In today’s Martin Center article, Duke University professor John Staddon explains the mess our universities have made of scientific publishing.

He writes: “The spread in subscription rates, the vast and still growing number of journals and the natural reluctance of commercial publishers to go to open-access without a pay-to-publish fee, point to several factors that have changed since the days when there were just a handful of scientific journals and a modest number of mostly vocation-oriented scientists:

The enormous growth in the number of career scientists since World War II.

The rise of quantification spurred by bureaucracies that need numbers to evaluate employees: Number of publications helps administrators evaluate career scientists, even though it is a corrupted measure (doesn’t adequately reflect differences in the size of the field or order of authorship, not to mention the quality of the work).

Hence, there is huge pressure on researchers to publish in peer-reviewed journals.

The influence of external research grants, which provide funds to pay for publication, allowing the creation of numerous pop-up journals[1]which offer easy pay-to-publish.

The rise of the internet, allowing researchers to self-publish at almost no cost. There are several publication sites, such as ArXiv, which is completely free, and others that allow free posting but charge for premium services (who is reading your papers, citation counts, etc.), such as Academia and ResearchGate. Researchers can also post their work on their own institutional sites.”

Staddon questions whether we still need expensive print journals.


He points to a possible solution: “It would also help if institutions themselves followed the hoped-for government-funding lead and only recognized publications in open-access journals. Promotion and tenure would be based on articles meeting these criteria and no others. If a group of elite institutions (the AAU membership, for example) proposed such a policy, many others would surely follow.”