Speed limit sign on the Chicago elevated.
Speed limit sign on the Chicago elevated. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When the Internet stormed onto the scene, all bets were off — this revolutionary technology with limitless potential would generate all sorts of creativity, from new article presentations, new forms of peer review, new capabilities, and an end to the status quo. Fast-forward a decade and a half, and it seems little has changed when it comes to our intellectual outputs as well as the general business environment. Papers are still the coin of the realm, and they still have abstracts, titles, authors, and references. The PDF still rules. Author and reference lists are longer, but those are incremental changes. On the business front, large publishers are doing the best of all, new entrants seem destined for consolidation or sale, experiments in peer review have only yielded innovation through elimination as stages of peer review are peeled away to save money and increase throughput, and the article economy is buzzing along at a larger scale but is fundamentally unchanged.

In fact, it seems that rather than diverging through market-specific experiments via technological liberation, we’re becoming increasingly homogenized, as the volume of papers goes up, the pace of processing them increases, and the innovation fevers of the 2000s fade into memory.

There are innovations, of course — there always have been. But the innovations seem to be more on the margins than we once believed they would be. The disruptive innovations we anticipated have been more sustaining innovations, as only a few major new players have emerged while most of the same players have gotten bigger and adapted relatively quickly and ended up doing more of what they were doing to begin with.

We’ve learned a few things about technology in academia in the process:

  • Video was once a centerpiece of multimedia innovation, but we’ve learned it is expensive, time-consuming for producers and consumers, and not as portable or efficient as competing formats. There’s still a lot of innovation to be done, surely, but it seems to be at the margins of the core scientific publishing economy.
  • Social media was viewed as potentially transformative, but it has been slow to gain much traction, and many players seem to have lost their sheen. Social seems to work marginally well at the edges of academic cultures.
  • Podcasts, RSS feeds, and so forth have, again, proven to be nice to have features, but not significantly revolutionary in the end compared to some of the main innovations we’ve seen.
  • Blogs have worked here and there, but these good little CMS engines for writers and editors with something to say have blended into the landscape without changing it much.

Each of the innovations above was directed at readers, and did nothing to help academic authors get their work done. Given this, it’s not surprising that the biggest innovations we’ve seen have been around services to authors. These include mega-journals like PLoS ONE, and discovery and sharing services for researchers like Mendeley.

But why would serving authors contribute to a homogenization of efforts? Simply, because author incentives are constrained and direct. Authors want domain-specific prestige, citations, and rapid publication. A journal that seems to provide two out of three of these will be attractive for publication of most papers.

Publishers have traditionally focused on their market of users, but this changed as author voices became more dominant in their cultures. Part of the focus on authors may be one of relative convenience for publishers and editors. The move to digital distribution and the site license have obscured the end-user behind proxy purchasing habits and usage aggregations. For many publishers, librarians and authors now form their main customer contact points. Because there are more authors contacting publishers frequently, their needs dominate. Overcoming the availability effect and proactively getting in touch with readers requires investments and discipline beyond the occasional survey or online poll. Some publishers can’t or don’t pursue these extra efforts.

Innovation is not immune to economics, and the past few years have seen publishers pulling back form adventurous programs as competition has increased, economic latitude has decreased, and the appeal of selling author services has become clearer.

Other factors are contributing to the homogeneity of modern academic publishing, including:

  • Increased outsourcing of editorial and composition tasks
  • Fewer and less vibrant university publishing programs
  • A desire to control technology costs
  • A lower tolerance for risk
  • Decelerated growth across major market segments
  • Downstream homogeneity in indexing and licensing services acting as constraints on upstream creativity
  • Less confidence in the overall direction and reliability of current business models
  • More demands to deal with scale, leading to innovations like ORCid and CrossRef

We may be in a rut, one formed by many forces — our increasing focus on authors as customers; expensive technology and human resources; diminished markets; and vertical integration constraints. Fundamentally, the technology may have changed, but the academic culture has only become more enamored with citations, impact factors, publication, and productivity measures. There is more science, more competition, and more pressure driving authors to seek relief from publishers. There is less incentive for divergence from the pack. These clear requirements reward a homogenized solution.

It seems odd that the new technologies of the Internet may actually have created less variety in our publishing practices. It’s explicable, but unanticipated.

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Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson is the CEO of RedLink and RedLink Network, a past-President of SSP, and the founder of the Scholarly Kitchen. He has worked as Publisher at AAAS/Science, CEO/Publisher of JBJS, Inc., a publishing executive at the Massachusetts Medical Society, Publishing Director of the New England Journal of Medicine, and Director of Medical Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics. Opinions on social media or blogs are his own.

