Trends in Scholarly Publishing

This talk was part of a series the Teaching Center is hosting on faculty scholarship. Given by Sue Maszaros and Claire Wiley from the Bunch Library, the presentation focused specifically on scholarly article publishing.

Scholarly publishing is big business. In this talk, I learned just how big: valued at approximately $28 billion in 2023. As most of us know, the money behind these revenues generally comes from university libraries, which pay for members of their community to access paywalled research. The 1990s, however, gave rise to a movement catalyzed by pressure from Congress and major funding organizations to make research freely available to the public. There was just one problem: who would pay for all of this open access?

The answer, it turned out, was the very authors who did the research in the first place. Article Processing Charges (APCs) are fees paid by the author of an article to make the work available to the public for free. Often, the actual money comes from the library at the institution where the researcher works. APCs were originally intended as a stop-gap measure until the academic publishing industry could find an equitable solution to the question of who pays for open access. However, APCs have become the norm in many fields, with fees that can run into several (or tens of) thousands of dollars. Claire and Sue’s talk gave an overview of this landscape and led us through several funding models posed as alternatives to the author-funded open-access model.

Their talk also identified several other areas of challenge and change in academic publishing, including peer review, which is unpaid and unacknowledged and can often be unreliable. They also discussed research integrity, with the appearance of easily accessible language generators in late 2023. They note it is probably no coincidence that last year saw the most retracted scientific articles to date, with over 10,000 articles later withdrawn. Sue and Claire ended with several recommendations for a more equitable ecosystem of academic publishing. See more in their helpful powerpoint presentation here.

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