Interview


“The rise of universities canceling subscriptions to scholarly journals is incredibly important”


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when the journals were printed, though sometimes it’s the journal subscription contract itself that stipulates exact delivery windows, and so leads to these crazy delays. If you’re a scholar, you want


to read new research as quickly as possible and you want your research published as quickly as possible, to advance science and your own career. As citizens, we should all want new ideas and new discoveries available as soon as possible.


How has Scholastica performed since it was founded in 2011? Scholastica came out of beta in 2013, and is now used by over 500 journals to accept submissions, manage peer review, and to publish open access. We’ve been lucky to work with some great journals over the years, from the 2014 launch of Sociological Science, which uses Scholastica for peer review, to the landmark arXiv-overlay math journal Discrete Analysis (founded by Timothy Gowers, who inspired the Cost of Knowledge boycott of Elsevier, as well as other


42 Research Information June/July 2017


renowned mathematicians), which uses Scholastica for peer review and publishing. More recently, some great


new open access journals like the Journal of New Librarianship and Internet Mathematics have begun using the Scholastica platform for peer review and open access publishing using Scholastica’s new journal website functionality, which makes it possible for journals to create modern, attractive publication websites on their own, without the need for a web developer.


What is the single most important development in the industry in recent years? I think the rise of universities – or entire countries – cancelling subscriptions to scholarly journals is incredibly important. The corporate journal publishers have a massive amount of business leverage on their side (e.g. inelastic demand from researchers, monopoly over content, secret contracts to avoid price comparison, etc.), and I think these institutional boycotts of journal subscriptions


could change the dynamic in a positive way by hitting the publishers where it hurts – the wallet. Recently we’ve seen negotiations and boycotts from the Netherlands, Canadian universities, Germany/Peru/ Taiwan, and even small colleges taking a stand. On a more practical note, the rising preference among researchers to access scholarship online instead of in physical print journals is paving the way to cut costs related to printing journals, as well as to streamline the entire publishing process with a new, digital- first mentality rather than the print-first/digital-afterthought approach we’ve seen among legacy scholarly publishers.


How do you see the next 10 years panning out (for Scholastica and the wider industry?) We recently released a white paper talking about this issue. I think we’re going to see the entire academic publishing industry atomise into smaller groupings of journals run by nonprofits or individual groups of scholars, rather


than continued centralisation of journals among a handful of publishers – which has been the case up to this point and is the reason for the unsustainable subscription situation we’re in now. I also think we’re going


to see more tools that democratise the academic publishing process so that scholarly publishing workflow is less specialised, more automated, and work more easily distributed across more people (you can see a good analogy in the democratisation of the financial sector). This will accelerate the viability of various open access publishing models, and lower the costs to run a high-quality journal – all of which will move control over academic publishing more into the hands of scholars, rather than corporate publishers. I hope Scholastica’s at the


centre of that movement, producing great tools to help journals publish scholarship efficiently, affordably, and sustainably.


Interview by Tim Gillett


@researchinfo | www.researchinformation.info


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