Discussion

10 Thoughts on "Are We In a Rut? Explaining the Increasing Homogenization of Scholarly and Scientific Publishing"

I think these generalizations are overstated because they do not apply in quite the same way, or to the same extent, to the book side of academic publishing as they do to journals. (Why does The Scholarly Kitchen not pay more attention to books? Is it because it is so heavily oriented toward STM publishing? But it claims to be about scholarly publishing in general, does it not?) E.g., reference book publishing in print has virtually disappeared, and some of the major successes in open-access publishing have occurred in this sector, such as the endowment-supported Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Epublishing has also liberated academic writing from the constraints about length that limited authors from writing short books (under 100 pages) or very long ones (800+), and in the past few years we have seen a number of academic (as well as general trade) presses launching new short book series. While it is true that most monographs mimic the form and format of their print predecessors, there have nevertheless been some significant experiments with models that go well beyond what print allows, such as the Gutenberg-e and ACLS Humanities Ebook projects and such landmark initiatives as the Valley of the Shadow and the Perseus Project. Even with journal publishing per se, there was never anything like Project Muse in the print era.

Not mentioned (though implied in “A lower tolerance for risk”) are the mechanisms of tenure, promotion, and other academic awards, which foster caution. Even when I give my undergraduates the opportunity to negotiate alternative forms for their course projects (including some you’ve mentioned) and try to reassure them that they won’t be penalized for taking a risk, they follow safe paths (i.e., the term paper).

“When the Internet stormed onto the scene, all bets were off — this revolutionary technology with limitless potential would generate all sorts of creativity, from new article presentations, new forms of peer review, new capabilities, and an end to the status quo….”

The medium was, in fact, the message. Arpanet (ancestor of the Internet) was the innovation. It connected government researchers to facilitate collaboration — via informal communications — in the hope of leading to novel science.

But who but a scientist understands a science novelty? The problem with the hoopla was that management culture (which understands GAAP but not the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) decided the Internet excused cost-cutting in terms of libraries, journal subscriptions, peer-review, etc. The result: more chaos and a hostile marketplace for publishers of research books journals.

I suppose the question is how much change one should expect from a relatively mature system. The research paper has had 350 years to evolve into a highly efficient form. Is it fair to ask that each new technology should radically alter the results of that evolutionary process? All of the new concepts you’ve mentioned have been subject to quite a bit of experimentation but few have gained traction as they’re mostly seen as serving purposes other than that of the paper itself. It’s really hard to come into a system which is that well refined and alter it in anything but an incremental manner. Should a “black swan” arise, it’s more likely to replace the whole system rather than remake it.

I think your last point though, on questions of scale, is an important one. We are in an era of consolidation. Great benefits are being received through economies of scale. There are economic forces that push a large publisher toward homogeneity. For example, if every journal’s website is identical, then savings are reaped by not having to do custom work for every single one.

This is not a technology problem. Rather, it is a people problem or, perhaps more precisely a problem of academic culture. That culture is no longer in sync with what modern technologies have wrought.

I would side with the proposition that adaptive cultural change is unlikely if it were not for the fact that institutions of higher education are at risk of extinction. That risk is due to the high cost and debt of its primary product (credentials) and the emergence of alternatives (MOOCs and their inevitable descendants) that may well evolve into viable alternatives.

Quite frankly, higher education can no longer afford the luxury of outsourcing scholarly communication to for-profit publishers who return only data to be used in promotion and tenure decisions coupled with exorbitant charges to academic libraries for bundles and binders of subscriptions to the output of the very scholars already in the employ of those institutions.

This is not a technology problem. Rather, it is a people problem or, perhaps more precisely a problem of academic culture. That culture is no longer in sync with what modern technologies have wrought.

I would side with the proposition that adaptive cultural change is unlikely if it were not for the fact that institutions of higher education are at risk of extinction. That risk is due to the high cost and debt of its primary product (credentials) and the emergence of alternatives (MOOCs and their inevitable descendants) that may well evolve into viable alternatives.

Quite frankly, higher education can no longer afford the luxury of outsourcing scholarly communication to for-profit publishers who return only data to be used in promotion and tenure decisions coupled with exorbitant charges to academic libraries for bundles and binders of subscriptions to the output of the very scholars already in the employ of those institutions.

Scientific journal publishing is definitely in a rut. The innovation that we might have expected to see from the internet has not emerged and we are left scratching our heads about exactly why this might be.

I tend to side with Frank Lowney that this is probably a result of a problem with a fossilization of academic culture (particularly around tenure and output measurement) that stifles innovation and change in scientific journal publishing.

The lack of change worries me, because it suggests (as raised by David Crotty) that when change comes it might be of a cataclysmic nature for the current system. If you fail to innovate incrementally, eventually you are likely to be so far out of step that the next solution just bypasses you altogether. It is also a sad fact of human nature that once we are heavily invested in one particular solution, it can be very difficult (if not impossible) to adapt to a major change, and extinction is the result.

Apologies if this seems very downbeat, but I feel there is cause for concern here. Perhaps we can’t innovate until the underlying system changes.

Whoa, SLOW DOWN! These ideas are difficult to fathom, and I find them threatening to my authority, and to my guilty secret of ‘Linkage Blindness’ about other disciplines. 😀

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