The future of scholarly communication: Open access and democracy – Terence Jackson

"Scholarly communication is changing rapidly, but not quickly enough. Online access is assumed and has changed reading habits. Open access is gaining ground. Widespread access through the likes of Sci-Hub, or the more legal unpaywall.org are becoming the norm. Online access to both the means of downloading and reading, and in the producing of scholarly work has changed things. Self-publishing, blogging, social media and micro-blogging have opened up different possibilities. These new forms of communication have the potential to break down barriers or create more in an occupation concerned with status and reputation. They have the potential to make our industry more democratic, open and conducive to knowledge creation and sharing. Yet the way scholarly communication is controlled both overtly and implicitly is blocking developments. The current post with a focus on journal articles, examines the control of scholarly communication by the university system itself and by publishers, the nature of prestige within the system, whether open assess changes things or simply reinforces the current situation. The current post is intended as part of a series.

The means of scholarly communication is not democratic if it is heavily controlled by specific interests, specific groups or individuals. The first issue I examine is inherent within the university system itself. Universities and control of scholarly production Within universities priorities appear to be given to interests defined by neoliberal economics, particularly in the way academics are assessed and controlled. Results are assessed through metrics that are a proxy of the contribution of scholarly endeavour. This to a certain extent is self-regulating. For example we would tend to give the SSCI or ABS star rating of our journal articles in our CV/resume rather than a summary of the scholarly contribution of each. We are familiar in colleagues’ bios of such phrases as ‘She have published more than 150 articles in such journals as…’., rather than ‘She has made the following contributions to scholarship..’. Control demands numbers. It demands that each scholarly journal has a number metric or other rating attached to it. Within our university systems the Research Excellent Framework (REF) in the UK, and similar exercises elsewhere are used as control mechanism to ensure that we aim to publish in certain journals rather than others. More prestigious journals tend to publish articles that are highly citable (a self-fulfilling prophesy in a way as they are cited more because they are in higher profile journals). This tends to skew knowledge towards the conservative end of the spectrum, rather than towards higher risk, minority areas that are less likely to be cited. Even though, in the UK, the guidance for the REF is that: “No sub-panel will make any use of journal impact factors, rankings, lists or the perceived standing of publishers in assessing the quality of research outputs. An underpinning principle of the REF is that all types of research and all forms of research outputs across all disciplines shall be assessed on a fair and equal basis.” Yet universities continue to recruit and promote on the basis of publication in highly rated journals, rather than on the basis of the direct contribution to scholarship. This is one issue of scholarly control emanating from the university sector itself..."