Although rapid changes in US government policy have had, and will continue to have, major implications for scholarly publishing, the roots of those changes go back decades if not centuries—ever since the fundamental purpose of scholarly publishing changed, gradually and imperceptibly, from the desire to share and advance knowledge to career advancement.
Impact of Changing US Policies
Challenges in Academic Publishing
Impact of Changing US Policies
That any state policy should impact academic publishing at all is a function of how academic publishing, once the embodiment of the construction of knowledge, has come to depend on state funding. And that impact is bound to be greater when the state in question is the US government, given its power and scale. For example, take several agencies of the United Nations alone, which have been major generators of knowledge, transcending national boundaries. Inevitably, the decision by the federal government to withdraw from these agencies has weakened them, and the effects will soon be apparent in the form of fewer manuscripts from these agencies to the world of scholarly publishing. The same holds good within the United States as well, given similar impacts of a similar policy on such agencies as the US National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Challenges in Academic Publishing
Let us retrace these impacts – these challenges to academic publishing – through some changes in the drivers of academic publishing, working backwards from the present and the recent past to much farther back in time.
AI-generated manuscripts and AI-generated reviews
A major disruptor of academic publishing is the increasing use of tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, all based on generative AI. Before such use became commonplace, the time-consuming process of actually writing and revising the manuscripts of research papers, and that of getting them reviewed and re-reviewed, acted as a brake on both the number of manuscripts submitted to journals and the speed with which they were reviewed. AI-based tools changed all that: a manuscript can be written in a few hours and reviewed in a few minutes. The resultant flood of manuscripts is something that academic publishing is yet struggling to deal with, besides fake or manipulated images, doctored data, and rampant plagiarism.
Article-processing charges (APCs)
Academic publishing is different from other industries in that not only are the raw materials free but their supplier actually pays the manufacturer to process them—and the processors work pro bono: authors give their manuscripts to journals free of charge and in many cases pay APCs to the journals to publish those manuscripts, while peer reviewers evaluate the manuscripts without charging for this service. The APCs thus supplement the income from subscriptions, which continues to dwindle as research institutes and universities are forced to trim subscriptions because of funding cuts.
Tenures and promotions driven by publication metrics
As research becomes big business, it increasingly adopts the practices used in business, especially with reference to performance appraisal of employees. Research may be seen as manufacturing research papers, but that output cannot be compared to industrial output since the intrinsic value of research output is unpredictable, indirect, and slow to manifest itself. Enter the journal impact factor and similar measures of research performance, all tied to academic publishing. Research itself may be driven by pure curiosity, but satisfying that curiosity and thus adding to knowledge is seldom a sufficient reward by itself: the findings must be published in a good journal (‘good’ meaning one with a high impact factor or a high rank or one covered by Scopus) with a satisfactory number of citations. And all these metrics are inseparable from the current form of academic publishing. The dominance of such metrics has led to evils as predatory journals, paper mills, rigged reviews, reviewers’ cartels, and ‘hijacked’ websites of reputable journals.
‘Citation classics’ and citation counting.
It all started with Eugene Garfield and his Institute for Scientific Information, the former publisher of Science Citation Index. Garfield, an information scientist, developed the concept of a relationship between a research paper and the many papers cited, or referenced, in that paper by its author(s) and also the concept of the number of times a paper is cited in other papers being a reflection of the importance of that paper: the more often a paper is cited, the more important or significant its contributions. From that, it was merely a step to extend the concept to the level of an entire journal: the more often papers published in a journal are cited by papers published in other journals (and also in that journal, the so-called self-citations), the greater the standing of that journal. This eventually blossomed into JCR (Journal Citation Reports) and the Impact Factor, which, put simply, is the average of citations earned over the preceding two years by papers published by a given journal in a given year.
Inevitably, such metrics as the number of citations and the impact factor became a proxy for the quality of research, a manifestation of Goodheart’s Law, which states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. Unfortunately, the second part of the law seems to have been ignored by the research establishment, and researchers and academics are busy chasing the measures.
Sharing and dissemination of knowledge through journals.
We now arrive at the beginnings of academic publishing, which evolved as the means to keep abreast of advances in research, which was announced through papers read at meetings of scientific and professional societies and subsequently printed and circulated for the benefit of their members. The oldest and continuing journal of this type is the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, first published in 1665. The idea caught on, and by the end of the 18th century, nearly 500 such periodicals had been published. Most of them were short lived but served to establish the model for disseminating research findings. The crucial difference, however, is the motivation of authors, and that has changed.
Final Thoughts
This brief survey of challenges faced by academic publishing following changes in science policy of the US government shows that the roots of the challenges go much farther back. It is now for the academic community as a whole to find ways to surmount those challenges.
