Academic publishing needs “renewed focus and collective action” to embrace new approaches and ensure the future of the industry, concludes a report from Cambridge University Press, released last week.
What started as an exploration of barriers to open access models turned into a call for “radical change” in academic publishing. “It has been clear for some time that the publishing ecosystem is under increasing strain,” Mandy Hill, managing director of Cambridge University Press, wrote in the introduction to the report. “This was the case before the growth of open access, but it is also clear that the shift to open has not solved the problems, as some early open access advocates may have hoped.”
The report, which followed workshops and interviews with stakeholders, includes results of a survey of more than 3,000 researchers, librarians, funders, publishers and societies.
Among its observations and recommendations:
- The growth in volume of research articles is overwhelming the system, as other coverage has noted, due to AI-generated articles and paper mill output and the increase in scientific research more generally.
- Economic models for publishing need reform, as “pay-to-publish and pay-to-read models continue to undermine financial sustainability” while budgets for both models remain static or shrink.
- The academic reward system continues to incentivize quantity over quality, and “the challenges in academic publishing are inseparable from broader issues of recognition and reward.”
“We fundamentally believe that publishing less – but better – is essential for the health of the entire research system worldwide,” the authors of the report state.
To learn more about the recommendations and what comes next, Retraction Watch spoke with Hill, who stepped away from the Frankfurt Book Fair for our conversation. The text has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Retraction Watch: We read a lot of reports on the state of publishing. This report makes some fairly provocative statements about what specific changes are needed. Why is that?
Mandy Hill: Doing the work over the past six months, through the survey, through the workshops, really brought home that enough is enough. We’ve got to stop talking about the problem and start doing something about it. [It has been like] everyone walking past a burning building going, “Oh, that house is on fire.” And then maybe a couple of people getting buckets of water and throwing them at the fire and saying, “Yeah, [I’ve] done my bit. Tried, didn’t work.” The only thing that is going to make the difference to put this fire out is us all working together in a concerted way to really tackle it.
So you’re right. We have tried to make pretty provocative statements about how serious this now is. It’s not going to be sustainable if we don’t make change. I’ve chatted to a few other publishers, including some of the large commercial publishers, and they agree that the rate of submission, and then the resultant output, is unsustainable. I think everyone sees that the incentives are wrong for some people to want to change that, but I think everyone sees we’re reaching a crunch point where something has to change.
As a publisher, what I don’t want to do is say, “The problem’s over there. Somebody else needs to sort it.” We want to say, actually, we’re all in this together. But we have to see this as a systemic challenge where no one piece can be fixed without everything else being fixed.
Retraction Watch: So to that end, what is Cambridge University Press willing to do? What changes will you make?
Hill: We made the conscious choice to not come up with a 10-point plan of what Cambridge is going to do, because that wouldn’t have solved this. The biggest thing we can do is grab people by the hair or the hand or whichever it’s going to take to get them around the table, and make that collective action work.
Realistically, we publish 20,000 research articles a year. We’re a relatively small piece of the publishing puzzle. We alone can’t change things, but that cannot be our “get out of jail free” card. So there are some things we want to do through demonstration.
We’re looking at ourselves in the mirror. Are all of our journals adding value in their communities? What can we do to ensure they are? We’ve been very clear in our strategy that we will never be driven by quantity, that there will be times when journals will grow, but that’s always got to be quality driven.
Probably the biggest way we hope we can make wider action is as a department of the University of Cambridge. We actually think the convening power of the University of Cambridge with us as a part of it — we’re both a leading university and a leading publisher — and with those two sides of our identity, we think we can really pull people together. We’ve already tried to have conversations with funders, but we hope to expand that.
Retraction Watch: Do you think the administration at the university is up for these conversations? Do they acknowledge the problem and acknowledge that they can play a role in making changes that influence the wider circle?
Hill: My hesitation is not wanting to put words into the mouth of the university. What I can say, though, is that we have had conversations, not only with the vice chancellor, but also with the pro vice chancellor of research and the university librarian, and they are very supportive of what we’re doing and want to work with us on that idea of convening. I think the University of Cambridge is a micro-example of the complexities of solving a problem like this. They would acknowledge themselves that this is going to be a really tricky one to solve, and there aren’t going to be easy answers. They’ve certainly said they are very keen to work with the idea of convening conversations to drive collective action.
Retraction Watch: In terms of a business model for the university press, what would publishing less look like? Is that sustainable for an academic publisher?
Hill: There are a number of journals, particularly that have been created over the past few years, that aren’t adding value and are just churning out quantity. One of the questions I’m asking my team is, how do we know if journals are valued by the community? What is a good rating of value? Is it something that people think, “I want to publish in that journal because I agree with the editorial policies?” Or, “They really support the development of my articles.” There’s something about the journal that is genuinely valued, and that’s something hard to quantify.
The other piece in the report is really talking about alternative publishing platforms. If we say there’s a whole chunk of content that does get benefit from being published in journals, fantastic. But there’s other content that’s not benefiting from being published in journals. It doesn’t warrant the cost that it’s adding into the system. It could be either of those things. There needs to be credible, scalable alternatives. So another part of the conversation we want to be part of is, what do those look like? At the moment there are loads of little things going on. Very few of them have got genuine scale, and so the reinvention of the wheel going on and the hidden costs in the system are not useful.
So in answer to your question, if we were to publish fewer journal articles, can we use our publishing services to support other publishing outlets? What exactly does that look like? Ask me in five years.
Retraction Watch: You write in the report, “The dominance of the impact factor must be replaced with more balanced metrics that acknowledge the real value of research outputs.” What do you mean by that?
Hill: How long has this been talked about? DORA has been around for how many years [saying] that the impact factor should not be used as a proxy for the quality of the individual articles that are published in that journal? And they shouldn’t, and the impact factor of where a researcher has had their research published should not be used in promotion decisions. It feels like forever, but it hasn’t changed behaviors. So there’s a cultural change that’s required.
We’ve got to think together. I think it’s going to be quite a complex one, and may well vary by subject. Maybe it’s how we’re going to value different outputs.The dependence on the journal article at the moment is really not reflecting the variety of research outputs that there are now. And we’re kind of shoving all research into a journal-shaped output, and it doesn’t really do a lot of things any favors. We should have more versatility.
Retraction Watch: In the survey portion of the report, you found 86% of respondents agreed that a future where the majority of research articles are made freely available is desirable, and 69% agreed that the move to more open access journal publishing so far has made high quality research outputs easier to discover. Is a majority open access world a sustainable business model for both the publishers and for the researchers?
Hill: I strongly believe we would think about open access as the default model, because we can see there’s so much evidence now in terms of citations and usage, and the way researchers around the world can access, the geographic distribution of usage that open access is better for research. It’s more equitable. We’ve got to have a system designed like that. So I think the question is not if it’s sustainable, it’s how we make it sustainable.
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