We often see discussions of scholarly publishing framed with familiar terminology — commercial vs. non-profit; subscription vs. open access; glamour vs. non-glamour; specialty vs. general; high-impact vs. low-impact.
Using these frameworks, it’s difficult to see why publishing wouldn’t change quickly and easily, with just a few adjustments, the proper financial incentives aimed at these simple distinctions, and a little elbow grease. Yet, while there have certainly been changes, the scholarly publishing world of today would be in many respects quite recognizable to someone waking up from a 20-year nap, especially when it comes to the major journals in most disciplines.
One explanation for this stability (some might call it persistence) may involve a factor that is less obvious because it is so prevalent and diffuse it is taken for granted — the power of the communities that define science in its myriad forms, and the durability of these communities’ journals.
Community journals, as I’ll call them, are like local newspapers in a way, but the community they bind can be worldwide. These journals sprang up within a community and serve a specific (real or imagined) set of academics or scientists. They represent some of the oldest and some of the newest journals, and they continue to be launched to serve community interests. They are not a dying breed by any means, but they are different, and they have interesting staying power.
Community journals keep their places because they are not just production outlets for research papers, but community creations that provide identity, context, and cultural integration. Communities have layers and points of unity beyond the production systems or digital outlets so often the target for technophilic change agents.
Examples of this stability? Despite years having passed now, these journals have not been displaced by pre-print servers. Some of these journals still have robust print and online advertising lines of business, based on community needs and norms. The subscription model’s more community-based demands remain appealing to the editors and publishers of these journals, as they feel normal and appropriate within the overall editorial and business model. Such entrenched cultural elements are not simply waved away with a dismissive hand.
While community journals continue to be launched, some newer journals are not directed by or at a particular community. They reveal this in their titles, which often use abstractions about the publishing process in the places we’d typically see community designations (e.g., words like “communications,” “reports,” or “advances” in the place of discipline or audience descriptions). Others make references to their business model (e.g., “open”). Still others simply elide the community or the business model with branding that avoids both issues entirely (e.g., PLOS ONE, ACS Omega, FACETS). These non-community journals seem to be easier to compete against — after all, competitive factors center around price, efficiency, speed to publication, and so forth. These are industrial qualities that can be beaten. Even though it’s too soon to tell, my initial impression is that these journals seem to be in a competitive space all their own.
Yet, look across the hype and controversies enveloping scholarly and academic publishing, and the strength of community journals barely gets a mention. You’re more likely to see Elsevier invoked as the totem for the entirety, a classic mistake of stereotyping which not only obscures the diversity around the entity, but within the entity. As a scholarly publisher, Elsevier is to a significant extent a confederation of contracts with community journals, and is influenced by these contracts to a large degree.
In many respects, the position of community journals is almost aggressively ignored. It’s not surprising that the sense of journals as community elements has been lost during the past 10-15 years. Search engines and social media flipped journals into the public sphere and article economy, disaggregating content in the eyes of many dominant commercial forces — Google, Facebook, Twitter, SEO firms, platform providers, and others.
But it’s three major business model shifts that have shaken community journals’ place in the world — because they make us think of journals as peddling commoditized content, not community assets.
One of the first business model shifts that led us down this road toward thinking of content as a commodity to be traded in bulk rather than a community asset was the shift away from individual subscriptions and toward institutional site licenses. The response of the larger commercial publishers to create the “Big Deal” (a term which apparently demands both scare-quotes and initial caps, it is so anxiety-provoking) put a pin in the commoditization of content. No longer were we trading solely in relevance to a community — we were now dealing in both relevance and quantity. This change eroded the ability of journals to create affinity among academics and others with their parent membership organizations. This has had effects on finances and the sense of identity for these organizations, which now have a harder time connecting with young, international, or loosely affiliated members. While it has taken years to unfold, the trends are clear and continuing. This genie is not going back into the bottle.
Open access has been another major shift away from the community model, enabling large, diffuse journals to spring into existence and proliferate. OA publishers have found community journals more difficult to sustain financially under the economic and business constraints of OA publishing, which currently demand lower prices per article, limited reuse and recommercialization opportunities, with a model that responds better to volume than quality. It seems worth noting that PLOS started with community journals (PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine), and continues to dabble in this realm, but their huge hit was and is PLOS ONE, which set a template others have used to further shift away from community journals. PeerJ started as a non-community journal, and has since branched into the community space with PeerJ Computer Science. Others are experimenting across the two forms.
