Talk:Academic publishing

Current status and potential developments

Research journals have been so successful that the number of journals and of papers has proliferated over the past few decades, and the credo of the modern academic has become "publish or perish". Except for generalist journals like Science or Nature, the topics covered in any single journal have tended to narrow, and readership and citation have declined. A variety of methods reviewing submissions exist. The most common involves initial approval by the journal, peer review by two or three researchers working in similar or closely related subjects who recommend approval or rejection as well as request error correction, clarification or additions before publishing. Controversial topics may receive additional levels of review. Journals have developed a hierarchy, partly based on reputation but also on the strictness of the review policy. More prestigious journals are more likely to receive and publish more important work. Submitters try to submit their work to the most prestigious journal likely to publish it to bolster their reputation and curriculum vitae. A quantitative (and not uncontroversial) measure of the prestige or importance of a journal is its impact factor, which is increasingly used as a criterion for promotion and in the awarding of tenure.

Some journals now include an open source element; i.e. the authors are allowed to post unreviewed material and designated reviewers or the reader community freely comments on the material and thus provide an alternative method of quality control. Such journals can be open access, such as PLoS One, or Psycoloquy, or subscription, such as Current Anthropology.

The mathematician Andrew Odlyzko has argued that research journals will evolve into something akin to Internet forums over the coming decade, by extending the interactivity of current Internet preprints. This change may open them up to a wider range of ideas, some more developed than others. Whether this will be a positive evolution remains to be seen. Some claim that forums, like markets, tend to thrive or fail based on their ability to attract talent, perhaps just the same as with conventional journals. Some believe that highly restrictive and tightly monitored forums may be the least likely to thrive, and some think the exact opposite. Semantic publishing is changing the face of scientific publishing. In particular, self-publishing of experiments on the web could potentially make all the experiment data available as semantic data objects that can be searched, shared and integrated by anyone at any time. This simple but radical idea is being explored by W3C now (demo).

Distribution and business aspects

It was a fact of pre-technology life that, no matter how dedicated, one person can only give a limited number of lectures to the small groups of students who can travel to hear them; and, if articles are to be written and distributed, only a small number of copies can be hand-written or typed. The development of the printing press therefore represented a revolution for communicating the latest hypotheses and research results to the academic community and supplemented what a scholar could do personally. Ironically, this improvement in the efficiency of communication created a challenge for libraries which have had to accommodate the weight and volume of literature. To understand the scale of the problem: about two centuries ago, the number of scientific papers published annually was doubling approximately every fifteen years. Today, the number of published papers doubles about every ten years.

But the new reality of internet technology is that it is far cheaper to send out electronic versions of a paper than to have it printed in a journal. Unlike their medieval counterparts, modern academics can now run electronic journals and distribute academic materials without the need for publishers. Not surprisingly, publishers perceive this emancipation as a serious threat to their business model. In reality, the interests of scholars and publishers have long been in conflict. The purpose of copyright is to protect the capital invested in the "work" by the publisher, while the wish of the scholar is to have the work as widely distributed as possible.

Publishing academic journals and books is a large part of an international industry. The shares of the major publishing companies are listed on national stock exchanges and management policies must satisfy the dividend expectations of international shareholders. Although some specialist academic publishers used to take a less commercial view of their business, the industry has been consolidating and, as smaller units are absorbed into the larger, standardised accounting and profit-oriented policies have dominated the industry. Critics have claimed that these policies now constrain more altruistic leanings of academic publishing.

Content moved over from Open access

I've moved over the #Role_for_publishers_in_scholarly_communication section from the open access page, witten by nemo bis, since I think it fits here better in a criticism section here than it did at its previous location (discussion). It focuses on publisher value-add and gatekeeping by academic journals. It probably still needs a bit of editing for tone and consistency with the rest of the page. There may also be some overlap with existing content. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 08:28, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

There is a lot of synthesis and essay-like issues in the section. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:34, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

I have to agree with that. Especially editorialised are parts like Above, for example, we question the necessity of the current infrastructure for peer review, and if a scholar-led crowdsourced alternative may be preferable., which I think isn't very well supported. I'd have thought that having a third party organise peer review as neutrally as possible is approx 80% of the value-add of a journal. the part about for-profit companies (or the private sector) should be allowed to be in charge of the management and dissemination of academic output refers to a lot of journals, but not all. I think the better solution might be to integrate some of the points and references throughout the current page, since the amount of info probably doesn't warrant its own section, and there's some significant overlap with #Publishers_and_business_aspects. I'll have to leave the decisions up to this page's watchers though, since I'm still a little over-busy at the Open access page. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 10:52, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

When reading the article I noted some observations: -the article had a neutral and informative tone -all of the links work and provided accurate information -the description of a thesis paper should be added to the categories of papers -in the citation section different ways to cite quotations should be included along with the rules of citing -the crisis section doesn't pertain much relevance to the article

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific publishing

Is there any article related to "Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific publishing"? There are many interesting studies such as that https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/02/23/study-says-women-arent-publishing-less-during-pandemic Think it could be good to have some article/section, but probably not here but elsewhere?Karlaz1 (talk) 14:13, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

Diversity?

Maybe we should consider to add some information about the diversity issue, not only gender (https://phys.org/news/2023-01-persistent-gender-gap-scientific-editors.html) but also Global south vs North, problems in science evaluation in developing countries etc. And last part should be edited to be more encyclopedic "Role for publishers in scholarly communication" Karlaz1 (talk) 14:15, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Consider checking VitalSource

for policies / practices / guidelines

GeoVenturing (talk) 19:36, 29 July 2023 (UTC)