Opinion
This is the second article in a two-part series on academic publishing by UNSW DVC (Academic Quality) Professor Merlin Crossley. Part 1 is available here: Publish or Perish Model Needs Re-think
Google became a household name because it solved a problem. The amount of information online had become so great that we needed a search engine that could surface the most useful data, then sift and rank information on its relevance.
This realisation is critical for understanding how, in the modern world, not only information management, but also scientific publishing, has changed. This is no longer about getting information out in the Evening News – this is about being on the front page.
Now that there is so much information, being on the front page is the only way to stand out. Being on the front page means a lot to academics and their careers.
In terms of scientific publishing, not every researcher can get their work on the front page – that is, into top journals like Nature, Science, or Cell – so it’s made sense for publishers to create a hierarchy of journals. If you can’t get onto the front page, at least your work may appear on page 2. Of course, the sifting and sorting of scientific papers to different ranks is partly subjective, but the whole scientific community has a feel for which research should be on the ‘front page’, and which research is ‘technically sound’, but involves discoveries that won’t knock your socks off.
In some ways, things have gone well.
Scientific research has grown across the world. More information than ever is being injected into the public domain. Although contentious, journal Impact Factors (based on citations) help with sifting and sorting, and they signal which journals are likely to contain discoveries that are considered, by editors and peer reviewers, to have the greatest impact. There are journals for results at every level, so all scientific reports can be published.
The important point is that publication is not just about disseminating information, it is also about ‘sifting’ and ‘ranking’ information in terms of ‘potential impact’ or ‘quality’. We might keep arguing about what ‘quality’ really is, but we need a practical sorting system, and we have one.
But the system is creaking.
The heavy lifting and sifting is done by expert academics, who serve not only as the researchers and writers, but also as peer reviewing judges, and on many editorial boards. They are usually not paid for these services, and worse still, the institutions that actually pay their salaries often also foot the bill to make the research available – open access (‘pay to publish’) – or they pay for journal subscriptions (‘pay to read’), or both!
The burden in terms of work keeps going up. And costs keep going up too.
We are now heavily dependent on the sorting and publication system, and the big publishers know it.
Each year they seem to increase their fees. They do this in complex ways. Sometimes they just lift the fees. Sometimes they bundle in extra journals – that we don’t necessarily want (it’s like a free set of steak knives), and sometimes they add on AI capability, that we don’t necessarily want either.
The big publishers have huge leverage over us now. In the age of electronic publishing, university libraries no longer hold paper copies of journals published in earlier years. The stakes are very high here. If subscription agreements cannot be made, universities will not only lose access to current issues of journals, they can lose access to all past issues!
Many people have been working to loosen the stranglehold that big publishers have on the sector.
One option involves not-for-profit publishing. Many academic societies run not-for-profit journals and at the turn of this century, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals were established by the Nobel Laureate and former leader of the US National Institutes of Health, Harold Varmus, as not-for-profit, quality, open access publishers. PLoS is sustained by ‘page charges’, that is, academics or their universities ‘pay to publish’. It is like a public notice board where only peer reviewed work is posted, and since it doesn’t make a profit, the charges tend to be lower than commercial fees.
PLoS and other society journals work quite well, but for some reason the ‘glamour journals’, from the Nature, Science, and Cell portfolios, seem to be growing faster. I’m not sure why, but perhaps the not-for-profit model prevents the generation of reserves for advertising, or for scaling up their workforce to meet demand and deliver very rapid turnaround times. Or perhaps it is just that glamour matters more and more – one has to be on the very front page in Nature! Sifting remains important.
Another new development may soon help us: the rise of pre-print archives and institutional repositories. It is now possible to self-publish on these repositories. These repositories, together with the practice of retaining copyright and publishing under Creative Commons licensing, may help prevent us ever losing access to ‘back issues’ covering work done in years gone by. This could be a big advantage.
Finally, collective bargaining – within the bounds of competition law, of course – can ensure that big publisher profits do not keep going up and up unreasonably. The Council of Australasian University Librarians (CAUL) has swung into action in this area, and is now positively engaging with big publishers to agree on fairer deals based not on historical charges but on publishing volume and real value.
By harnessing repositories/archives, copyright retention, and collective bargaining, universities can hope to tip the balance, but one thing remains – sifting.
We still need that magic ‘sorting hat’ to signal, at the time of publication or close to that time, which papers are likely to have major impacts, and which are solid but not world changing.
Accumulated citations do this over time, but only journal prestige (usually reflected in Impact Factors) does this up front, at the very moment of publication.
It is possible to imagine social media based processes for signalling ‘impact/quality’ early. In archives like BioRxiv the number of reads and post-posting reviews can now be recorded, as can other indicators in the form of ‘Altmetrics’ (number of reposts on social media, news outlets, blogs, podcasts etc).
The Faculty of 1000 (F1000) a group of originally 1000, and later 8000, interested experts, has previously experimented with post-posting peer review. A very innovative journal eLife is busy developing its ‘publish, review, curate’ model to rank its publications on two scales, on scientific significance from ‘landmark’ to ‘useful’, and on strength of scientific evidence from ‘exceptional’ to ‘inadequate’.
Other informal sifting and ranking systems may emerge. In the days of Twitter, I used to follow the ‘Epigenetic Hulk’, who provided insightful, witty, and influential assessments of each new epigenetics paper that emerged. One can imagine processes akin to “Goodreads” for books, or “Letterboxd” for films, where members of academic societies might provide very rapid assessments, that might be as good or better than the judgement of editors in for-profit, prestigious journals.
We are in the midst of a battle for resources as the world of publishing changes and keeps growing. We need to contain our costs.
In Australasia we are well placed to use collective action to restore the balance. The Council of Australasian University Librarians understands all the issues and is working through approaches to ensure permanent and open access to materials, fairer bargaining, fairer copyright deals, and the best ways of signalling quality in the modern world.
We are not at a tipping point yet, but with technology changing it may be that we are close and that in Australasia, with a united, well-connected, and supportive academic community we can make a contribution or even, dare I say it, lead the world in driving progress to stop the bleeding of scarce public sector educational resources into the world of profit-driven publishing.
Professor Merlin Crossley is Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic Quality at UNSW