Abstract
Rapid transformation in the ecosystems of academic publication can be attributed not only to changing demands of the neoliberal university but also to factors in the broader economic, cultural, and technological world. The centralization of information flow has led to consolidation of academic publishing into fewer multinational media corporations who provide information to scholars in aggregated and disaggregated forms. Resistance by academics has focused on the availability of open access scholarship, but they have not solved how to make this system financially sustainable. This article reports on trends in this ever-more-unequal ecosystem, the challenges they raise, and options for scholars to solve them.
Keywords
Global capitalism requires growth, of companies, of an industry, of a world economy. But, how does growth work in a stagnant or shrinking sector like academia? How do scholarly publishers survive when their world is clearly not expanding? And what does this mean for scholars? How does the neoliberal environment enveloping the university and the universe around it affect how and where academics publish and access publications? The purpose of this article is to briefly outline how the neoliberal economy has affected scholarly publishing and publishers, particularly in qualitative research, over the past several decades, and the various strategies that the universities, their libraries, and individual scholars have used to counteract it.
The neoliberal capitalist world has created a model where large companies in the technology sector and elsewhere—like Google, Apple, Amazon—try to provide all things to all people. So far, the academic world has been too small for these media giants to bother with, although Amazon seems ready to explore the K-12 education market (Anderson, 2016). But the same business model created by these corporate giants has been emulated by the largest players in academic publishing—Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer, SAGE, Taylor & Francis—as they move from publishing discrete pieces like books and journals to offering large amounts of information to customers, only partially in traditional book/article form. Third-party organizations like EBSCO and ProQuest, who do not own academic content, have followed the same strategy by aggregating material from many smaller publishers. The strategy is to try to control large bodies of information so, like Google, finding research results is made most efficient by always checking their site first. In a finite marketplace, these organizations’ market share from the core customers—university librarians—increases by packaging and selling ever-larger bodies of information in a single transaction. Although this phenomenon is facilitated by the move of scholarship to an electronic medium, it goes far beyond simple ebooks or ejournals to a whole different model in which academic knowledge is marketed to its primary customers (Esposito, 2016).
Let’s call this process “aggregation.”
Aggregation in Scholarly Publishing
The history of the development of aggregation in scholarly publishing over the past two decades takes two related forms—the aggregation of publishing organizations and the aggregation of published content. The aggregation of organizations, swallowing up of smaller publishers by ever-larger publishers and they, in turn, by larger media conglomerates, has been well-documented and is somewhat familiar to most scholars (Munroe, 2007; University of California, Berkeley, Faculty Conference on Scholarly Publishing, 2009). This includes my own company, Left Coast Press, Inc., sold in 2015 to Routledge. A recent article shows that 70% of all academic social science articles published in 2013 came from the five largest journal publishers (Larivière, Haustein, & Mongeon, 2015). If anything, the speed of consolidation has accelerated over the past several years (Publishers Lunch, 2016).
But it has been the need to aggregate content that has largely driven the aggregation of presses, and its influence is equally profound. Let’s briefly recount that history here. Publishers discovered several decades ago that libraries were hostages to journal subscriptions. One cannot pick and choose which parts of a journal to keep on subscription; the entire run of a journal was necessary to meet the needs of scholars who are looking for a particular article. A subscription, once purchased, needs to be perpetual. Prices began to escalate in the 1980s, and journals swallowed up ever-larger percentages of library budgets. Most senior scholars are familiar with the scenario of receiving a list of journal subscriptions from their librarian with the request to choose which subscriptions to eliminate to redirect that money to the increased price of journals they wished to retain.
To counter the escalating prices, libraries began to band together in logical groupings to hold and share a single high-priced subscription. Thus, all the research libraries, for example, in Ohio, created a consortium to host a single subscription to a journal. This process was made possible by a parallel trend, the development of electronic journals, where an article could be accessed with a couple of keyboard strokes rather than by shipping a journal issue from one campus to another.
