Aca­d­e­mic pub­lish­ing is built on an old model where pub­lish­ers were needed to print and dis­trib­ute jour­nals to libraries. Under this sys­tem, it makes sense that the jour­nals are dis­trib­uted by pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies who charge fees for their work. On the other hand, the aca­d­e­mics who write for the jour­nals, the peer review­ers and (almost all) edi­tors, have always con­tributed their time and exper­tise with­out cost. Essen­tially, they are being paid by uni­ver­si­ties and other research orga­ni­za­tions to do this work. While we had print-​​based dis­tri­b­u­tion, this model largely worked.

But now we work elec­tron­i­cally, the model is bro­ken. We do not need pub­lish­ers to print and dis­trib­ute jour­nals. In fact, they are now hin­der­ing rather than help­ing aca­d­e­mic research. You would think that in the mod­ern world, we would have high qual­ity on-​​line jour­nals avail­able free-of-charge. It costs almost noth­ing to main­tain a jour­nal web­site, and with aca­d­e­mics con­tribut­ing their ser­vices with­out cost, why are we still per­sist­ing with the old model in which we pay pub­lish­ers enor­mous sums of money?

There are sev­eral rea­sons why the sta­tus quo is very dif­fi­cult to change, per­haps best under­stood by example.

If one of my PhD stu­dents has writ­ten a new paper and asks me where they should send it, I am going to rec­om­mend an exist­ing, well-​​recognized jour­nal. That inevitably means a jour­nal that is expen­sive and does not have open-​​access. I can­not sug­gest that an aspir­ing aca­d­e­mic pub­lish in an open-​​access online jour­nal because it will not help them get tenure or pro­mo­tion. As long as the pub­lish­ers con­trol the most rec­og­nized jour­nals, the sys­tem is self-​​perpetuating. Put another way, as long as aca­d­e­mics judge research out­put based on where it appears rather than what it says, the sit­u­a­tion is unlikely to change.

Now think about it from the point of view of the aca­d­e­mic soci­eties. I am a direc­tor of the Inter­na­tional Insti­tute of Fore­cast­ers (IIF) which pub­lishes the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing (IJF). Every few years, the IIF must decide which pub­lisher (if any) to part­ner with in order to pro­duce the IJF. We have been with Else­vier since the jour­nal was founded, but there is noth­ing to stop us split­ting and going our own way at the end of the cur­rent con­tract. What keeps us with an exist­ing pub­lish­ing com­pany is money. Else­vier sells our jour­nal to libraries and gives some of the money to the IIF as a roy­alty pay­ment. They sell the IJF as part of a jour­nal bun­dle which also includes some well-​​known jour­nals that are must-​​buys for any aca­d­e­mic library. We ben­e­fit enor­mously from this prac­tice as it forces libraries to buy the IJF also. If we self-​​published the jour­nal online, we would lose the asso­ci­ated income which we use to fund other activ­i­ties (e.g., schol­ar­ships and con­fer­ences). Even if we charged a small frac­tion of what Else­vier charges, it is unlikely that many libraries would buy the IJF if it was not bun­dled with more famous names. So our choice is to stick with a big pub­lisher and receive some much needed income, or go online and open-​​access and be poorer. Of course, we could charge more for soci­ety mem­ber­ship, but most aca­d­e­mics do not have the avail­able funds to afford it.

Noth­ing much will change while the aca­d­e­mic soci­eties are locked into the sys­tem, and bud­ding aca­d­e­mic authors need to get pub­li­ca­tions in the exist­ing publisher-​​owned jour­nals in order to get pro­mo­tion or tenure.

