OSF | The transformative relation between publishers and editors: research quality and academic autonomy at stake

Abstract:  The prevalence of scientific journals amid the expansion of digital platforms and mega-infrastructures features the persistent will of scholars to give part of their time to this endeavor, which is frequently a thankless task and subject to intense pressures. In this paper, we focus on scholarly editorship and the commercial interferences recently denounced by editorial teams of renowned journals to explore whether this has an equal incidence in publishing circuits outside the mainstream. For this purpose, we describe the case of Latin America, where a parallel value system is observed through standard evaluation criteria focused on academic quality and independent editorship. We examine 1,971 journals indexed in Scielo and Redalyc stressing the features of editorial teams, publishing institutions, and calibrating the penetration of the APC business model. We argue that the development of this regional publishing circuit, along with the value system that explains its survival, finds its main strength in its public nature and the crucial role of universities’ autonomy, although its main weakness in the absence of an interoperable infrastructure capable of broadening its circulation. Eventually, we discuss the idea of predatory publishing and its evolution from the representation of journal backwardness to fraudulent for-profit publications, proposing to reorient the value of scientific journals onto their academic autonomy.