Academic publishing has recently come under intense scrutiny, and for good reason. With discussions around vast profits, the rise of paper mills, and the impact of AI content generation, the current state of academic publishing demands a closer look. As someone with a modest three years of experience in academia, I’ve found myself increasingly questioning the fairness of the model.
How Does It Work?
At its core, the process is fairly straightforward: Academics secure grants and funding, conduct research in their respective fields, and then write up their findings as a paper to contribute new knowledge. This paper is submitted to a journal, where an unpaid editor finds unpaid reviewers to assess the work. After the rigorous process of peer review, the author is granted the privilege of paying to publish their research in the journal. This fee, known as the “Article Processing Charge” (APC), can range from $1,000 to over $3,000 AUD. Once published, the journal often places the article behind a paywall, meaning that universities and individuals must purchase a subscription to access it. If the author wants their work to be freely accessible to others, they must pay an additional fee. Thus, the author can claim their work is published in a reputable journal—but at a significant financial cost.
The Cash Grab
To put it bluntly, the situation can be summarized as follows: “I create knowledge, pay (with the university, taxpayer, etc.) for the privilege of sharing it, and then pay again to access it.” A quick glance at Oxford Academic’s 2024 pricing shows that the average APC is around $5,444 AUD, without any membership discounts. My preferred journal, the Journal of Economic Entomology, charges a staggering $4,328 USD to publish, and that’s before any additional charges for Open Access or color figures. Yes, they charge extra for color figures—hundreds of dollars per figure, despite the fact that most readers access the journal digitally. The absurdity of charging for “color pixels” in a predominantly digital world cannot be overstated.
The Problems with Journals
Beyond the financial burden, there are several other significant issues with the current journal publishing system:
- Paywalls: Many academic journals are locked behind paywalls, making research prohibitively expensive for individuals and institutions without substantial funding. This restricts the dissemination of knowledge, especially in developing countries or among independent researchers (Björk & Solomon, 2012).
- Open Access Fees: While open-access journals allow free access to articles, they often charge authors high fees to publish their work, creating barriers for researchers from less well-funded institutions or those in developing countries (Björk & Solomon, 2012).
- Peer Review Challenges: The peer review process, while essential for maintaining quality, has its flaws. It can be slow, sometimes biased, and prone to errors. Reviewers, often overburdened and working for free, may not always provide the thorough evaluations needed, leading to delays and potential oversights (Moher & Srivastava, 2015).
- Predatory Journals: The rise of predatory journals, which charge authors for publication without providing proper peer review or editorial oversight, undermines the credibility of published research. These journals prioritize profit over quality, bombarding academics with solicitations for papers or reviews for obscure, often illegitimate, journals (Tennant et al., 2017).
- Publication Delays: The time between manuscript submission and publication can be lengthy, sometimes delaying the dissemination of important findings. This is particularly problematic in fast-moving fields, where timely publication is crucial (Tennant et al., 2017).
- Pressure to Publish: The “publish or perish” culture in academia emphasizes quantity over quality, pushing researchers to publish results that may not be fully validated. This pressure, combined with performance metrics like the H-index and citation scores, contributes to the ongoing reproducibility crisis, where many studies, particularly in fields like psychology and medicine, cannot be replicated (Tennant et al., 2017).
- Editorial Bias: Journals may exhibit biases, whether intentional or not, that favor certain institutions, geographic regions, or types of research. This bias can limit the diversity of research that gets published (Moher & Srivastava, 2015).
- Gender and Ethnic Disparities: There are ongoing concerns about the underrepresentation of women and minorities among authors, reviewers, and editorial boards, which can influence what research is published and how it is evaluated (Tennant et al., 2017).
A New System?
There have been several proposed alternatives to the traditional journal model, ranging from peer review systems akin to Reddit to blockchain-based models. These ideas are worth considering as we think about the future of academic publishing and how it might be improved. The key questions are: “Where should the money go instead?”, “How can we ensure the security and rigor of peer review?”, and “How can we make the system equitable for all?” What follows is a speculative look at a future without traditional journals, using forecasting and backcasting techniques to envision what that might look like.
Publishing is Dead. Long Live Publishing.
Mark finishes the final edits on his research paper, his customized AI-powered review assistant checking the reference DOI links and performing one last sweep to ensure no citations or recently released research have been missed. The AI gives the green light, and Mark generates the final PDF, ready for publication. He notices that the university’s “Disperse” blockchain publishing platform is running a bit slow today, likely due to the end-of-financial-year rush as researchers hurry to meet their KPIs. Mark uploads his paper to the university’s server, fills out the required tags, and hits submit. The university’s system verifies the details, confirms them with the other authors, and then publishes the pre-release paper to the blockchain, complete with a timestamp and author tokens. Once on the chain, smart contracts initiate the peer review process.
As an early career researcher (ECR), Mark’s paper requires review by both an ECR and a more senior researcher. These reviewers, whose identities can remain anonymous, will decide whether to attach their real names or simply their ID tokens to the approved paper. The paper is likely to come back for revisions, but Mark’s AI has already addressed factual issues along with readability, logic, and method-analysis concerns. Nonetheless, there’s always the chance that “reviewer 2” will point out an obscure, untranslated article from the 1950s that Mark missed. The edits will be logged on the blockchain, preserving the paper’s revision history along with the reviewers’ ID tokens for complete transparency.
With the peer review process underway, Mark now considers which Aggregators to submit his paper to. These Aggregators, modern-day equivalents of traditional journals, link to blockchain-stored papers within their field of relevance. Each Aggregator has a human editorial team that curates the work passing AI quality checks. Editors are chosen based on their experience, impact within their field, and a publishing score—a metric generated from the number of papers they publish, citations received, and papers they review.
Mark selects one of his preferred Aggregators, “The Journal of Industrial Interaction Design.” It’s a niche field, but the journal has high impact, particularly in industry applications. After selecting an article by a familiar researcher from his old university, Mark is directed to the paper on Queensland University of Technology’s blockchain. Their blockchain is replicated across several global universities, part of the 2029 Publisher Accord—a collaborative effort that distributes infrastructure load, provides equitable blockchain access for developing nations, and ensures that all blockchains are fast, redundant, and secure. The infrastructure costs are surprisingly low, given the savings from eliminating traditional publishing fees, and the additional funds are reinvested into research, scholarships, and facilities.
A chime on Mark’s terminal alerts him to his upcoming class. He dismisses the notification, finishes his coffee, and heads out for his 10 AM lecture.
This speculative vision of the future might seem distant, but it’s grounded in the pressing need to rethink how academic knowledge is created, shared, and accessed. By imagining new models and embracing technological advancements, we can start to build a system that is fairer, more efficient, and better aligned with the needs of the global academic community.
References:
- Björk, B. C., & Solomon, D. (2012). Open access versus subscription journals: A comparison of scientific impact. BMC Medicine, 10(1), 73. https://doi.org/10.1186/1741-7015-10-73
- Moher, D., & Srivastava, A. (2015). You are invited to peer review an article: What’s next? BMC Medicine, 13(1), 159. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0423-3
- Tennant, J. P., Dugan, J. M., Graziotin, D., Jacques, D. C., Waldner, F., Mietchen, D., Elkhatib, Y., B. A., Crick, T., & Masuzzo, P. (2017). A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review. F1000Research, 6, 1151. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.12037.1
