged for black and white text, so-called ‘Article Processing Charges (APCs)’. If the journal was particularly good, it sometimes charged more than you might expect, whereas journals from not-for-profit academic societies aimed to keep their charges low.
Even in those days academic publishing was exploding as a business. The controversial businessman Robert Maxwell (yes, the father of the notorious Ghislaine Maxwell, but let’s not get distracted), had worked something out. Given each issue of Nature and Science consisted of a small magazine, they could only publish a small selection of interesting work. There was room for other journals. What’s more, academics would be prepared, indeed, honoured to serve as editors, and academics would be interested in reviewing manuscripts, as it gave them a chance to see breakthroughs prior to publication. And he reasoned that academic editors would encourage university libraries to subscribe to new journals. Maxwell founded Pergamon Press in Oxford, and he became a squillionaire, primarily by harnessing the hard work of academics, and launching new journal after new journal.
This was all before the internet. It was also before journal Impact Factors and H indices began to provide league tables of ‘quality’. But even then, we all had a very clear idea of quality. I’m not sure how, but just as I know a Jaguar is a desirable car without ever having sat in one, I knew precisely which were the top journals and which were lower ranked. We all did.
Then came the internet. I remember saying to my flatmates that this would allow Nature to publish not just ten but a thousand papers per week. They didn’t have to all fit into a magazine that was delivered to our door.
How wrong was I?
Nature continued to publish about ten papers per week. But it created new Nature stable journals: Nature Genetics, Nature Structural Biology, Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, and Nature Cell Biology – were all launched before the turn of the century! Science and Cell, and others, also launched new journals leveraging their quality brands.
The money was rolling in as libraries paid for subscriptions and authors paid APCs, and academics continued to do the reviewing and often served on editorial boards. It was an amazing time for publishing – both a ‘pay to read’ and ‘pay to publish’ model was sustaining industry growth.
Gradually public institutions became concerned that they were paying for research, paying the salaries of editorial board members and reviewers, paying for the publishing, and then paying to read the published research as well. In 2008 the National Institutes of Health mandated that the research it funded should be made available to all – Open Access. The idea was that anyone should be able to read publicly funded research.
The Open Access movement was embraced by many and had many advantages. But it also had some unintended consequences. Previous ‘pay to read’ business models, inherently relied on quality. If the quality was not good, no one would pay for the content. There would be no subscribers. But ‘pay to publish’ models could work irrespective of quality.
Academics have always been under pressure to publish – ‘publish or perish’ – and now they could choose low or no quality open access publishers and build up long bibliographies. Given the increasing specialisation of academic disciplines, many people would never really be sure if the publications were of high quality or not.
The well-intended war against metrics such as journal Impact Factors, often a sensible war, softened attempts to rein in low quality journals. Such journals prospered, and are now referred to as ‘predatory publishers’.
Two broad processes were in operation here. Firstly, publishing now relied on tech-platforms, and publishers started holding us hostage via what Yanis Varoufakis might call ‘techno-feudalism’. Secondly, the platforms were prioritising profits over quality, and this results in what Cory Doctorow calls the ‘enshittification’ of the internet.
Publishing today remains a big business that is supported by some surprisingly strong forces in society. Yes, society requires access to new knowledge. Publishers have become like big notice boards. Researchers pay to pin up records of their latest discoveries, and readers still often pay to read.
At the same time the production of information has exploded. The supply of information outstrips demand. One cannot always generate revenue from selling information. Instead, many business models are based on triaging information and serving up quality information. Some audiences will pay for quality, and academics pay for the job security and esteem that comes from publishing in top journals. Some top journals charge eye watering APCs – because they can!
In this world of overwhelming quantities of information and impenetrable complexity and sophistication of knowledge, I regret to say that simple proxies like Impact Factors continue to matter. They help keep ‘predatory publishers’ in check. But high Impact Factor journals also charge us too much. We have to get the balance right – understanding metrics, interpreting them wisely, and looking at new publishing models.
We have a lot of work ahead of us if we want to minimize both techno-feudalism and enshittification. It’s a jungle out there but it always has been. Universities will have to work together if we are to fashion sustainable publishing and reading strategies. More on this later.
Professor Merlin Crossley is Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic Quality at UNSW