The publisher Taylor & Francis have a new service for some of their biomedical journals. If you pay them $7000 per article, they can expedite your peer review and have it done within 3-5 weeks.
In one sense, this is nothing extraordinary. For-profit publishers have already turned open access, a concept intended to increase the free circulation of scholarly knowledge, into a profit stream by requiring authors to pay to publish their work as open access. There too the fees mostly—though not exclusively—apply to scientific publications. The main reason for that is that many scientific research teams are underwritten by public grants or by private research and development support, so these kinds of fees get written off as overhead. Which just intensifies pressure for grants and creates an even more dramatic divide between haves and have-nots.
How do they get away with it, considering that peer review for open access or other modes of publication is free to the publisher, that the labor of editors is nearly free, that the cost of producing the scholarly knowledge is underwritten by grants and by academic institutions who then spend enormous sums buying back what they spent labor and money to create? At this point, they don’t even buy it back, they rent it, and the rentier publishers frequently extort new payments just so you can keep using the knowledge you gave away for free.
They get away with this kind of accelerating enforcement of more and more unequal terms of access to knowledge that was produced not for profit but for use because we have naturalized this sort of inequality. Are you a billionaire? Fly on your own jet, from your own airport. Are you a millionaire? Welcome to first class. Are you part of what’s left of the middle class? Welcome to the sardine can. Here’s a cracker. So are you at Harvard, supported by a big NSF grant and a pharmaceutical company? Sure, pay 7 grand to get a peer review rushed through, why not. (Probably more than just rushed—let’s face it, the teams paying 7 grand are going to expect more than just a quick turnaround, they’re going to expect a favorable review.) Are you at Iowa in a thirty-person research collaboration where the PI has to be pretty careful managing the grant? Maybe you’ll pay for the middle-tier expediting if the third author is coming up for tenure in the fall. Are you at CUNY, working in an underfunded lab with no current outside grant? Get in the slow line and hold a bake sale to pay the basic fees associated with publication.
There are so many things going wrong with the world that it feels insular to care so much about the wretched state of scholarly publication, but on the other hand, what is more perfectly indicative of just how badly we have lost our way in the 21st Century? Scholars around the world labor to produce a vast bounty of knowledge. Their only real reward is reputational: most receive no payment for what they create, and only get reputational rewards if their work is used in the production of further knowledge or in teaching. They give away what they’ve produced to for-profit publishers who rely on the free labor of peer reviewers and volunteer editors to evaluate the quality of the work and focus the identity of a journal or a book series. The publishers charge a lot for a product that is today mostly costless to them, without any real belief in the values that led to that work being created or any consideration of what the people making the knowledge wanted to happen.
We once had libraries that maintained their own expert systems of cataloging and collection that were firmly wedded to the vision and needs of scholars and teachers. (And the libraries and librarians are still there, just increasingly beholden to profit-based services that they don’t control or even strongly influence.) We once had university presses that were close to our mission and vision (and a few remain). We once had knowledge that we owned and leaders who valued the production of that knowledge. Now we have for-profit publishers who control it all and leaders who care only about scholarly dissemination when it moves them one place up in some ranking system or when it brings revenue in the door.
We could collectively be free of the current system tomorrow—the entire system that creates scholarly knowledge could be taken away from the publishers. They don’t own it, they just own what was given away to them. It only takes the collective will of thousands of institutions to spend a fraction of what they do now to create a large-scale publication platform that they all own together, as a public good. And every time I write about this, I’m told by everyone that it will never happen, it can never happen. The reason? Because higher education’s leaders aren’t interested—despite their talk of austerity and efficiency. Because faculty are too afraid of leaving the reputable journal title they’ve heard of for a journal that has the same content and mission but a new name in a truly open-access platform controlled entirely by scholars and their institutions. Because the for-profit publishers will fight and will buy support among academic professionals. Because it’s too hard to pursue collective action even when the current system is the purest insanity in both financial terms and in terms of its conceptual wretchedness. Institutions that like to preen and flatter themselves about the depth and richness of their traditions, their steady stewardship of many generations of study and teaching, can’t manage to collectively spend a bit more for a short while in order to free themselves from usury forever.
This isn’t one of those cases where in order to reform one system, you have to have a global revolution. This is a change that’s perfectly plausible, completely possible. Nothing else needs to happen except for universities and colleges all around the world—or hell, just in the United States—to join in a single initiative to build an open-access platform together, to create new journal titles there, and to direct their faculty to move all peer reviewing, editorial work, and publication to the platform.
The publishing trolls will still collect their tolls for the legacy knowledge that was foolishly donated to their hoards. Nothing can change that now. But we can stop compounding our mistake.
Image credit: "Life Sciences Library, University of Texas at Austin" by myoldpostcards is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
This is the scary side of reputation: The one the Ancient Regime knew well. When reputation is for sale, then some will buy, and those who cannot afford it will suffer. No skin off the noses of the buyers, of course, except for the pesky way monetized transactions always escalate, because when profit is at stake, it doesn’t matter if fewer help you generate it. Today’s reputational customer is tomorrow’s has-been, unless they keep getting the massive grants and the Harvard jobs. Courtiers rarely become kings.