The scandal of academic publishing

Much is rotten in academic publishing, but it is easier to hold noses than do anything more fundamental about the stench. The five companies dominating the industry have grown fat on the backs of free academic labour. Why do academics (and so their research funders, their employers and the taxpayer) continue to subsidise the Big Five? Perhaps because one needs, and the other supplies, the publication indicators of academic performance on which rankings and the distribution of resources in higher education are largely based. Many of those with vested interests in academic publishing and higher education share a faith that publication indicators indicate something other than an ability to game, that academic papers will be read rather than merely counted, and that scholarship is mysteriously protected by a peer review system that is often little more than hollow ritual. The incursion of “predatory” publishers – publishers simply selling authors what they want – cheap, instant performance indicators, no questions asked, no need for gaming or peer review – might have been expected to have shaken this faith. Instead, established academic publishers have not hesitated to emulate the predators in their rush to make money, whatever the cost. This paper argues that the cost may be to scholarship.