The third shift was the introduction of community journal portfolios, with Nature leading the way (e.g., Nature Medicine, Nature Genetics, and so forth). With the notion of a journal portfolio now common, the traditional community journals are finding themselves knocked down a peg as these larger organizations bring their increased reach, tighter operations, and larger sales teams to bear. The commercial competition in this space is intense, and the bigger guys are setting the tone.
The business models for community journals are different and not easily changed. Community journals’ content and purposes differ from those found with non-community journals. Joe Esposito, in a recent LibLicense exchange, made a McLuhan-inspired observation about how business models work and what businesses offer are two sides of the same coin:
What troubles me about conversations about “flipping” the economic model for published scholarship is that it assumes that the basic units of content will remain unchanged. But the history of media tells a very different story, that media of all kinds changes when the business ecosystem changes. The business model, in other words, is not something that is wrapped around a piece of content but is a property of that content.
Because business models have implications for the content journals generate now and into the future, there are many well-founded concerns about changing either. Changing one means changing the other. This is a key point often lost on editors and publishers, and certainly it’s lost on crusaders. Modifying your business model is not just a matter of shifting revenue sources. It’s always more fundamental than that.
To draw on a favorite example, the music industry’s shifts from selling hard goods to selling digital wares to now licensing digital streams fundamentally shrank and changed the industry. ESPN is now $3 billion more valuable itself than the entire music industry, and singers are being forced to perform more, leading to an increase in vocal cord injuries. It is not a trivial matter to change variables in a business. Because business models are integral to the business itself, changes to them have ripple effects.
It’s easy for change agents to ignore the importance and strength of community journals because their value is niche and a little hard for outsiders to discern. At their best, community journals allow conversations to occur within and between disciplines. These conversations may be hard for non-specialists to detect or understand, but they occur, and they can influence the undocumented lives of practitioners and researchers for years. Important articles are contextualized and emphasized. These journals pack a punch. They can change informal or formal practices with their findings and expert insights. They can alter public opinion. Occasionally, they stimulate and change laws. They can inform and modify educational curricula. They can be cited for weeks, months, or years within a community. They connect people and unite communities. Community journals punch above their weight in ways that are often invisible to those outside the communities themselves.
And here we have the heart of the disparity — technology-based and non-community entities view journals as asynchronous collections of articles, while practitioners (editors, publishers, authors, and readers) within communities view journals as ongoing records of advancement and conversation, with layers of context only they might appreciate.
Neither is wrong. But these perspectives are deeply at odds, and must be reconciled somehow.
Because of such perceived limitations (or imperceptible community benefits), there are those who would like to see journals abandoned or undermined. Focusing on journals as industrial outputs, they only see them as containers with content — which makes it easier for them to propose throwing the baby out with the bath water. The New York Times’ notorious rant about Sci-Hub failed to see journals as community assets, so suffered from such a fundamental flaw, which started at its headline’s treatment of papers as commodities (“Should All Research Papers Be Free?”) and lasted to the end, where the author became annoyed with academia for behaving like a serious community.
Others mistake journals as production systems and not as forms of community interaction. In a recent essay about Sci-Hub in Slate, Justin Peters attacked a community journal in which the editor-in-chief defended the value journals provide. She was defending the value to her journal’s community, while Peters was attacking the journal’s ineffectiveness for people outside the community. In his tirade, which was largely based on arguing that journals are just article factories, the author threw out a red herring about communities I haven’t seen in years:
If a site like Sci-Hub really threatens to decimate a given organization’s membership, then that organization wasn’t providing enough value to its members in the first place.
Aside from being paradoxical, it’s apparent Peters was not seeing journals as the product of a community effort, so he could easily dismiss their community value. To him, journal articles are equivalent one to the other in manufacture and meaning — patience, judgment, and community responsibility be damned. The irony of this view is that he cannot see journals as “providing enough value” to a community. His invective depends on journals being valueless to communities. He is wrong.
