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Monday, I had a long discussion with a colleague about academic publishing, quality control, and open access. This morning, I came across an article (unfortunately behind a paywall) about (European) data sovereignty and science. The two events have sparked some thinking on the relationship between commercial publishing in academia, open access, and – not to be dramatic – fascism.

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First, a lot of people in academia, especially in positions with decision-making power, use heuristics for quality control – when it comes to hiring, promotions, or evaluations. Now, I think the use of heuristics in and of itself is, at least to some extent, both inevitable and very, very human – but which heuristics we use to what ends and what (side) effects that use has is worth interrogating. When it comes to ‘controlling’ the quality of research, one heuristic often used is publishing venue. Did this article get published in the right journal? Was this book published by one of the big publishers in the field?

The thinking goes along the lines that the publishing venue, via editorial and peer review, ensures that only publications of the highest quality are published in this journal/book series. Accordingly, the person checking whether someone should get hired, fired, promoted, receive a good review, etc. does not need to check whether the work of the person they are evaluating is any good, because someone else has already done that.

Now, we can ask whether that is actually the case, and quite some ink has been spilled investigating this system and existing biases[1] or whether peer review is actually any good at ensuring quality[2] and worth it.[3] Possibly even more ink has been spilled on ‘publish or perish’ as a paradigm in current academia and how harmful that is.[4]

Here, I want to focus on another aspect of current academic reality. Irrespective of whether the link between publication venue and quality control actually holds, the current system – certainly in my field – puts a lot of emphasis on commercial academic publishing venues.

I think commercial publishing, whether open access or not, is often immoral. In short: public money pays for the research. Public money pays for the editorial work. Public money pays for the reviewer. It is then published behind a paywall, in which case public money (often in the shape of university library subscriptions) pays for access, or it is published open access, in which case public money pays for the fees to publish it open access. Commercial academic publishers have huge profit margins,[5] because public money pays for most of the labour involved in the process.

Of course, there are alternatives and the open access movement is gaining traction – but still, many of the big names are commercial.

This means academics face a social dilemma. Individually rational behaviour – maximising publications in high level journals or with big name book series – leads to collectively irrational results – huge profits for commercial academic publishers, paywalls, and higher costs.

I firmly believe that science, broadly conceived, is the communal pursuit of knowledge, that it is a public and common good, that it should be funded – and that research paid for by public money should be publicly available. I believe that commercial academic publishing is, at its core, unethical because publicly funded labour enriches private companies. And yet: I am working on a book proposal that I will send to commercial academic publishers. The current system strongly incentivises me to do so – and I live and work in a country that leads the move towards ‘Recognitions and Rewards’.[6]

Many commercial academic publishing venues are ‘the best’ and so people keep trying to publish with them because that is what is incentivised. Because of this, they can be selective about what they publish and maintain ‘excellence’.

I am convinced that if instead, all scholars submitted only to diamond open access publishing venues, some of those would become ‘the best’. But there is a risk for each individual scholar to do so, because the incentives of the current system are such that we are evaluated not by whether we are democratising knowledge, but by whether we are publishing in those venues that are currently considered ‘the best’. As long as we keep evaluating each other by whether we are publishing in those venues, we are maintaining a system that lines the pockets of private companies and that puts research results behind paywalls or asks for additional payments to make them openly available.

None of this is new.[7]

What had not really sunk in for me until today is how much this reliance on private companies as the keepers of our communal pursuit of knowledge opens us up to danger of losing access to that communal knowledge if those private companies decide to bend the knee to authoritarian and fascist regimes. Unfortunately, those regimes are currently gaining traction in the world and the thought that private companies might bend the knee to them is not far-fetched. In fact, we already see academic freedom under threat – very clearly in the United States of America, where funding cuts are used for censorship[8], but also closer to home. Fascism is, by its very nature, anti-scientific.[9]

I don’t have all the – or even any – answers. People working in metascience[10] are better placed than me to think about these issues and to develop answers. But I am an academic and I am trying to live both my private and my professional lives in as good, ethical, and, yes, as anti-fascist a manner as I can. So I am concerned, and I think that concern is worth voicing.

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[1] For example regarding desk review by editorial boards (in economics): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268122002657

[2] For example, https://www.vox.com/2015/12/7/9865086/peer-review-science-problems

[3] For example, https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review

[4] For example, and anecdotally, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/14/higgs-boson-publish-or-perish-science-culture  

[5] https://theconversation.com/academic-publishing-is-a-multibillion-dollar-industry-its-not-always-good-for-science-250056

[6] https://www.nwo.nl/en/recognition-and-rewards

[7] Consider, for example, https://www.rug.nl/jantina-tammes-school/community/themes/data-autonomy/blog/overpaid-bankers-think-again-scientific-publishers-top-the-charts?lang=en

[8] https://www.knaw.nl/en/news/academic-freedom-and-international-research-collaboration-under-threat-us

[9] Again, by way of example, https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/umberto-ecos-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html, https://www.americanlaboratory.com/Blog/355628-What-s-Behind-the-Rejection-of-Science/

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metascience