Academic Publishing and Blue Checks

There’s a scandal brewing in the rarefied field of political philosophy, and it’s reflective of trends in academic publishing more generally.

Wiley, the commercial publisher of the Journal of Political Philosophy, has removed its editor Robert Goodin. And this has led to a flood of resignations by members of the editorial board, including such notables as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Jane Mansbridge.

The precipitating event appears to have been a demand by the publisher that the editors dramatically increase the number of articles accepted for publication each year. Doing so would benefit Wiley because academic publishing has been moving away from subscription-based distribution and towards open-access, funded by author fees. Each published article brings in revenues for the publisher, with the costs typically being charged to author research budgets or grants from funding agencies. Some researchers without adequate funding or institutional support are forced to rely on personal funds.

Conflicts between editors and commercial publishers are nothing new, of course, and arose frequently even under the subscription-based model. A couple of decades ago the entire editorial board of the European Economic Review resigned in a dispute with Elsevier over the price of subscriptions. This journal was the official outlet of the European Economic Association at the time, and since the title was owned by the publisher, the association had to relinquish it. The editors responded by launching a new publication, the Journal of the European Economic Association, which quickly inherited the prestige of the outlet it replaced. The EER continues to be published, but as a shadow of its former self, eclipsed by the official association journal.

Much of the work that keeps a journal functioning is done without adequate compensation, including the laborious and time-consuming process of peer review. Referees provide their services as a public good, in the expectation that they too will benefit from the process at some point. They do so to assist editors and authors, not to strengthen the balance sheets of publishers.

Even as a business decision, large increases in the number of articles published annually doesn’t make much sense. Anna Stilz, editor-in-chief of Philosophy and Public Affairs (another Wiley journal) explains:

This conflicts with the role of journals in our profession, which is to curate a body of well-vetted, high quality work for an audience, to provide feedback that improves people’s arguments, and to serve as a signaling device that validates the importance of someone’s work when they go up for tenure and promotion. If the top political philosophy journals now have to publish 50 articles per year, 100 the next year, 200 the next, and so on infinitely, it no longer means anything to have your article published in these journals. And the role of the editorial team also becomes superfluous—if the aim is to rush as many articles to publication as possible, why provide careful comments?

It’s hard to resist the analogy with blue checks on twitter. These used to be associated with verified accounts of journalists, celebrities, and other public figures. They were markers of value and carriers of prestige. Allowing people to pay a modest monthly fee to obtain the same marker completely transformed the symbol’s meaning. Many legacy verified accounts refused to pay the fee, and were eventually stripped of the blue check. But this just entrenched the new meaning of the marker as a simple verification of purchase (and perhaps a signal of support for the new management at the company).

In an effort to maintain some ambiguity about its meaning (or perhaps just to toy with his antagonists), the owner of twitter then decided to gift the blue check to some celebrities who had publicly refused to pay for it, including Stephen King and LeBron James. The gift was unwelcome, of course, and at this point I suspect that these folks would gladly pay to be permanently denied the blue check:

So it will be with journals that scale up the number of articles published, and lower standards to do so. They will have a hard time finding competent and committed reviewers, and will have to rely on a more perfunctory evaluation process. The value to an author of securing an acceptance will decline precipitously, and promotion decisions will have to rely on other sources of information. Wiley will end up killing its own golden geese.

The silver lining is that this creates an opportunity for academic presses. The JEEA is now published by Oxford University Press. The editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics resigned en masse in 2019 and launched Quantitative Science Studies in collaboration with MIT Press. The board of NeuroImage has also recently stepped down in unison, and is looking to launch Imaging Neuroscience, also with MIT Press. So the future of serious academic publishing is not at risk.

But commercial publishing of academic work will probably shift towards low prestige content. It will have a niche in the journal ecosystem, but not one that is taken very seriously or relied upon for promotion decisions at institutions that place significant weight on research. Publishers like Hindawi and MDPI already occupy this space. It will be interesting to see whether historically significant printing houses like Wiley will join them.