The 5 stages of the ‘enshittification’ of academic publishing

"Science is bought and sold, and is increasingly shaped by corporate funding and managerial logic. Scholars have described this shift – exemplified by commercial academic publishing – as “academic capitalism”. It influences what research gets done, how it is evaluated and how careers progress.

The open access movement was originally meant to make knowledge more widely available. However, major publishers including Wiley, Elsevier and Springer Nature saw it as a way to push their production costs onto authors – and earn extra money....

Based on these trends, we identified a five-stage downward spiral in the enshittification of academic publishing.

1. The commodification of research shifts value from intellectual merit to marketability

2. The proliferation of pay-to-publish journals spreads across and expands both elite and predatory outlets

3. A decline in quality and integrity follows as profit-driven models compromise peer review and oversight

4. The sheer volume of publications makes it difficult to identify authoritative work. Fraudulent journals spread hoax papers and pirated content

5. Enshittification follows. The scholarly system is overwhelmed by quantity, distorted by profit motives, and is stripped of its purpose of advancing knowledge."