Publish and Impoverish
Academic journal publishing has become a minefield of bad incentives, and it affects everyone.
Back in the mid-1600s, intellectuals and scholars had a wild idea. They reckoned that the best way to figure something out was to have your work checked by others who were trying to answer the same question, and to have these debates open to as many people as possible. Places like The Royal Society started publishing certifiable rock stars. If Isaac Newton showed up to an afterparty for the 17th-century version of the Grammys, he could snub any celebrity — full-on Rick James. These publications were pretty radical for their day, providing thinkers the opportunity not only to be right, but also to be publicly and productively wrong. Hypotheses and evidence had to fight in front of the whole tribe.
Academic journals are still supposed to be places where ideas can have an honest cage match, but over the centuries, the system itself has become encumbered by bad incentives. For many scholars today, especially new researchers, academic publishing has become a minefield of professional pressures, outright scams, shoddy standards, and vast amounts of painstaking but unpaid labor. This presents issues not only for the academics involved, but for the production of knowledge as a whole — and that affects all of us.
Consider the anti-vaccine rabbit hole your aunt fell down while browsing Facebook. That all started with one colossally bad scholarly paper linking vaccines to autism. The paper was retracted, and there’s a reason the author is referred to as a “former doctor”, but not before damage was done. As we’ve seen through COVID-19 and the ongoing measles crisis, we all figuratively — and maybe literally — have skin in the game.
There are thousands of academic journals that put out millions of articles every year. These articles get packaged and distributed through publishers. And over time, most of the academic journal industry has been consolidated among a handful of publishers. It’s gotten to the point where the top five publishers now control more than half of all content, and the top 20 control more than 80 percent. As we all know, having important industries controlled by ever fewer people has always worked out well for society (at this point, please adjust your sarcasm detection device). To get a sense of just how titanic these big fish have grown, Elsevier, a top-five publisher, rakes in billions every year. In 2018, its profit margins were more than double that of Netflix.
To make matters worse, journals today have what appears to be a captive pool of contributors, in stark contrast with the intrinsically motivated and often independently wealthy pre-Victorian savants who comprised the first generation of academic authors. In modern academia, if you want a tenure-track career, then you must “publish or perish.” Even folks whose primary focus is on teaching rather than research could be passed over in their career because they didn’t publish enough.
“The main ‘currency’ for academic jobs is academic publications and grants,” Christopher Ferguson, a PhD psychologist who studies violence and video games, told us. “This puts a lot of pressure on academics to get publications, whatever their quality, to enhance their careers.”
Where things truly start to go sideways is when it comes to monetary compensation. For researchers, doing something for the love of the sport is great. But we’re not talking about Jordan playing baseball while he’s milking a lucrative shoe deal. Many researchers are earning under $40,000 a year, even with a doctorate. This mostly comes from teaching salaries, as well as grants and fellowships. Publishing in journals may be a “currency” for securing positions, but the labor itself usually goes unpaid. Whenever an individual or university shells out cash for journal access, which in some cases can exceed $10,000 a year per institution, that money goes straight to the journals. The authors themselves rarely see a dime of it. And the dynamic of “climbing the ladder” by publishing shifts the bulk of the pressure in the scholarly publishing industry squarely onto the shoulders of authors rather than the institutions.
It’s not entirely strange to expect that highly skilled people should be paid for work that was required for career advancement. After all, academia is supposed to be the bleeding edge of human knowledge, not the NCAA. But not all academics see the situation this way, as Brett Zimmeman, an author and retired English professor from York University, pointed out to us.
“I don’t see professional researchers as a ‘captive pool of people.’” Zimmerman said. “True, typically we aren’t paid for our work by the publishers of academic journals, but those journals provide something far more valuable — exposure. [...] Small things can lead to big things. It’s a long game.”
Matthew McManus, a political science lecturer at the University of Michigan, described the academic publishing world as a “prestige economy.” “You sometimes still hear people say academia should be a kind of Platonic search for truth unsullied by those kinds of monetary obsessions,” he told us.
The sad reality, as McManus agreed, is that there can be no unbesmirched search for truth for people with ends to meet. Prestige might lead to future rewards or opportunities, but you cannot eat prestige. Given that researching, writing, revising, submitting, and coaxing a paper through peer-review to publication is a process that can easily take months or even years, how productive is it that all this work goes unpaid until some theoretical future date?
“I think you're led to believe that the institution that hires you is meant to appropriately compensate you for your work,” Dr. Justin Mogilski, an evolutionary psychologist and sex researcher, explained to us. “But there's too much distance between what you're capable of generating — in terms of publications — and what you get paid. It would be better to receive a direct incentive."
These pressures can lead to some dark places. If you’re trying to pad your credentials, an easy-out is falling victim to predatory journals. These aren’t the normal, “reputable” outfits that take your stuff for free and then sell it — instead, they charge you a fee to publish your work. Predatory journals may put out as much as 20 percent of all articles published annually — more than 10,000 journals — some of which can be actively dangerous, especially when someone in a field like medicine takes advice from official-looking nonsense. Those sorts of slip-ups become increasingly likely when we’re looking at half a million articles being pumped out every year in shoddy journals.
Some predatory journals are out-and-out scams. Others do publish, but their review process can range from bad to non-existent. The review process is the stage where a credentialed expert looks over your work to make sure it’s not complete trash before it goes live. Predatory journals aren’t too keen on that. They basically take the brand of academia and sell bootleg versions on the sidewalk. Careful review might mean publishing fewer articles overall, which is bad for business if you get paid by the paper.