The pub­lish­ers, of course, argue that they pro­vide a use­ful ser­vice even in an elec­tronic age. Apart from print­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion, they do pro­vide the web-​​based sub­mis­sion sys­tems that are use­ful for jour­nal man­age­ment (e.g., Man­u­script­Cen­tral and Elsevier’s Edi­to­r­ial Sys­tem), and they pro­vide online repos­i­to­ries of pub­lished arti­cles (e.g., Sci­enceDi­rect and Springer­Link). How­ever, in both cases what they pro­vide is actu­ally pretty ordi­nary. Elsevier’s Edi­to­r­ial Sys­tem is so appallingly dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate that I used to be inun­dated with emails from con­fused authors, review­ers and asso­ciate edi­tors won­der­ing how to use it. I even­tu­ally con­vinced Else­vier to let the IJF switch to the rival Man­u­script­Cen­tral which is cer­tainly bet­ter but is by no means a great exam­ple of a sim­ple user-​​interface. Fur­ther­more, the online repos­i­to­ries are clunky and out-​​dated — they do not allow mod­er­ated com­ment­ing on arti­cles, or easy upload of asso­ci­ated data sets and com­puter code.  So I main­tain a sep­a­rate web­site for the IJF at www​.fore​cast​ers​.org/ijf/ in addi­tion to the Sci­enceDi­rect site in order to pro­vide these facil­i­ties. If the pub­lish­ers were really adding value, they would be pro­vid­ing a much bet­ter ser­vice than they do, and I would not need to run a sep­a­rate web site.

I should point out that I am paid by Else­vier as the Editor-​​in-​​Chief of the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing, and I have an excel­lent work­ing rela­tion­ship with the Else­vier staff. So I am bit­ing the hand that feeds me. How­ever, despite the per­sonal ben­e­fit I gain from the exist­ing sys­tem, I think that the whole schol­arly enter­prise would be much bet­ter served with an online open-​​access system.

It is hard to see how indi­vid­ual soci­eties and authors can change the sys­tem to online and open-​​access given the cur­rent entrenched inter­est groups. What is needed are sev­eral simul­ta­ne­ous changes:

1. We need uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tors to con­cen­trate on what peo­ple write rather than where it appears (yes, they actu­ally need to read some papers). It is crazy that a great paper that gets pub­lished in a low-​​ranking jour­nal is ignored, while an ordi­nary paper that gets passed the review­ers and appears in a top jour­nal leads to pro­mo­tion. The papers that appear in top jour­nals are not all good, and the papers that appear in lower-​​ranked jour­nals are not all bad. There is no sub­sti­tute for read­ing the papers and judg­ing the qual­ity of an aca­d­e­mic directly on their research, not indi­rectly based on where it is pub­lished. If uni­ver­si­ties want to cut their library bills they need to stop pres­sur­ing staff to only pub­lish in the top-​​ranked jour­nals and let them get on with writ­ing good papers regard­less of where they appear.
2. Aca­d­e­mic soci­eties need to wean them­selves off the pub­lish­ers’ purse. One way would be to make pub­li­ca­tion in a soci­ety jour­nal more expen­sive (in sta­tis­tics it is usu­ally free) and get the employ­ers of researchers (e.g., uni­ver­si­ties) to pay the costs. After all, they should be sav­ing a lot of money in library fees and this way it is given directly to peo­ple who will spend it for the ben­e­fit of researchers. There would need to be some dis­count­ing sys­tem estab­lished to pro­vide for researchers in devel­op­ing countries.
3. The major fund­ing agen­cies (who are not wed­ded to the exist­ing sys­tem) need to take a stand for the ben­e­fit of every­one (except the exist­ing pub­lish­ers). We need the National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion, the National Insti­tutes of Health, the UK Research Coun­cils, the Aus­tralian Research Coun­cil, the National Health and Med­ical Research Cen­tre, and sim­i­lar fund­ing agen­cies in other coun­tries to insist that government-​​funded research be made pub­licly avail­able online and with­out cost. That will short-​​circuit the exist­ing sys­tem and help weaken the publisher-​​stranglehold on aca­d­e­mic jour­nals. Research that is pub­licly funded would then also be pub­licly avail­able. This is argued per­sua­sively by Danny Kings­ley and George Mon­biot.

Related Posts:

• Beware of junk jour­nals and publishers
• Using DOIs
• Why ref­eree?
• The falling stan­dard of Eng­lish in research
• Cross­Val­i­dated Jour­nal Club