2025/05/14 by Damian Pattinson, George Currie · 1 voice · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Decision Sciences · #Academic Publishing and Open Access #Academic Writing and Publishing #scientometrics and bibliometrics research
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/leap.2012
openalex publication_date 2025/05/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/03
The majority of scholarly communication today depends on publishing. An industry with estimated profit margins of between 30% and 50% (Van Noorden 2013), scholarly publishing has long been on a trajectory of consolidation, with 2022 estimates giving the top five publishers control over 60% of the market (Crotty 2023). Through the medium of the journal, scholarly publishers play an integral role for scientific communities. On the one hand, journals need to provide value to their customers—authors (through APCs—article processing charges), or readers (through library subscriptions)—and on the other, they are incentivised to maximise profitability and to outcompete other journals. While the incentive structures at play for publishers are primarily commercial, all scholarly publishing has to exist in the same system, face similar considerations and play the same game by the same rules. The interests of scholarly communication and publishing are not always compatible. What's good for publishing isn't necessarily good for science, and successful publishing strategies may be actively harmful to the scholarly record. Science-led publishing is an opportunity to realign the current processes and reward systems in publishing and research to first and foremost benefit the scientific endeavour. It demands faster, fairer and more transparent modes of science communication. It is not an unachievable ideal; it is a choice within our current reach. Science-led publishing means two things. First, the needs of science communication dictate how publishing processes and models work, what options are available to researchers, and how researchers are incentivised—how success is measured—by funders and institutions. Second, it is not an end state. Science-led publishing must continually reevaluate itself so that it best serves the current needs of researchers and research within current social and technological boundaries. An example of this is how, despite technological advances, much of scholarly publishing still operates as it did in print. Where the print medium demanded works be final before they are shared, digital publishing allows works to be shared, reviewed and revised iteratively and publicly. This change could be relatively straightforward within our current technological limitations, and is already in place for some journals, yet much of the system exists in an inertia—why? Publishing is a service, it should facilitate scholarly communication. However, the commercialisation of science has led to profit- rather than purpose-driven structures and systems dominating (Buranyi 2017). What science gets seen, and—because of the ‘publish or perish’ pressures on researchers—what science gets done and how it is presented (Fanelli 2010), has been distorted by what is profitable for publishers. This is not unique to commercial publishing—all publishers face these same pressures and incentives, and must compete to survive in the same system. This commercialisation has created a system where behaviours and actions that benefit publishing are rewarded, whether or not they benefit science—and in some cases even if they are to its detriment. We see this play out in the existence of publication bias toward positive results (Easterbrook et al. 1991), that more interesting results seem to be favoured over less interesting but more reliable results (Serra-Garcia and Gneezy 2021), and the ever-increasing volume of published research (Hanson et al. 2024). Publication bias toward positive results of perceived high interest is a hangover of the dominance of subscription-access journals where journal brand and status were primary drivers of revenue. Articles reporting positive results are more likely to be cited (Duyx et al. 2017; Jannot et al. 2013), therefore contributing to prestige metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor and in turn increasing journal brand equity, allowing higher subscription charges. In the article-based economy, this has translated into citations driving APCs upwards (Schönfelder 2020). Though it is interesting to note that when other measures of impact are considered alongside citations, there is little correlation between the cost of publication and eventual impact (Yuen et al. 2019). The increasing volume of published research is a more recent example of questionable publishing behaviours driving changes in scholarly communication. APC-model publishing means that journal revenue is tied to publication volume and increasing that volume is an effective engine for publisher growth (Mellor et al. 2020; Nicholson 2025). Because of this, rather than research being rejected outright, it is often redirected to other journals within a publisher's portfolio through journal cascade systems (Davis 2010). While this can offer time savings for authors, it also helps ensure potential revenue is not turned away. The impact of this sequence of priorities filters backwards to influence research decisions (Ramassa et al. 2023), the analysis of results (Head et al. 2015), how researchers choose to present those results in journals (Gonzalez Bohorquez et al. 2025), and even to pervert the scholarly record with poor-quality or fraudulent research (Parker et al. 2024). It is detrimental to science that journal publication is of such great importance in research assessment, research funding, researcher assessment, researchers' careers, and, because of the latter, their very livelihoods (Rawat and Meena 2014; Marcum 2024). When publication underpins so many facets of an academic career, academics must work toward goals that align with publication, rather than those that align with good science. When journals place requirements of novel, impactful, and positive results on publication, this becomes both the threshold of the scholarly record and of academic career success. When journals decide certain research or certain results are of less value to their publications, they in turn become of less value to authors. Publishers have built and entrenched power in their relationship to research through their role in the quality assessment of research (Neff 2020), meaning in practice the administration and control of the editorial and peer-review process. While journals are editorially independent and publishers do not perform peer review themselves—instead they are reliant on the often free (to them) labour and expertise of editors and reviewers—publishers do exert influence on the process. This can most clearly be seen when journal editors disagree strongly with pressures from