Academic publishing is broken. Here’s its top three fixes.
I could go on and on about how broken the current academic publishing system is — from reviewers not being paid, to racism and sexism in whose work gets published, to the volume of dull scholarship and IP theft occurring to meet neoliberal metrics, to reviewers bullying researchers because the “peer” review process is anonymous. For your sake, I’m going to whittle it down to the top three issues and how to fix them.
Problem #1: Editors own the world’s scientific knowledge base and tell us what we’re allowed to see
Academic publishing is big business. The handful of top publishers together earn more than $20 billion in profits per annum. The biggest journals reject 90% of the manuscripts coming their way. The average rejection rate across all journals is 55%. When a paper is accepted, researchers may pay between US$1,500-$11,000 for it to be published. If academics want any chance of getting a grant or getting promoted, they need to publish prolifically — ‘publish or perish’, as they say. The entire game is built to keep academics ‘out’ yet R&D is the backbone of an innovative, robust, and ethical society. So, what gives? Why are academics being trained to be grateful for their exploitation and what can be done about it?
