Publishers Flood Their Readers
One theme from Peer Review Week — for some, consumers are an afterthought
Most people working in scientific fields are readers or consumers of information. A small percentage produce scholarly articles as a natural extension of their work.
We’ve spent years increasing the output from reluctant participants in the production market through carrots and sticks incentives of various kinds, including academic incentives, professional incentives, scientometric incentives, educational incentives, and financial incentives.
Today, the pressure to produce papers extends to physicians, trainees, students, and even high school students, mainly because getting more people to produce papers is profitable for Gold OA publishers and a shortcut for institutions and employers to measuring something akin to productivity in the era of academic capitalism we’ve helped expand.
The result has been a flooding of the zone of science to such an extent that a sort of scientific water intoxication has started — a malady where the signals in the body scientific can’t fire in a way that ensures coordinated action and predictable behavior.
At the heart of this change has been a shift of focus from consumers to producers — a privileging of authors and a neglect of readers, even though they are the same people in different roles.
The extent of this shift and its negative externalities are rarely discussed. But that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.
Participating in Peer Review Week last week made this apparent to me again, as the discussions were often framed by capacity, the authorship supply chain, and information as a commodity, even community as a commodity, with less at least initially seeming to be about quality, relevance, or true community.