For many good reasons, community journal editors and publishers find shifting away from the community model somewhat bewildering and worrisome. They also see little reason to do so — it seems like a superfluous question. Sheltered within their communities, all this turmoil seems akin to a spell of bad weather happening outside. Their community runs by its own rules and on its own clock. Proposed business model shifts would dictate editorial shifts they may not be comfortable with. These domain experts are used to working with peers while using shared jargon and knowledge gained within their communities. Working on a more industrial footing requires them to shift into a bland management style, with little of the intellectual engagement and peer feedback they’re accustomed to. If the experiment struggles or fails, we might not realize it’s because the two don’t mix.
Discussions about establishing or changing publishing policies also tend to get hung up on invisible community boundaries. The “scientific community” is really a few hundred distinct communities loosely affiliated by a common language (and not even that all the time — try asking a mathematician to read an article about microarchaeology sometime). What might work in computer science journals won’t work for medical journals, and what might work for medical journals won’t work for history journals, and so on. The production, business model, and editorial elements in each community are inextricably linked, and each is purpose-built for that community. There is really no uniform standard for peer review, article processing, rejection rates, and so forth. And why should anyone expect rapid adoption of imposed uniformity, which always means cultural uniformity? The industrialists will argue for it, but nearly every industry has learned that cultural differences trump industrial streamlining.
The biggest issue facing community journals is that publishing dissenters undervalue them and can’t see them for what they are — vital community assets. Subtle and not-so-subtle changes in the economics and attitudes around publishing are tipping the scales toward a more production-oriented industry, with less of an emphasis on community assets. This creates a deep and profound tension that few are comfortable with — the history of science leans toward tighter communities with more specialized knowledge. There are more sciences today than ever. We should expect to see emerging diversity, not more uniformity.
Science remains a social enterprise, a city of villages. Yet, we are moving toward figurative and actual federalization of research publishing, with weaker communities and more influential centralized players setting the terms as regards business models, funding options, and academic choices. Pursued without care, these players’ action will change what content looks like in science, and move us away from high-quality community-based publications to less stringently reviewed and contextualized outlets built around uniformity and efficiency.
While not necessarily unacceptable, this would represent a profound change. Communities stand to lose in this scenario. What the world might lose — cohesive groups of experts incentivized to move their fields forward together, deep discussions of topics of intense specialist interest that fail to attract larger audiences but matter profoundly to social policies, and the room and resources for small communities to articulate and distill important insights society needs — could be significant.
Discussion
9 Thoughts on "The Power of Community — Why Much of Scholarly Publishing Is Unlikely to Change Quickly"
Kent a very interesting analysis. It seems to me that the development of the search engine has been one of the leading causes of the new view of what journals are. Plos 1 would not exist without it. How would one find something in that journal without a search engine. Thus, the commoditization of journals seems to have occurred concomitantly with the development of the search engine.
Additionally, it seems to me that the saving grace of a journal with the title of: The Journal of…. lies in the community of which you speak. In short, that community says: if it is important it will be reflected in that journal.
I take it that in your language, Kent, societies are a subset of communities, and that communities exist even when there are no formal societies that bind them together. Is everything you say about communities equally true for societies, or do societies have some advantages and disadvantages that communities more generally do not?
As for changing business models, using your example of the music industry, recall that it was external disrupters like Napster that forced the established major players to change. Perhaps SciHub will be the Napster of the publishing business. Then, we can wonder, what will be the counterpart of Apple’s iTunes in our sphere?
An excellent post, Kent. My experience in working with two Canadian SSH journals of, I believe, equal quality in the content, has been shock at the usage differences. One, established in 1974, the Canadian Journal of Communication generates over 400,000 visits/article downloads per annum whereas the other, Scholarly and Research Communication, founded in 2010, generates less than 5,000 visits. Both use OJS so they are equally tagged and so on. It is clear that the emerging generation of Canadian communication scholars see the CJC as their journal. While a significant portion of the Canadian digital humanities community looks to SRC as a place to publish, the journal has yet to find and draw in its community. As well, the CJC is often used in classrooms whereas there are few, if any, courses in which articles from SRC would be useful. On another note, if you put your post together with Allison Mudditt’s post of May 11 re OSI highlighting Judy Luther’s and other’s comments about scholarly societies potentially being road kill in the flip of business models, it seems to me that there falls at the feet of the library community a heavy responsibility of undermining academic communities in favour of academic institutional control of knowledge production.
