Turning a blind eye to the reality of academic publishing

There is a fundamental divide in academic publishing between those who create papers and those who publish them. Power lies with the publishers, who have persuaded academics that they should contribute a free supply of papers along with editing and refereeing services. Publishers make enormous profits from academic publishing: academics get to keep their jobs. Both like to be seen, and to see themselves, as advancing knowledge for public benefit: in fact, both produce indicators of scholarship rather than scholarship itself, and then for their own private benefit. We explore how this travesty has arisen, specifically the impact of Robert Maxwell in demonstrating how scholarship might be exploited and of Eugene Garfield in showing how it might be replaced by indicators, especially the journal impact factor. Their contributions were instrumental in making academic publishing viciously competitive while still presenting itself as collegial. Citation was presented as a dependable measure of academic quality requiring only the counting of cited papers. It was not—it was ruthlessly gamed, though the very possibility of gaming was dismissed out of hand. So, too, were the thoroughly negative observations that papers were produced to be counted rather than read, even by their authors, who were not expected to have written them either. Academic publishing chose to ignore such scurrilous suspicion, relying on peer review to sort out any problems that might have escaped its notice. The reluctance of academic publishing to recognise reality was challenged by the influx of predatory publishers with their open access model. Predatory publishers were quite open about publishing papers to generate performance indicators in return for the academic’s cash. Established publishers, insulated from reality by their profitability, could not fail to notice that more money could be made if lofty academic values were taken less seriously. The largest also began to see themselves, and to present themselves, as information companies producing not academic papers, but indicators to measure and rank all manner of academic activity. They seemed to forget that these indicators had been gamed for years, even though they themselves had been responsible for much of the manipulation. While the blind eye saw nothing and left academic publishing in ignorance, the reality seen by academic publishing’s good eye was no more than the creation of its own indicators.