Faced with these consortia and their buying power, publishers resorted to attempting to sell ever-larger bodies of information, offering libraries collections of journals rather than single subscriptions. This created the Big Deal, where a publisher and a library or library consortium would negotiate subscriptions to a large number of journals at a fraction of the price of purchasing those journals individually. Although the faculty at their campuses might not use all those journals, the cost-benefit logic was that there was enough use in the journals collection that the library was saving money on the journals that were used by scholars at that institution or consortium.
It became a world of big publishing versus big libraries, a battle of the titans.
This incentivized journal publishers to go on buying sprees to purchase as many more journals as they could. The larger the collection they could amass, the larger the deal they could make with the library. In effect, it began an academic arms race. And, with journals being highly valuable because of their skyrocketing prices, the larger journal publishers had the cash to effect such deals. Values of journals skyrocketed for those who published them. My own company’s fledgling journal program of 12 publications was sold to Maney Publishing and University of California Press in 2012 at a price much higher than their annual sales, even though few of those journals were older than 5 years, none had impact factors, and almost none of them were profitable. Some academic societies also benefited greatly, their organizational finances transformed for the better by selling their journals to these publishers or partnering with them in long-term contracts. It had even greater benefit for the publisher who could add another group of high-visibility, high-prestige journals to the package offered to libraries. The cost to the society of having to accommodate their publication policies to the assembly-line practices of the conglomerate who now controlled their publications seemed worth it given the financial windfall that could be directed to other organizational programs.
Another direction this move toward gigantism took was the evolution of the massive, online general journal. Begun in the hard sciences with publications like Public Library of Science (PLoS), launched in 2001, they sought to be a publication that merged content from many different disciplines into a single journal, rather than parse content by subject area. PLoS and similar publications seek self-sufficiency through the Author Processing Charges (APCs) and are free to the reader. The quantity of articles published, which was more than 165,000 by 2016, not only reflects the attraction of broader distribution to authors through greater availability to readers but also represents the journal’s need to escalate APC income to pay expenses (https://www.plos.org/history).
Commercial journal publishers, seeing the success of this model, have begun their own copycat versions. SAGE Open, as one example, offers open access publication in the full range of social sciences and humanities to authors whose articles are accepted and who, in 2016, pay a US$395 processing charge (http://sgo.sagepub.com/about-us). The editorial board of the journal lists more than 500 scholars from a wide range of disciplines who review articles. But looking closely at the fine print, the journal editors, the decision-makers who decide whether to accept an article, are not scholars but publishing professionals who are SAGE employees. When one considers that the income for the journal is entirely dependent on APCs and the decision is made by the publisher instead of by scholars, the incentive is to accept rather than reject marginal articles for publication. More articles increases the income of the journal. In qualitative research, both the International Journal of Qualitative Methodology and the Global Qualitative Nursing Research journals, also published by SAGE, are built around this incentive toward increased publication, although each of them is edited by a reputable scholar in their field.
Having found successful financial models for journals, books were soon added to the publishers’ mix. Large publishers began to sell collections of their content in specific areas to libraries. Again, size mattered and the acquisition of smaller publishing houses ensued. For smaller publishers, who could not offer libraries thousands of titles on a subject for their collection, third-party aggregators like EBSCO and ProQuest filled the gap. Aiding this process was again the digitization of books for sale to libraries and the growth of multiple electronic options for purchase by the library, generally subsumed under the moniker “patron driven acquisition” (PDA). In some cases, the library would be allowed to list the entire collection purchased from a publisher or aggregator in their electronic catalog but only paid for books that were being used. Interlibrary loan programs, available at the click of a key, soared. For example, Grand Valley State University in Michigan made a PDA agreement with EBL Corporation, now part of ProQuest, from 2009. EBL placed 50,000 titles from many publishers in the Grand Valley electronic book catalog, although the university paid only a small platform fee and for actual usage of those titles. The bill ended up at US$69,000, rather than the US$3 million it would have cost them to purchase all of those titles outright, while giving the university community access to a huge book collection from many publishers (Kolowich, 2011). All this was made possible because of the large size of the collection offered.
