KT Debate: Academic Publishing — Why We Need It (or Do We?)

Leah Crockett vs. Kathryn Sibley

“The music business was killed by Napster; movie theaters were derailed by digital streaming; traditional magazines are in crisis mode — yet in this digital information world: academic journals and the publishers who own them are posting higher profits than nearly any sector of commerce”

Recently, I came across the Huffpost article quoted above, which stated that academic publishers are boasting higher profit margins than Apple. APPLE?! This sparked a debate around the table at our weekly team meeting. We recognized both that we need the academic publishing system, but also perhaps, that we don’t. Some aspects of the system are essential for knowledge translation (KT), quality assurance, and to reduce publication bias — but some aspects are also archaic and place a damper on KT.

So we debated the pros and cons of some of the aspects of academic publishing and what that means to KT. Here we go!

Topic: Academic Publishing

PROS: Questioning, reasoning, and evidence are critical to the advancement of science. The academic community relies on the work of its members and peer review provides a quality assurance check on the science being conducted. If research merely sits in lab books and computer files, it represents a waste of research activities. Research results need to be published, regardless of the outcome, to contribute to the advancement of science, new discoveries, and better patient outcomes. There is an obligation to communicate so that others may benefit, and also to avoid unnecessary repetition. Furthermore, the productivity of an academic is an important aspect of promotion, tenure, and funding success.

CONS: The system is bizarre. If you take a look at the flow of money in research production, it goes something like this: the government uses tax dollars to fund university research groups and libraries, researchers obtain government grants to conduct their research, and researchers write up these results and submit them to journals. Here, other researchers review submissions as unpaid volunteers and if accepted, the authors pay to have the work published, which often ends up behind a paywall, for which universities (who produced the research) then pay to access. It seems counter intuitive — but it continues to exist because researchers’ funding prospects and career advancement are tied to this system. And in the age of ‘publish or perish’, journals exist to give discoveries, researchers, and institutions a hierarchy.

Topic: Open Access

PROS: Open access is the practice of providing unrestricted access to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles, making research more readily available to the public. This has the potential to reduce research waste by opening up scientific research to those outside of the academic community and allowing for faster dissemination of research findings.

CONS: While open access to research findings represents a major step towards public availability of knowledge, it only goes part way. Open access ≠ open knowledge if it remains in academic language and is not conducted using processes that include greater engagement between researchers and research end-users. Additionally, open access may be a term that those outside of the academic realm may not be familiar with, or know where to actually access articles from. Furthermore, open access often comes with a hefty fee for the researchers, without necessarily reducing the subscription cost to institutions.

Topic: Publishing & KT

PROS: Knowledge synthesis is one of the four key areas of focus in KT, and is essential when considering an initiative’s potential for widespread implementation. Knowledge Synthesis involves synthesizing results from individual research studies and interpreting them within the context of global evidence. In this regard, academic publishing of all research is key to building a representative picture of the truth. As our Research Assistant Gwen Brockman has discussed previously, drawing conclusions from a skewed sample (termed publication bias) can lead to misinformed solutions and misinformed interventions down the road. In this sense, academic publishing is key to KT for two main reasons: (1) it allows us to synthesize existing high-quality peer-reviewed articles, and (2) the peer-review process is an important tool for quality control of research.

CONS: The emphasis on peer-reviewed publications has meant that they have become a goal in and of themselves. Academics are expected to publish, and to publish frequently. This has created several structural barriers to effective knowledge translation. The volume of publications has increased in the past 50 years, making it difficult for end-users to find the information they need (not to mention the issue of the paywall). The often lengthy peer-review process is also problematic. Career progression and grant success are often based on number of publications, the impact factor of the journals themselves, and the number of citations those articles receive. Yet, evidence shows that quantity doesn’t necessarily reflect quality, journal impact factors are misused and lack transparency, and peer review generally fails to screen out poor quality research. Furthermore, researchers typically aren’t rewarded for doing KT, so it’s not surprising that academics may view KT as an important process, but not necessarily a personal priority with so many other competing obligations with direct bearing on their success as an academic.

The Verdict

It’s clear that the answer isn’t simply black and white. There are aspects of the academic publishing system that we absolutely need for research integrity, the advancement of science, and effective KT. But there are also aspects that create structural barriers for researchers, institutions and to the process of KT. Changing this system will require a major paradigm shift, but a good start is in how academic institutions recognize KT in tenure and promotion. For now, I recently heard a useful analogy: “peer-review is like democracy: it’s a terrible system, but it’s the best we’ve got”.

About the Authors

Leah Crockett is a doctoral student in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba.

Dr. Kathryn Sibley is the Director of the KT platform at the George and Fay Yee Centre for Healthcare Innovation (CHI), Canada Research Chair in Integrated Knowledge Translation in Rehabilitation Sciences, and Assistant Professor in Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba.