Analysis and news


Independent publishing: breaking the mould? Broken pact in scholarly communication motivates shifting locus of control, writes Daniel Berze


In decades past, there existed a tacit ‘pact’ between the academic community and academic publishers; namely that the academics would conduct the research, create the content, perform peer review to ensure quality and the publishers would disseminate it. This sounds like a sensible arrangement. The advantage for the academics is that they do not have to invest their precious time and money in an area that is not their core raison d’être. The obvious advantage for the publishers is that they receive quality content that they can then disseminate to the appropriate academic audience.


So what went wrong? Pricing: the price of academic content has increased disproportionately to the costs associated with its dissemination. One of the arguments for introducing digital technology into the dissemination process is that it would make the entire process cheaper and faster. In fact, it has become much more expensive for users (ask any librarian!) and looking at submission to dissemination times, the speed of dissemination can also be questioned. Publishers would argue that the


tremendous increase in volume accounts for increased costs and the slowness of the system, but the entire principle of technology is that it can handle large volumes of content without significantly impacting costs. Does it really cost more to process 1,000 digital manuscripts than it used to take to process 100 hard copy manuscripts? The cost of computing memory, hardware and software has reduced dramatically in the last decade. So what is the justification for these massive price increases? In my previous career at a learned society, I would receive letters from publishers announcing that (for example) ‘we have restricted price increases this year to 15 per cent’ when inflation was less than two per cent. Division of profits: in the afore- mentioned ‘pact’ between academics and publishers, it was tacitly agreed that academics would submit their articles for


16 Research Information February/March 2017


nothing (or their book manuscripts for roughly nine per cent of royalties), and conduct their peer reviews for nothing, and the publishers would support the dissemination process over time to ensure sustainability and that content would reach intended user communities. It was expected that a profit would be charged in order to support the process and to allow for the investment in new technologies, adding value and increasing the user experience. However, no one expected the disproportionate, almost extortionate profit-taking that many (but not all) publishers had realised. The academic community felt betrayed, their excellent content being used to spike publishers’ share prices instead of being used to further the goals of science. Status grab: in the original pact, it was


clearly understood who was to receive the credit for high-quality content – namely the content generator. It takes years of high quality education, innate ability and hard ‘roll up your sleeves’ work in order to create a successful academic researcher. Yet publishers seem to have turned the tables, basking in the limelight of ‘their’ excellent content. Publishers take credit for high-quality content, while they are mere facilitators. Both the editorial process, as well as the content generation process, are products of the academic community. Not that this facilitation process is unimportant, but the publisher does not deserve the status that it often projects to the international community for the operational role it plays. Also, content users now typically search for content according to subject relevance


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