The next step was a logical one. Large publishers who publish in multiple formats are making all their content in a subject area available in aggregate form. The most prolific publisher of research methods material created a collection of content—SAGE Research Methods Online—which purports to contain more than 175,000 pages worth of SAGE proprietary journals, books, case studies, videos, and reference works (http://srmo.sagepub.com/page/About$0020SRMO$0020Public/about). SpringerLink is based on a similar model but covers all the proprietary Springer social science content in one database (https://www.springer.com/gp/products/springerlink). In spring 2016, a number of American researchers reported to me that they received an email inquiry from Routledge asking for feedback on an idea to aggregate their methodology publications into a single collection similar to the ones mentioned above.
As a next step, large publishers have been looking into publishing research data, prepublication drafts, and working papers, the totality of scholarship. Elsevier has attracted attention for first purchasing Mendeley and its wealth of stored publications in 2013 and, in spring 2016, the Social Science Research Network and its informational content of 300,000 researchers. These presumably will be integrated with their published work for an ever-larger group of products for institutional sale (Schonfeld, 2016).
The move toward gigantism and the cost of these aggregate collections leaves little budget room in university libraries for purchase of single books or journals that might not be in a collection. The parallels to other sectors of the corporate world—technology, consumer goods, music, even bookselling—is immediately obvious. Kindle users are coerced to purchase their ebooks from Amazon. Consumers may not want 8 pounds of artichokes, but the Walmart price for a box of them is hard to turn down, even if half of them are thrown away. Ever-larger collections have some benefits for the researcher, who needs to search fewer and fewer sources to find the material sought. However, it points the reader first to the material in the database of the publisher, increasing usage and therefore the value of the content. Furthermore, the growth of large collections by large media conglomerates is rapidly squeezing out smaller, more innovative publishers who don’t have comparable masses of material to offer to libraries. Publications become safer, less controversial, less innovative, more homogenized. This too parallels current consumer trends.
Disaggregation
Shadowing the trend toward aggregation is its opposite, disaggregation. This too is borrowed from the contemporary world of technology. It allows the researcher to get whatever she wants and no more, whenever she wants it. Researchers no longer need to peruse tables of contents of a stack of journals or scour eight chapters of a book to find one datum, theory, or reference. Those can be made available from a simple search across the Google universe. In proprietary collections, the first results will be the content owned by that publisher. The reader can find and access just what they need, no more, no less. If a library does not have a subscription to that content, the seeker can access a single article from another library, a publisher, or from a commercial service at a cost.
Publishers have facilitated disaggregation by making their offerings available piecemeal at a cost. Grabbing an article from the Taylor & Francis’s International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, for example, will cost US$41 if the university library doesn’t have a subscription. Other third-party services like Deep Dyve (https://www-deepdyve-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/) will provide access to thousands of journals articles from many publishers for US$40 a month. As part of the dance between university libraries and journal publishers have come short-term loan programs, which allow universities with aggregations to loan articles to other libraries for a fee. That fee and other costs to librarians and individuals for piecemeal information varies widely between publishers, as different commercial organizations experiment with different economic models without drastically undercutting their subscription and book sales.
This new marketplace of scholarly publications has had a differential impact on scholars’ access to information. Discoverability is easier but skewed toward the collections and the libraries that possess them. Costs are higher because of the volume of information transacted, access scaled to the wealth and size of the institution’s library budget and to their purchasing decisions on Big Deals. Academically marginal parties—students, adjuncts, independent scholars, and academic institutions in less developed parts of the world—have less access than those in well-funded research universities. Humanities programs have it tougher than medical schools. The neoliberal academic pecking order described elsewhere in this issue is reflected in the publications ecosystem.
