Today's Challenge for Academic Publication

Abstract

Dear Readers, Change in the world of academic publications is no less dramatic than in the ‘‘real’’ world of the economy. This seems to be true especially in our part of the world, the applied sciences of management, engineering, economics, operations research, and logistics—except: the direction is different! While the challenge to many ‘‘real world’’ businesses and to policy and decision makers of the recent years has been to cope with a precipitous decline in demand, production, and financial supplies in many industries, we see and foresee an equally dramatic rise in the demand for opportunities to publish academic work. The observations that I make in our German-language and broader European academic community suggest that the pressures to ‘‘publish or perish’’ are increasing now far beyond the levels of the past. More precisely, it is now ‘‘publish in A- and B-ranked journals…or else!’’ for academics working on their careers and reputation. Some reasons are obvious: • Where there are respected and accepted national journals in their respective languages (other than English), these are declining in importance. Papers of whatever quality, which are published there, are rapidly losing their value on resumes and publications lists. • The competition between universities for positions of excellence has become as global as the competition between international corporations in markets in the automotive and electronics industries, and elsewhere. The primary, if not the exclusive yardstick by which excellence is measured is their output in highly ranked journals. • Last but not least: the practice of writing dissertations and habilitation research is rapidly shifting from the traditional monograph-type, book-length piece of research to ‘‘cumulative’’ dissertations and habilitation volumes, where three, four, or more refereed journal publications are bound together. Some estimates that I have—just from the German ‘‘demand’’ for A and B journal publications—suggest that in the next few years an additional 40 to 60 aspiring Ph.D. students in the field of logistics and supply chain management will want to place their three or more papers in A and B journals per annum to substitute what used to be monograph dissertations. And that is just Germany, accounting for less than a quarter of the European