Transcript:

When you think about publishing within your academic discipline, you might consider several options including conference presentations and proceedings, book chapters, edited books, and even blog posts.

Publishing a journal article is another option and a beneficial choice for several reasons. First, publishing an article allows you to share your ideas, theories, and research much faster than if you were publishing a book. Journals also often serve as a proxy for the quality of the articles within them, helping readers quickly make judgments about the caliber of research articles published.

As you consider drafting and publishing an article, certain journals may come to mind, perhaps based on readership, reputation, or advice from your mentors. You might find that certain journals are valued more, often as a result of disciplinary tradition. As faculty advise students, they pass along information about journals that they received from their advisors. Another reason might be that the journal is cited more in the field.

Historically, journal publishing was governed by scholarly societies and presses affiliated with universities, making publishing an internal affair to higher education. Shifts in the information ecosystem transformed this relationship between journals and the academics that author, edit, and peer-review them. Impact factors, or calculations used to track the number of citations that journals received, became more widely used by institutions, in order to assess which voices were most impactful. Another shift was the expectation for academics to publish more content, resulting in a significant increase in the volume of articles published.

As research has become more specialized, it’s more difficult for scholars’ tenure committees to be composed of colleagues with the same research expertise. As a result, faculty being considered for tenure must supply information, such as impact factors, to help their colleagues understand their research and its quality.

Over time, high-impact journals became both the backbone of higher education’s processes for vetting academics as well as strategic assets for publishers, particularly big publishers. While publishers enhance journal articles through editing, typesetting, and indexing and should be compensated for this work, they have built a business model on scholarly works that have been submitted, reviewed, and edited at no cost to them. They have been able to then sell these works back to institutions for extremely high prices through library subscriptions.

The next chalk talk, Inequities in the Ecosystem, will explore the problems this system has created.


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