The Move Toward Open Access
Academics and their organizations have not been completely passive in this transformation of the publishing marketplace. Libraries have occasionally done battle against publishers over skyrocketing costs. Most notable was the threatened 2010 boycott by the University of California of both subscriptions and article submissions from faculty over the price increases of the journal Nature (Howard, 2010). The consolidation of libraries into consortia to share subscriptions, described above, has also been a feature of university responses to the increases in publication costs.
An important part of the resistance, generated at the level of the academics themselves, has been the growth of the Open Access movement, that is, the process of wresting scholarly publications away from any economic system and making them freely available on the web for anyone and everyone to read. Here, “everyone” includes not only academic colleagues, but also students, people in other research areas who might stumble across this work, and even mom and dad who are proud of their daughter, the professor. And, every scholar hopes, the audience will include the curious non-academic reader browsing their smart phones in Pakistan, Poland, or Paraguay, a global public audience for scholarly writing!
“Open” Access Is Not Free
Many of its proponents speak of open access with a religious fervor. It is a democratizing movement designed to break the stranglehold of large commercial publishers who hide published work from potential readers behind expensive firewalls. These advocates are right about the problem. There’s only one issue with their solution: open access systems are not free systems. Someone pays for them.
There are costs of producing academic content, whether on the web or in print. These include the need to edit, design, typeset, and proofread the content, to maintain the host electronic platforms at universities, to protect legal rights of creators, to publicize articles and books to those interested in the work, and to administer all of these systems. Converting everything to electronic format doesn’t eliminate the costs; the printing of scholarly material is only a small fraction of the overall cost. If publishers are no longer responsible for these other tasks using their own capital, someone else will have to do this work and pay for it. The author? The professional organization? The most likely candidate to manage these tasks is the university library, except that the library is subject to the budget uncertainty that plagues all universities. For scholars seeking a system that will ensure their book or article is available in perpetuity, it is a bit unnerving that the task rests with a branch of the university that might be dependent on annual fluctuation of state budgets or the varying success of endowment campaigns. If there’s a budget shortfall, do they cut the qualitative journal they host before the one on cancer research? Nor is the culture of librarians, traditionally focused on serving internal informational needs of their campus, easily adaptable to promoting publications to academic and non-academic audiences worldwide.
Proponents can show many open access publications that work effectively today. In qualitative research, FQS and The Qualitative Report stand out for their longevity and quality. Their founders should be proud. But they still represent a small fraction of the content output and still are reliant on volunteer labor for sustainability. What happens when open access systems become responsible for the estimated 100,000 academic journals (journalseek.net), and tens of thousands of new scholarly books published each year? Where will the money come to hire editorial, technology, and administrative staff to maintain the flow of knowledge? In the neoliberal world, perpetuity is ensured by the profitable flow of capital for its success. Will a non-profit system work equally well?
Another key issue about open access is that it does not provide the most important thing a traditional publisher provides—publicity (hence the origin of the term). When an author’s carefully crafted work is posted on the server along with thousands of other works on the same topic from hundreds of other authors, what will draw attention to this project? Under the current system, the publisher serves a gatekeeper role to ensure quality and has the responsibility to tell the world how good it is. And they do. Under an open access system, that becomes the author’s job or the job of the voluntary publishing organization. Thus, work receiving the most attention is likely to be the ones promulgated by the best academic self-promoters, who are not necessarily the best scholars. Even worse, the attention may go to someone who has few academic credentials but is good at working electronic media for publicity. These hucksters already overpopulate the web; one can only expect that to increase in a system based in open access scholarship.
Co-Opting Open Access
As part of the battle of the titans, commercial journal publishers have attempted to co-opt the open access movement, making articles free to readers by charging the writer APCs, as described above, as part of the process of accepting articles for publication. This program, called the gold open access model, allows the author to pay for the privilege of removing the firewall for their publication. Costs can run from a few hundred dollars to several thousand—not a big deal for a large National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored medical school project, just another budget line added to the multimillion dollar grant proposal, but a very big deal for an independent scholar in the humanities, an adjunct professor, or a graduate student. The system seems to reward the wealthiest scholarly areas and participants at the expense of the poorest—not a democratizing movement at all.
