The Future of the Academic Journal

Inc.

1

Introduction

Bill Cope and Angus Phillips

The journal has a long history, stretching back to the seventeenth century. It lies at the heart of our system of scholarly communication and has stood the test of time. How then will it develop over the next few years and what changes can we predict with any degree of certainty? The chapters in this volume provide an up-to-date survey of developments in the field, drawing on the expertise of a range of academics and professionals.

In the five years since the first edition of this book was published, the landscape of scholarly publishing has continued to experience transformative change. Some of this can be attributed to the disruptive winds sweeping through the publishing industry generally, a consequence of technological changes that have transformed business models for commercial publishers, and that also offer digital content at no charge in the domain of the ‘commons’.

Even more prominent than when we assembled the first edition is the challenge to the present publishing structures from open access, which has increasingly found an institutional foothold alongside other publishing models and now has support from governments, research bodies and universities. Will this become the dominant model of publication? There is of course an intimate connection between the journal article and the practice of scholarship. Are there also challenges to the established, linear process of the creation of knowledge? These may have major implications for academics, researchers, publishers, librarians and policy makers.

There has been much research into the overall shape and structure of the journals market. In this volume we have allowed individual authors to use relevant figures, properly referenced, without the imposition of a common standard. Indeed, this then becomes the subject of some discussion. For example, the figure given for peer-reviewed journals can vary from around 24,000 up towards 29,000, and this number is growing each year. Similarly there are varying estimates of the total value of the journals market globally.

The journal online

We can say, first of all, that the journal has gone online. Over 90 per cent of English-language journals are available online and users expect to access articles in this way, whether at their place of work or study, or remotely from home. They also may wish to have access wherever they are via a mobile device. There is a growing trend of online-only journals and this will continue, providing cost savings to users’ institutions and journal publishers. The proviso is that there is a significant cost involved for publishers in establishing platforms for online delivery, which has encouraged consolidation in the industry. For libraries, online access also reduces the need for shelf space to house journals in print form. Start-up journals may go online-only from their first issue, and online publication means that articles can be made available at different stages of their production, and that there is no need to wait to complete a journal issue before an article is published in its final form. Freed from the restrictions of print, journals are expanding in size and this can be seen in the creation of mega journals with no boundaries.

Philip Carpenter of Wiley writes:

In STM, the migration of journals online is so advanced that the electronic version is effectively primary and print secondary. This is true in two senses. The online version is now commonly published ahead of print, an important factor when speed to publication is critical. Perhaps more significantly, the electronic article will often be richer than its print version, containing more data and certainly more functionality.

(Carpenter, 2008)

Is online access creating a new dynamic amongst researchers, as proposed by James Evans? Evans (2008a) suggests that researchers are now citing a higher proportion of more recent articles and a narrower range of articles. He writes about his article:

I used a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005) and online availability (1998 to 2005), and showed that as more journals and articles came online, the actual number of them cited in research decreased, and those that were cited tended to be of more recent vintage … Moreover, the easy online availability of sources has channelled researcher attention from the periphery to the core – to the most high-status journals. In short, searching online is more efficient, and hyperlinks quickly put researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but they may also accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas grappled with by scholars.

(Evans, 2008b; author’s use of italic)

This immediately suggests disadvantages to the online journal, but there is no going back to the serendipity of browsing through print journals. Literature searches are most easily carried out online. The trend towards consensus may also reflect the nature of today’s research. The sociologist Laurie Taylor is one who believes that today’s research is dominated by a check-box culture:

There’s been a real diminution in research freedom … It’s meant that a whole branch of anthropology and ethnography, where researchers spent two or three years with a group of people and came back with some inside story of their lives and culture, is now almost impossible … You get vapid little bits of research, which take six months to do and amount to little more than rejigging common sense, or you get people churning out orthodox research in areas approved of by the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) … There’s not much surprise in a lot of the research I come across now. It hugs the mainstream, because it doesn’t have a licence to roam.

(Taylor, 2008)

Open access

Hotly debated in recent years is the question of open access (OA) to journal articles, with the debate being driven initially by concerns over journal pricing and pressure on library budgets. Supporters of OA maintain that research outputs are a public good, and should be freely available to all:

Scholarship, and hence the content of scholarly journals, is a public good. A public good is one for which one consumer’s use of the good is not competitive with, or exclusive of, another consumer’s use of the same good. The classic illustration is national defense – some citizens cannot be defended without all being defended. But an illustration closer to home is a community’s clean air – one resident’s enjoyment of clean air does not interfere with another’s enjoyment of the same ‘good’. So, too, one scholar’s access to and benefit from the knowledge found in a scientific article published in a scholarly journal in no way limits another scholar’s use of and benefit from that knowledge.