It’s perhaps worth expanding the analogy of the local newspaper. You used to have your home town paper. This paper would reflect the character and personality of your town. Its editorial sensibility would follow that of the community (or else it would lose readers). You’d get local news, local sports, local opinion, letters to the editor from local citizens. Now most newspapers are run by corporate conglomerates. To cut costs (because they’re not making any money), you do away with all the local reporters and employees and you instead rely on wire reports from one main national source. You lose all local flavor and all connection to the community. News is now a commodity to be fulfilled by the least expensive means possible. It is certainly more efficient, but I think there’s an unmeasurable damage that this inflicts on the cohesive nature of the community. There’s a civic pride and connection that one has to the New York Times or even the New York Post that one doesn’t have with USA Today.
An excellent essay, as readers have come to expect, Kent! I would add that these are times in which individuals who take actions in the digital sphere under the guise of furthering their own interests can unintentionally undermine the flourishing of those communities with which they also identify. I’m thinking particularly of the so-called “sharing” networks Academia.edu and Research.gate. The enormity of Academia.edu’s megalomania was just brought home to me when I was looking at their company pages. They are advertising for a job whose description contains these revealing (and slightly unhinged) paragraphs:
“Are you aware of how inefficient, inaccurate, slow, and costly, scientific publishing is? Imagine a world where scientific experiments can be peer reviewed and published with an order of magnitude more speed and efficiency.
Academia’s strategy is to fix this broken 100-year old monopolistic system by becoming the largest academic publisher in the world, which is a $10 billion market. We are already the world’s largest academic distribution platform, by users and traffic (10% of the world’s Internet traffic visited our site last year). Now, we’re building and scaling out a modern peer review system, which will turn our distribution platform into a publishing platform.”
https://www.academia.edu/hiring#devops-engineer
At a conference I attended last week, I learned that some academics have already become aware of the threat that Academia poses and have started warning their colleagues and students not to create accounts on the site. I also learned from talking to editors and authors of science journals that there have been cases of Academia software creating profiles for authors without their knowledge or volition. The trigger seems to be pulled if the author performs a search on the site or has entered it via a Google search. This profile is created, it seems, on the fly by scraping an author’s personal webpage. Bibliographies, biographies, photos can all end up on this automated profile.
For any academic society whose continued existence derives in any way from its journal income, the activities of Academia.edu constitute a very real threat, not unlike that of SciHub. The difference here is that the content on Academia is in most cases coming from the authors themselves, under the impression that the site is a genuinely non-profit vehicle to facilitate informal peer-to-peer communication. Instead, we have learned in the course of the past few months that Academia is clearly trying to become a publisher in its own right by parasitically gaining access to work that has been performed and paid for by others, and then monetizing it in some not yet clearly defined way. Classic Silicon Valley charlatanry.
Michael Magoulias
Director, Journals
University of Chicago Press
One other dimension of a community journal that is worth mentioning is its role in curating. As Daniel Sarewitz’s recent article in Nature observed, scholarly publishing is experiencing an explosive growth in output, which makes both discovery and quality assurance very difficult to accomplish. Even efficient search tools still present researchers in many fields with large numbers of outputs to sift and evaluate. When I was editing a top-decile journal in a sociological specialty in the early 2000s, my team were clear that our job was to find the best 30-35 papers per year that would interest our community. If you wanted to keep up with the field, as opposed to your own small niche, the journal would give you what you needed. Our main competitor published much higher volumes – perhaps 2,000 papers per year – and our feedback suggested that the community found it hard to identify relevant content of high scholarly quality. Clearly, there are reasons and incentives to adopt both models. However, the branding work of a fairly exclusive journal does save scholars a lot of time and effort. One of the unacknowledged costs of the large-scale OA model, with light-touch refereeing in relation to a fairly basic threshold is that of search. The curation work of community journals collectivizes that cost and may well be worth paying for. Speculatively, I wonder whether a widespread shift in publication models would actually create a business opportunity for paid-for playlists, where the search and evaluation function is undertaken post-publication by scholars who specialize in this niche. Could this be a future income stream for learned societies, rather like consumer magazines?
Why is there a photo of the ‘FEMA Community Relations team’? I would of thought some publishing activity, or a community of scholars, would be more appropriate.
I think we also need non-community journals. While the one I run definitely has a community, if you don’t contribute to our journal’s field very clearly (political ecology) you don’t get published. So in certain cases, articles that don’t ‘fit’ are better placed in megajournals like SAGEOpen, where there is no such prescription.