The other drive for open access has come from government, the third titan in this battle of the giants, who purportedly want “the people” to be able to access the work funded by their tax dollars. Thus, new regulations on making research findings public have been promulgated in a number of countries, including by several U.S. federal agencies. Many universities have similar regulations, requiring public availability of their scholars’ output through the university’s repository. The concept of making research publicly available through this method is attractive to scholars, but few journals and book publishers will publish work for which a competing version is available on the web at no cost. The green open access model has evolved to accommodate this, establishing rules to maintain exclusivity of content by publishers by preventing the author from posting the published version. Rather, an unedited, pre-typeset version is deposited in these repositories, often after an embargo period of a year or more. Although it allows the reader to view a version of the content of a piece, it is not particularly useful for formal citations of the published version and doesn’t represent the final, published work.
Even this green open access system can be monetized. Recently, the publishing colossus Elsevier launched a pilot program with University of Florida libraries to use Elsevier’s metadata to identify and include all material appearing in Elsevier journals from Florida faculty in a University of Florida repository hosted by the publisher—approximately 31,000 articles—and free to all who have access to the Florida’s collection. Without proper university accreditation, these materials can be accessed for a fee, which Elsevier is happy to accept. It also gives Elsevier usage data that can be used in pricing and selling the journals to other libraries (Crotty, 2016).
Commercial publishers receive most of the criticism in this battle over control of scholarly publications, but there have emerged some players who truly wear black hats. A host of new journals have popped up, many based in China and India, who will publish articles for a fee much smaller than Springer or SAGE. These so-called predatory journals will often not have editors or editorial boards, but will have titles sounding like traditional scholarly publications and will promise speedy, inexpensive, and open access publication. For example, Open Research Network (ORN) launched 86 journals simultaneously in the spring of 2013. The journals, with titles like ORN Journal of African Studies and Development and ORN Journal of Agricultural Biotechnology and Sustainable Development, were listed on their website, but there was no list of journal editors or editorial boards, nor any evidence of peer review. It is advertised to cost US$300 per accepted article to publish in an ORN journal, a fraction of most traditional publishers’ APC costs, with no guarantee that the scholar would have any academic credit for this publication (Beall, 2013). To help monitor this flood of new, sketchy journals, Jeffrey Beall, librarian for the University of Colorado, developed a list of predatory open access journals (www.scholarlyoa.com), whose peer review processes are questionable and who charge to publish in their journals. This list has become a resource for academic librarians and should be for scholars before submitting an article to a journal with which one is not familiar.
Other Academic Sector Efforts to Circumvent the Battle of Titans
University presses, less formal publication structures within the university, and some not-for-profit organizations have developed other strategies to circumvent the battle of titans on behalf of marginalized elements of the scholarly community. A few university presses have developed their own open access programs and have banded together to create others. Some of these projects have been in existence for quite a while. Project Gutenberg has built an electronic collection of tens of thousands of free out-of-copyright academic books since the 1970s (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page). Project Muse, although not an open access project, has collected almost 1.5 million articles and book chapters from 250 not-for-profit publishers since 1995 and merged them into a single database hosted by Johns Hopkins University Press, available to academic libraries at a much lower cost than their commercial counterparts (https://muse.jhu.edu/about/index.html). JSTOR has gone beyond its original role as repository for older journal articles by adding current articles from 200 journals from 46 publishers, and an ebook program comprising 40,000 titles from 100 academic publishers (Straumsheim, 2016). They have also developed a Register and Read program, which allows access to JSTOR-hosted material for independent scholars at a modest cost (http://about.jstor.org/rr).