(Edwards and Shulenburger, 2003: 12–13)

OA papers also have a potentially wider readership compared to those published in subscription journals. Support for OA is coming from many different directions including governments, research bodies and universities. In 2013, the US Government indicated its support for OA, and said that research funded by the taxpayer should become freely available after a year. Under Harvard University’s OA policy, faculty members must grant the university a non-exclusive right to distribute their journal articles, which are then stored and made freely available from the university’s repository.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the policy of the government-funded research bodies in the UK, introduced from 2013, is for research articles to be freely available on publication with payments made up front to publishers. This resulted from the findings of the Finch Report published in 2012, which proposed that OA would enable ‘closer linkages between research and innovation, with benefits for public policy and services, and for economic growth’ (p. 5). Although publishers may have breathed a small sigh of relief, faced with the alternative of green OA being favoured, it remains to be seen how influential this gold policy will become. Is UK policy going to impact significantly on the world of international journals? Will other governments follow this lead? The new direction certainly caught researchers in other disciplines (outside the sciences) unaware, and they were immediately concerned about the implications for their subjects, which receive less generous funding. It is also difficult to see the immediate benefits for commercial companies from the release into the public domain of much of the research in the humanities. The publication of articles in the humanities under a CC-BY Creative Commons licence, allowing commercial use, hardly seems necessary; and there are further questions about the viability of research monographs if fees have to be found for their publication.

An advantage of gold OA is that it allows for the text mining of scholarly articles: ‘Text mining extracts meaning from text in the form of concepts, the relationships between the concepts or the actions performed on them and presents them as facts or assertions’ (Clark, 2013: 6). It is clear that text mining can enhance searching across the relevant literature and identify key trends; it is also proposed that it can produce new research insights. By contrast, many articles issued under the green route do not allow commercial reuse or text mining without permission. For example, of the 2.6 million full-text articles available from Europe PubMed Central, only around 0.5 million can be text mined as they are published under gold OA whereas the rest are green (http://europepmc.org/).

OA still forms a small part of the overall journals output – around 10 per cent of articles in 2012 (The Economist, 2013) – but it seems certain to grow in importance with the level of support it is receiving from funding bodies. The equivalent percentage for 2006 was around 5 per cent (Björk et al., 2008). Certainly, most new journals in science and medicine would now be launched on an OA model. It also serves to support the ‘long tail’ of journals publishing – those niche journals which cannot survive as commercial publications, including those from developing nations. An author-pays model of OA publication will work in disciplines such as medicine, where there is sufficient funding available from research bodies or institutions; how well it can work in areas with lower levels of funding is open to doubt. Will it also lead to a drop-off in the quality of what is published, with publishers being encouraged to publish more if they are paid per article?

It seems likely that the costs of journal publication will be driven down further. Efficiencies are already being found in the publication process, for example by using the cascade concept to reduce the overall costs of peer review. The green route of OA, self-archiving, does have the potential to undermine the traditional business model of journal publishing – subscriptions. There are some successes such as the physics repository arXiv, whose monthly submission rate was touching 8000 articles by early 2013. If users expect to be able to find articles for free using a web search, will they cease to use their existing access routes for journals? We cannot give a definite answer to this question, unless we can predict the systematic development of repositories which offer the kind of added value to be found in aggregated services from publishers and distributors. Up until now, most institutional repositories have not taken this approach, as commented on by the Ithaka report, University Publishing in a Digital Age:

Several librarians conceded to us that they are good at organizing information but lack expertise in choosing or prioritizing what merits publication. Libraries provide tools and infrastructure to support new forms of informal publishing, but these tend to be inward focused (towards the home institution) rather than externally focused (towards the best scholarship in a given discipline), limiting their appeal to users. As a result, institutional repositories so far tend to look like ‘attics’ (and often fairly empty ones), with random assortments of content of questionable importance.

(Brown et al., 2007: 16)

OA began as a movement in response to what were seen as excessive price increases by journals publishers. To many authors and users, OA is still not a big issue, since they have high levels of seamless access through their institution. It is important to remember that publishers can and do add value in journals publishing – whether through selection, quality control, editing, production, functionality, aggregation of similar and relevant content, linking, brand, entrepreneurship and business acumen. Even freely available content carries with it a certain level of cost. Joseph J. Esposito (2007) comments:

When someone stubs a toe, there are always those who want to cut off the leg. This is the situation in scholarly communications today, where the predictable aches and pains of a mature industry have been met with a wild surgeon brandishing a saw. Prices are rising, therefore all information must be free. Publishers can and must be disintermediated and war declared on copyright. Reform peer review! Those who liberated the institutions’ administrative buildings in their youth will now free knowledge from the grubby hands of commercial interests in their dotage. To further this agenda – which is extreme and at times seems like a violent eruption of emotion – members of the academy have at times found some strange bedfellows, most notably Google, a hard-driving commercial organization and darling of Wall Street. Is it possible that Google is being taken at its word when it declares, ‘Don’t be