the parent publisher (De Vrieze 2018), as often the only protest available is to withhold labour. Mass resignations from journals appear to have become more frequent in recent years (The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List 2024). The current system of publishing and peer review slows down science communication. Finding reviewers and conducting reviews takes time. Research can then be stuck in peer review for months with no guarantee that it will eventually be published. When research is rejected during peer review, the clock is often reset at a new journal. This means science progresses more slowly than it could. Science-led publishing enables faster scientific communication and expedites sharing and refining ideas and approaches ahead of formal review. The preprint becomes the standard research article type using existing infrastructure that is free for authors and readers. The role of preprints in accelerating the search for a COVID-19 vaccine is a compelling example of the need for faster science (Watson 2022). Even in more routine cases, it is not an exaggeration to say these delays cost lives (Sommer 2010). In our current publishing system, peer-reviewed research comes with immense costs. These can be quantified in APCs and subscription charges, and in reviewers' and editors' time, but also in the cost of delaying research advances. Despite the special significance given to peer-reviewed articles over non-peer-reviewed research, studies suggest that around two thirds of preprints (Abdill and Blekhman 2019) or more (Gordon et al. 2022) eventually get published in peer-reviewed journals. This percentage may even be an underestimate as some papers could have taken longer to be published in journals than were recorded in the timeframe of this study and there could be false negatives due to title changes. The differences between the preprints and the peer-reviewed articles are seemingly minor, with various studies showing there are minimal changes to conclusions of a paper (Brierly et al. 2022), the quality of preprints, while slightly lower on average, is comparable to that of peer-reviewed articles (Carneiro et al. 2020), and that articles change very little as a result (Klein et al. 2019). This suggests that most preprints could be of near-equal value to peer-reviewed journal articles before any revisions are made to them. Current forms of peer review create significant delays for seemingly marginal gains. Then what of the remaining 30% or so of preprints that do not eventually see publication in a journal? A 2023 study found preprints published from low-income countries are later published in journals at a lower rate than preprints published from high-income countries. Rather than this being a question of research or article quality, the authors draw on additional studies that suggest a lack of resources, lack of stability, and policy choices (Eckmann and Bandrowski 2023) are factors that cause preprints to not later appear in journals. It seems likely for some of the remainder, it is not a question of research quality but a question of means. It is sensible to bring a critical perspective to anything you read no matter where it is published or by whom. However, given the unreliability of journal publication as a mark of validation, that the majority of preprints eventually see publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and that by and large the improvements made during peer review are slight, there appears to be little reason to assume preprints are inherently less valuable than peer-reviewed articles. Faster publication means that research findings can have a more immediate benefit to research and the public. Experts can continue and build on ideas earlier than they would have otherwise been able. Scientific progress could be significantly accelerated for a minimal change in perceived quality of outputs. If the value of preprints is a question of what can be trusted, does the peer-review process prevent publication of untrustworthy research? Is it a filter and is it a good one? As a general principle, it is difficult to argue against the idea that work that has been reviewed by independent experts should warrant higher degrees of trust. Conversely, it is easy to see how a process that intends to challenge knowledge and ideas can help improve them, or to show when to disregard them. However, in many cases, peer review today has become little more than an industrial process that helps safeguard journal status through notions such as novelty or impact rather than to enhance research. This focus is not helpful to science; it is helpful to publishing. There is little evidence that peer review works as expected—that it validates research (Jefferson et al. 2007). The binary accept–reject decision means peer review has taken on ‘more of a judicial role than one of critical examination’ with a focus on the decision rather than the process and little justification for the decisions (Tennant and Ross-Hellauer 2020; Hope and Munro 2019). Given peer review's role in the modern scientific endeavour, it is ironic to find it described by prominent journal editors as both a ‘faith-based system’ and a deeply flawed ‘quasi-sacred process’ (Smith 2022; van der Wall 2009). Rejection during peer review can happen for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality or trustworthiness of the research. Reviewers may reject articles because of a perceived lack of novelty, because ideas challenge norms and received wisdom, because the research undermines or disputes previously published ideas (or the reviewers' own research and ideas). It also opens the door to all kinds of bias that, in the very opaque system of anonymised and closed peer review, are hard to identify and root out. Journal cascade systems, where rejected research is redirected to lower-status journals, can be seen as an admission that peer review isn't just about keeping bad research out of the scholarly record. It is instead pushing it around based on journal status and brand. In each of these cases, the rejections may exacerbate publication delays by months while providing no benefit to science, only protecting the interests of the journal. Traditionally, journals and by extension publishers built their brands by what they kept out. In the predominantly subscription-access world, scarcity and exclusivity drove profitability. Instead, in the APC era it is volume (Sivertsen and Zhang 2022). Despite this seismic change—perhaps the most fundamental from a publishing perspective is the change of who is the customer—the problems of the previous model still exist. But research now faces a new challenge. APCs mean every single article, no matter its merit or quality, has monetary value to publishers. Every article rejection is lost revenue. The publish-or-perish reality for researchers meets the for publishers. 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