The latest university press entry to the open access model is Lever Press, a joint effort of 40 liberal arts colleges to create a humanities publisher in which the libraries of the participating institutions cover the costs of publication, rather than the author or the reader (http://www.leverpress.org/news/). Although laudable, the commitment of US$1 million collectively by the participating institutions is expected to produce a total of 60 books over the next 4 years, a miniscule fraction of the scholarly output requiring this treatment given that a recent study conducted by Ithaka S+R (the parent of JSTOR) showed the average cost of producing an academic monograph was US$30,000 (Maron, Mulhern, Rossman, & Schmelzinger, 2016).
Not all open access initiatives are as benign as advertised. University of California Press, for example, has developed the Luminos program for publishing open access academic monographs that would otherwise not be considered economically viable. But, as paralleling the journal gold open access model, it requires a US$7,500 subvention from authors, or their institutions, or a special waiver of the subvention from the press, once again disadvantaging the least able to afford publication (http://www.luminosoa.org/site/faqs/#author-faqs-open-access).
All of the strategies mentioned above involve traditional book or journal articles. Another key strategy evolving in the academy is the development of other channels for presenting information made possible by the Internet: blogs, databases, hyperlinked websites, social media, all can offer the researchers ways of reaching their colleagues and a much broader public without having to worry about firewalls, gatekeepers, or even peer reviewers. Many have used these channels to good effect and contribute and read key research findings and thinking without having university affiliations. Blogs like Savage Minds (http://savageminds.org/) and The Weekly Qualitative Report (http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/WQR/) are highly influential and represent a growing group of qualitative research blogs.
The development of non-traditional digital communication sources is particularly important for arts-based and community-based researchers. The former have traditionally been hamstrung by the limitations of paper products and the early generations of their digital counterpart, often not more than PDF versions of the paper work. Arts-based research can use digital media to present oral work, color artwork, interactive projects, theater, music, dance, and a host of other presentation genres without the restrictions of traditional media. Community-based researchers, intent on sharing their work with the community, can create information accessible to anyone in the community with an Internet connection. The volume and complexity of qualitative data are also more easily presented in a matrix, hyperlinked form than in a linear, narrative fashion.
As noted above, the volume of noise in the ether means that scholars need to be as good at publicizing their projects as producing them. This is an entirely different skill set, and one for which few academics are either trained or adept at. The best scholarly work presented outside traditional channels is often lost to the audience it seeks. Although these alternative models work for some projects largely through grant funding or volunteer efforts, to transform the entire system of academic communication to these alternative forms would require there be a perpetual funding base for editorial, technological, publicity, and administrative costs.
Why Doesn’t the System Collapse?
With all these competing pressures, what keeps the traditional publishing system in place? We can thank the conservativism of the tenure system for that. Those Faculty Evaluation Committees (FECs) still look at vitae and assess the number and worth of all those articles and books to make promotion decisions. As long as that system stays intact, scholars will be pushed to produce publishable articles in high impact factor journals and books through reputable publishers, no matter how work is aggregated and disaggregated when in the hands of the publisher. For all its many limitations, the Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Report is still the gold standard for evaluating a scholar’s worth to tenure committees.
However, what if the tenure system gets abolished or transformed, what would it do to the publishing landscape? FECs around the world are already puzzling over how to evaluate material coming from non-traditional sources and in non-traditional formats. Some of this transformation will be welcomed by qualitative researchers. In some institutions, an arts-based product or a community-based project already counts as much as a refereed Qualitative Health Research article. The number of institutions accepting this work should increase over time. Some day scholars may be able to blog their research study in weekly posts.
In most institutions, that day won’t be tomorrow. The academic reward system changes very slowly. These utopian (or dystopian) scenarios may or may not happen. If they do, it will likely take a long time and may come in a form currently not foreseen. For those currently on the tenure treadmill, it is unlikely the rules will change before the big day comes. So don’t lose any sleep over it . . . yet. In the interim, publishers will have nightmares about the day some junior development specialist at Google decides that they should add a scholarly publishing division.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the editors for their interest in including it in their special issue.
Author’s Note
An earlier version of this article was delivered at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in Urbana, Illinois, in May 2016. Parts of it are drawn from Allen (2015a) and 
.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.