An opportunity for social good
Brian Cody, co-founder and CEO of Scholastica, has his say on the future of journal publishing
Tell us a little about your background, education, and career... I grew up in Florida, went to school down there, then started a sociology PhD programme at the University of Chicago, where the idea of Scholastica was born.
I met the other two Scholastica co-founders (Rob Walsh and Cory Schires) while we were all in graduate school at UChicago. We saw how slowly new research was published and thought, since we were all self-taught programmers, that we could help improve scholarship with technology. As we started talking to more academics, we realised that the problem was really two-fold: publishing journal articles is MUCH slower than it should be in the digital age; and universities are paying billion of dollars to large corporations to access
“Journal publishing today is like smoking in the 1980s: experts agree it’s bad, and companies make billions from it”
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knowledge that volunteer scholars are actually doing the bulk of the work to produce. That’s why we decided to start Scholastica – we saw a real problem with a real opportunity for social good. In many ways, Scholastica
is a combination of the three co-founders’ experiences in academia, our ability to write code, our friendship, and our shared passion for making positive social changes.
You’ve been quoted as saying that the way scholarly publishing works ‘is an accepted evil’. Why do you say this?
Journal publishing today is like smoking in the 1980s: experts agree it’s bad, and companies make billions from it. None of this is a secret:
the scholarly community knows the fees charged by corporate journal publishers aren’t justified by the final product, yet scholars continue publishing with them and universities keep purchasing their titles – because societal norms haven’t yet caught up to reality. The research community
today pays $10 billion each year to be able to read scholarly journal articles (which is vital for the advancement of science) – but the crazy thing is that most of that money goes to large corporations and not
to the people who authored and reviewed the research or back into the budgets of the universities and non- profit organisations paying professors and scholars to do research. Most academics would
agree that scholarly publishing is broken, and the cause is a vicious cycle that’s hard to stop. Universities feel they have no choice but to buy access to expensive journals from corporate publishers for their faculty, then those same faculty members publish their new research in similar journals, which gives the corporate scholarly publishers more leverage to charge universities more for their content, ad infinitum.
That’s an accepted evil in
my book – everyone knows it’s bad, but for a long time there hasn’t been a real way out because it was so onerous for non-profit groups to publish print journals on their own, so the research community just kept doing the same thing. Now, with the move to digital publishing, it’s harder to justify the need for corporate publishers and it’s clear that publishing can be made much more affordable. Laws, advertisements, and individuals speaking up changed social norms around tobacco – we need the same thing for academic journal publishing. The good news is that some universities are starting to cancel their journal subscriptions as a way to break the cycle, individual scholars are being more vocal about the importance of supporting free and open access journals, and alternatives to the corporate journal publishing model are gaining ground.
What are the benefits of shortening the publishing process – for librarians, researchers and publishers? Scholarship is often delayed for months or years – which is always surprising to people outside academia who expect knowledge to be available quickly, considering we live in an age where news is available within seconds. I’ll share an example: when
a scholar finishes a research article and sends it to a journal, it would not be uncommon for that article to take 2+ years to be published. How could that be? The traditional publishing process looks somewhat like this:
l Peer review: 3 months l Author revisions requested by the journal: 3 months
l Second round of peer review: 3 months
l Wait for other articles in the same issue to be selected: 4 months
l Copyediting: 1 month l Layout/Typesetting: 1 month l Backlog of quarterly issues:
9 months When an article passes peer
review, it does not go through copyediting or layout right away – it generally waits for all the other articles that will be in that issue to be selected, and then the entire issue is sent for copy editing. Many journals only publish an issue every three months, and often try to create a backlog or buffer of a few issues to make sure they hit their publication deadlines. Consequently, even once an entire issue is ready to be published it can easily sit for over a year until it’s publication date rolls around. Often this delay is simply a holdover from
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