Offline: The crisis in scientific publishing

Abstract

Back in 1990, no one used the words strategy, brand, or monetisation. Scientific publishing was a gentle and languorous affair. Manuscripts edited by pencil. Page layout with scissors and glue. Proof reading over a pint of beer at our typesetters. And when the weekly issue went to press, a small toast made with a glass of sherry. The Lancet then occupied a beautiful rabbit warren of an 18th-century town house in Bloomsbury. You could see a blue plaque across Bedford Square marking the home of the journal's founder, Thomas Wakley. It seems another world compared with today. Now we work on the hyper-modern tenth floor of a steel and glass building in the City of London. Technology has transformed artisans into professionals. And the whole paraphernalia of what it takes to publish a journal—from media to marketing, bespoke production to digital publication—has allowed us to offer (what I sincerely hope is) a better service to authors and users (the reader, I am afraid, was an early casualty of the Internet). Yet despite these advances, the state of scientific publishing today has never been more precarious. And publishers (and editors) have few solutions. Instead, they are preoccupied by a host of anxieties. Will innovative start-ups, such as ResearchGate, eliminate the need for journals? Will predatory open access destroy public trust in science? Is copyright dead? Editors too are lost. Is peer review meeting the needs of modern multidisciplinary science? Does the threat of research misconduct mean we should be endemically suspicious of authors? Is lack of reproducibility in some categories of research proof of fatal flaws in the scientific method? These are important questions. But they are peripheral to the main danger. The more serious question (that should be) gnawing away at the soul of the modern publisher/editor is: what am I here for? Publishers are increasingly in thrall to volume. The more they publish, so they believe, the stronger will be their presence in the market of science. The most dangerous embodiment of this trend is the mega-journal. All major publishers now want their own mega-journal, a place where they can publish hundreds, maybe even thousands, of research papers each month. By doing so, they capture market share, and thereby increase their opportunities for the monetisation and control of science. Those motivations apply as much to open access publishers as they do to any other kind of publishing. By targeting quantity over quality, the net is cast wide to catch as much science as possible. The notion of a journal understanding and serving a particular specialist community is laid aside. Instead, vast numbers of papers are loaded onto databases where users are left to search their way through science. The publishers and editors of these journals mean well. But in trying to be all things to all people, they are becoming ever-more divorced from the communities of scientists they once claimed to serve. This mortal sickness in contemporary publishing was best diagnosed by Robert Calasso in his book, The Art of the Publisher (2015). Although writing about books, his insights echo the depredations of scientific publishing. He identified a trend that afflicts large scientific publishers today—“the obliteration of publisher identity”. Publishers once defined themselves based on their “physiology of taste”, their particular interests in, and enthusiasms about, the world around them. Modern publishers have too often evolved into anonymous and homogeneous conglomerates, more focused on accumulating quantity than fostering quality. Indeed, the perception of quality “is increasingly becoming an evanescent and secondary element”. The identities of publishers have blurred. Claims that they make unique contributions to science look increasingly unconvincing. Volume is not value. Databases are not designed to improve either communication or understanding. As Calasso notes, publishers are using “technology in such a way as to make themselves superfluous”. Some critics of scientific publishing might welcome that outcome. But be careful what you wish for. The purpose of publishing should be to make sense of the world in which we live. The defining quality of publishing is judgment. I understand why the corporate leaders of scientific publishing are concerned about market share, revenue growth, cost control, and profitability. But I wish they would supplement their directives with a deeper concern for the purpose and ambitions of science, and their role in strengthening the health and resilience of the societies they so depend upon.