Mapping (but not solving) the science communication crisis

Scientific communication has never been more important – or more troubled. In an era of global science – the multinational scientific development of COVID-19 vaccines is but one impressive example – the ability to quickly evaluate and communicate science and scholarship is critical.

The dramatic expansion of higher education and research in the past half-century has meant that research publications have expanded exponentially, and publication has become the coin of the realm for academic advancement, for university prestige and the influential global rankings.

The scope of the academic enterprise is immense. Approximately 200 million students study in 26,000 universities (and many other postsecondary institutions) worldwide. More than 10 million academics serve this huge system.

Perhaps 10,000 of these universities are ‘comprehensive’ and likely have some research mission. While the number of truly ‘research intensive’ institutions is much smaller – and most quality research productivity is from this small number of universities – total academic output is much broader and bigger.

Pushed by the emphasis in the global rankings on research, among other factors, the pressure to produce publishable articles has dramatically increased. A shift from monographs and books towards multi-authored journal articles has happened over the past 50 years.

We are entering a new era, made possible by new technologies, multinational publishers and new ‘open access’ arrangements between the higher education sector and the publishing industry. The resulting exponential expansion in the number of articles and books has essentially destroyed the traditional publishing system and created an insurmountable crisis in scientific communication.

At the same time, there is a strong call for ‘open access’ and ‘open science’ in response to the financial and exclusive dominance of the publishing industry. This analysis provides a roadmap of the crisis, but no clear solutions.

Unsustainable expansion

No one really knows how many scientific publications are published each year or how many journals exist. Scopus, a major index of academic journals, includes 22,794 active titles from 11,678 publishers. Forty languages are included. The other major indexer, Web of Science, includes more than 14,400 journals in its three main data bases, plus an additional 7,800 journals in its emerging list.

One open-access publisher, MDPI, based in Switzerland and founded in 1996, has published one million articles since its establishment, including 295,186 peer-reviewed articles in 2022 in its 403 journals. As an open-access publisher, MDPI charges a transaction fee of approximately US$2,000 per article. MDPI reports that it relies on 600,000 reviewers and has a rejection rate of 57%. These numbers are impossible to verify.

The journal production industry has become more diverse, with a mix of traditional academic publishers (including non-profit university presses and commercial publishers such as Taylor & Francis and Springer – and many new entries), a rise in predatory publishers, and a range of others like MDPI in between.

The pressure for open access has not challenged the dominance of the main academic publishers, predominantly located in the high-income countries and publishing in English. The editors, editorial boards and reviewers are still mainly from these countries and are mostly male (although this is gradually changing).

The pressure for scientific communication and publication is increasingly coming from middle-income and low-income countries, from female and young scholars and from universities not previously focused on research and publication.

Furthermore, the academic promotion system has become ever more competitive and demands a high number of publications, often without regard to quality. As a result, these groups have no other choice than to look for alternative publication options, such as MDPI, and predatory journals of poor quality – with higher personal costs.

Book publishing

Over the past 50 years the importance of academic book publishing has been diminished by the dominance of academic journals. But books remain important in some disciplines and have seen a change as well.

Originally they were predominantly monographs by single authors, but first in the hard sciences, then in the social sciences, and more recently also in the humanities (according to Albert N Greco’s Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities, 2000-2024: Marketing and communications challenges and opportunities), the emphasis has focused on multi-authored books: conference proceedings, handbooks and textbooks for teaching.

Print-on-demand and e-book options and other technological innovations have made it less expensive and more attractive to publish books. Further, it is now possible to purchase individual chapters and not an entire book, creating further income streams for publishers. This has contributed to a lack of coherence in many multi-authored books. To reduce costs, publishers skimp on peer reviewing as well as on editing, which is generally outsourced to low-quality companies in India and elsewhere.

In an effort to reduce costs to the absolute minimum, quality at all levels is sacrificed. In some ways, many books are now more similar to journal issues, as they have little coherence.

At the same time, the prices for academic books and individual chapters from many publishers are extraordinarily high, often even for e-books, putting books and chapters beyond the ability of individuals to purchase and creating severe problems for libraries and institutions in the Global South to afford them even when discounts are offered.

Increased competition

A significant cause of these dilemmas is the dramatic growth in the numbers of often sub-standard articles and books. Why? Increased competition in the academic profession and the desire for many universities to join the ranks of research-focused institutions when, in fact, they should first and foremost focus on teaching and community service has placed an unnecessary premium on publication.

As a result, huge pressures are placed on the entire publishing apparatus. The ‘open access’ movement is in itself highly complex and has, in some ways, created as many problems as it has tried to solve. The goal, of course, is to make knowledge freely available to all, and there are indeed several positive cases of institutions, research funders, editorial boards and other agencies that try to address the crisis and develop alternative models.

A recent report by the International Association of Universities (IAU), Open Science: The challenge for universities, correctly places the crisis in scientific communication in the context of universities “facing numerous pressures spanning from political interference, digital transformation, environmental challenges, funding cuts, decolonisation processes, to the repercussions of the increasing commodification of higher education”.

It asks whether universities perceive the open science movement “as a transformative opportunity for higher education to collectively address current inequities and collaborate around a shared set of principles to make knowledge a global common good”.

Certainly, the trend seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Many journals and publishers have moved from subscription-based economics to charging fees to authors. And some journals and publishers simply publish anything, bypassing peer review and flooding the market with substandard material.

No easy answers

This discussion has only scratched the surface of an immensely complex set of challenges. For example, who ‘owns knowledge’? Those who produce it or multinational or other publishers? Should English continue to be the global language of science and scholarship? How, in this context, can research and publication focusing on local themes in local languages be encouraged and respected?

There are few answers and the challenges are many, as the IAU report on open science concludes, but the range of topics involved requires careful attention from the higher education community.

Philip G Altbach is Monan University Professor emeritus and distinguished fellow and Hans de Wit is professor emeritus and distinguished fellow, both at the Center for International Higher Education, Boston College, USA. They are co-editors of probably the oldest open access publication International Higher Education, free for authors and subscribers and available in different languages. (E-mails: [email protected]; [email protected])

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.