Dreaming on a healthier future of scholarly journal publishing

Abstract

<p>The general landscape of academic journal publishing is fundamentally unsound. Academics do most of the work, as editors and reviewers, for journals, which are mostly owned by big publishing houses, with no remuneration for their work requiring high level of scholarly expertise. The current status quo is of course supported by many structures around the closed journals, which are inclined to cement their existence and still today offer the big publishing houses chance to reap high profits. However, there is no real functional or economic reason for not revolutionizing the publishing world now. We can quite easily get rid of APCs of any form – and especially, the sooner we can get rid of even the idea of paying any APCs for making closed publications of the big publishing houses open, the better. The real value-added of big publishers is today minimal and they know that. They are currently almost desperately trying to harvest the last glimpses of their profits. Once the international academe only gets the kind of snowball outlined above rolling, the now cemented looking institutional arrangements will soon collapse and become replaced by other, much healthier ones. There is no necessary need to change (practically) anything in the review processes or make any compromises regarding scholarly quality. The rising impact factors and journal rankings will follow. At least the governmental rankings like JUFO and e.g. the corresponding Norwegian and Danish systems as well as the Plan S initiative could and should strongly encourage all this. This may now look like just a dream, but starting from courageously visioning this we can make it become true – and even before long.<br /></p>