Spotted: A scholarly publisher quietly sunsetting their legacy platform, hoping no one would notice the migration deadline they’ve been pushing back since 2022. Spoiler: we noticed. In this industry, nothing stays off the record for long — not a botched deployment, not brewing unrest in the editorial office, and certainly not the growing list of publishers finally asking whether their infrastructure is built for where publishing is going, or just where it’s been.

Let’s say the quiet part out loud: gossip plays an important role in scholarly publishing. But is that a bad thing?

During the pandemic, I got very into a podcast called Normal Gossip. The concept was simple: with everyone working from home, there was a notable dearth of gossip — turns out leaving our homes is required for most good stories — so people would send in anonymous, everyday gossip stories to scratch the itch of hearing low-stakes drama that doesn’t affect the listener.

The original host of the podcast, Kelsey McKinney, later wrote a book called You Didn’t Hear This From Me, which looks at the role that gossip has played throughout time — in everything from religion to reality TV. While the word “gossip” can carry negative connotations, research has repeatedly revealed its important social functions, even connecting it with the evolutionary origin of language and social cohesion. Anthropologists and sociologists have documented how informal information networks:

• Democratize information flow by circumventing traditional hierarchies
• Enforce behavioral norms through peer accountability
• Facilitate information sharing about opportunities, threats, or changes
• Foster solidarity among those facing similar challenges
• Provide early warning about ecosystem developments

Whether one calls something gossip, rumor, or strategic information sharing often depends on whether they are the subject of said conversation and how it reflects on their interests. But rather than being a shameful secret, gossip has long served as a tool that levels the playing field for those not in power. It reinforces societal norms around what we as a collective consider unacceptable behavior. For women, minorities, and other disenfranchised groups, gossip has served as critical information-sharing to keep us safe (“Watch out for so-and-so at the holiday party…”) — it polices behavior in communities where formal accountability is weak.

From 18th century literary salons and underground circulation networks to modern workplace whisper networks and the “grapevine telegraph” used by enslaved communities to share information, gossip has long existed to fill information vacuums that formal channels can’t or won’t.

Gossip also has a gendered history, long dismissed as feminine and trivial precisely because it was a form of power available to people excluded from formal channels. In The Heroine with 1,001 Faces, Professor Maria Tatar asks:

“What is gossip’s greatest sin? One possibility is that gossip knits women together to create networks of social interactions beyond patriarchal control and oversight. It can be seen as counter-discourse that operates against prevailing communal norms, a strategy for collecting talk in the form of compelling stories that can be parsed and analyzed to turn into useful sources of wisdom and knowledge.”

To this day, it’s more often “gossip” when women do it but “strategic intel” when men do it. When’s the last time you heard a comment about men gossiping?

Even scholarly publishing has roots in gossip, where early discoveries and ideas were communicated through private letters and conversation. Formal peer review as we know it didn’t emerge until the 19th century; before that, the informal correspondence network was the evaluation system. Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip, a Victorian periodical, made this explicit, inviting readers to submit their own observations and ask questions of one another. As an industry heavily rooted in relationships and reputation, these informal networks continue to be crucial.

Scholarly publishing runs on gossip — we just don’t call it that. The hallway conversations at SSP, the Slack threads among trusted colleagues, the whispered recommendations about which reviewers to avoid and which editors actually champion new voices: these are the informal information networks that shape careers and surface problems that formal channels are too slow or too political to address.

Long before a preprint lands on bioRxiv or a review arrives in an inbox, the scholarly community is already talking — about whose methodology is shaky, whose work is genuinely groundbreaking, which society is quietly imploding under bad governance. This isn’t noise to be managed; it’s community intelligence.

The trouble is, much critical industry information remains trapped in these informal networks, accessible only to well-connected insiders. Junior professionals and those without access to the hotel bars of industry conferences often lack access to important industry dynamics and intel. See: the conceit of the hit industry podcast Midnight at the Casablancais the replication of the late-night conversation at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where millions of dollars of deals have taken shape and lord knows how many scintillating behind-the-scenes tales have been exchanged.

Learning about misconduct by a vendor you’re about to sign with, hearing a horror story about a potential employer, or learning whose extracurriculars might make them a concerning business partner — these are information exchanges that serve to protect industry connections outside of formal channels. The mere existence of these informal information networks can also serve as incentive to play fair, to treat others well, and to act with integrity. I’ve said many times that one of my favorite things about this industry is that it’s counterproductive to be a jerk to someone, because chances are that you’ll end up working with that person at some point in your career. The same is true of bad behavior generally and its tendency to come back around.

Gossip is the social infrastructure that holds a community together and enforces its norms. In scholarly publishing specifically, where power asymmetries between authors, reviewers, editors, publishers, and service providers are significant and often opaque, gossip fills in those important gaps.

It’s not all good, of course. Misinformation is something we work against in our day jobs, and peer reviewing our gossip can help distinguish between suppressed truths and simple trash talking. We can all tell the difference between malicious venting and sharing insider knowledge, and we learn quickly who is the purveyor of which sort.

Functional or corrosive, gossip is going nowhere in scholarly publishing. And so, as the world has gone remote and AI slowly drains the humanity out of existence, is there benefit to designing for productive gossip rather than pretending it doesn’t exist? Sadly, there’s apparently “not enough liability insurance in the world” for our idea of a “Kitchen Confidential” gossip column here in TSK.

Be seeing (or discussing) you, XOXO — the Scholarly Publishing Information Network

Claude was used as a research assistant, but all writing and em dashes are my own. Hat tip to Sam Green for book recs, Emily Hazzard for turning me on to Normal Gossip, and intel broker Lauren Kane for her review, insights, and inspiration.