As Brian Kalla-Collins, an Australia-based linguistics Phd, told us, some authors may fork over thousands of dollars in publishing fees to journals with low quality standards but huge audiences, which can further your career, even if you're putting out “controversial papers […] with bad statistical design, crazy hypotheses, etc.”
New knowledge has a production cost, and it’s important to ensure that journals have the funding to properly vet new submissions. But journals are only one link in this supply chain, and academic scholarship isn’t really supposed to be a commodity traded on the stock market, nor the research equivalent of those “totally legit” Gucci sunglasses you bought from a guy on the pier. If there is some profit to be made, there’s a strong case for sharing at least some measure of it with the people doing most of the work. To do otherwise creates a two-tiered system where the life of the mind once again becomes a luxury only modern-day aristocrats can afford. This isn’t just unfair to the many promising and talented academics who can’t afford to put in months or years of unpaid labor, but to all of society.
“I think we're missing out the perspectives of people who, on average, probably experience the world as most people experience it: not rich.” Dr. Mogilski said. “Academia would probably feel more relatable to more people if it didn't select for affluence. And, I don't know. Maybe that would improve trust in science, scholarship, and expertise? Science for the people.”
We all have a stake in research working well, because the knowledge it produces, along with the downstream technologies and breakthroughs, can potentially enrich the lives of billions. This means, among other things, fairly compensating academics with actual currency they can pay rent with. And not just authors, but also their counterparts who are supposed to be the last line of defense against bollocks being injected into the bloodstream of scholarly and, by extension, public discourse.
“One group who really should be paid are peer-reviewers,” Chris Ferguson said. “Right now, it's unpaid and there's really no incentive other than one's own intrinsic desire to help science. I can say as an associate editor of one journal, it's very hard to get peer-reviewers.”
At the same time, dialing down the profit motive for journals and publishers would seem to be a prudent move. We don’t want to turn academic journals into click-bait based on “likes and subscribes”, but neither should research be fueled by instant noodles and trust funds.
Multiple people we spoke to mentioned that introducing a financial incentive for authors may risk exacerbating the trend of volume rather than quality, and provide a system that could be gamed. “[We should] find some way to get authors to slow down and do really good studies rather than just churn out as many as possible,” Ferguson said.
One alternative may be the model followed by the US National Institutes of Health, whose researchers are paid, but not by the article in a fee-for-service way that would incentivise high-volume, low-quality tripe. Instead, they’re given grants with the caveat that their final product be made available for free to the public. After all, the money flowing to journals is ultimately from you, the public, whether it’s that time you decided to bite the bullet and pay 35 bucks for an article you weren’t sure you really wanted, your university/institutional subscription, or your tax dollars which subsidize many of them.
Using this template, we could require for-profit journals to commit cash for grants that fund the research they publish. Think of it as paying it forward… or just paying anything at all in any direction. It’s not an unprecedented policy. We regulated insurance companies and how much they can skim off the top as profit. We could absolutely funnel some of the money going to journals and require that it be used to materially support basic research. For those still on the fence, imagine one day getting a hip replacement from a doctor who prepared for the surgery by reading a garbage paper published without review for a modest fee.
We take for granted the countless innovations of the modern era that we all enjoy, and the careful and methodical systems, processes, and institutions that have allowed this steady march of progress. These systems and institutions require regular maintenance and the occasional prod in the right direction. Academic journals shouldn’t be a pay-for-play hustle, or a country club, or a series of content mills. They should be the engine that helps propel us — all of us — into the future.
See also: “The Things You Bought But Don’t Own”
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Stop the presses -- the psychology hucksters want to be paid by the page! At least they're mask-off pulpers now.
Your error, here, is accepting on faith that every current professor of anything is an "academic." Most are, quite a few aren't. In what I may call the fictive disciplines - or perhaps, now, the pulp disciplines - there is a very obvious supply/demand-related issue at play.
In disciplines where nothing more is required to produce "academic things" than fingers and a chair, field members are not limited in their output by physical factors. One researcher in chemistry can only prepare so many solutions, and grants have to be sought and papers published on the basis of material evidence. One p-hacker in sociology, on the other hand, is only limited by his (or her) words per minute - and maybe not even that now thanks to ChatGPT - and grants are sought & papers published strictly by dint of the relative appeal and zazzle of his conclusions and proposals over and above the rest of the field.
The latter thing, as a concept, is not outside the remit of the university: it is in fact a thing called an art and/or letter, as distinct, specifically, from science. Such a distinction was drawn because arts and sciences are governed by very different rules. What we now have, in our sort of hybrid fields, which sometimes judge by evidence and sometimes by beauty or morality, but purport to rely on neither fully, is what would be known to the ancienter academics, of which you speak, as a "chimaera," a miscomposed and hopeless notion, crudely and gappily stitched together from parts of several incompatible bodies.
I enjoyed this piece but I do think if you're gonna talk about bad publications the vaccine one isn't a particularly representative example, as it's one bad paper that was retracted. Whatever one thinks of its effects (I'm sceptical it has had much of an effect), it's not the typical bad publication. The typical bad publication is something with a questionable methodology, faulty logic and/or bad evidence that gets through because it supports a hypothesis the reviewers and editors want to support.
As you note, reviewers are unpaid. Some people use the review process to pressure people towards their views (or even say things like 'you should have cited X' when X is their own work). Reviewers demand impossible standards of proof for views they disagree with, and demand nothing for those they agree with. Then they use the overwhelming number of publications on one side of the debate to declare the other side illegitimate.
Paying reviewers wouldn't completely solve this, but it does provide another incentive besides enforcing ideological uniformity.