Academic Publishing - Trends and Tendencies

A survey of academic publishing and its trends and tendencies.

1. THE CHANGING NATURE OF
ACADEMIC PUBLISHING
Prof. David Alexander

2. To begin with, a little
personal history

3. Founding Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (Elsevier)
Editor-in-Chief, Environmental Management, Springer-Verlag, New York 1985-2002
Editor, Springer Book Series on Environmental Management, New York, 1995-2001
Co-Editor, Disasters journal, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 2002-2015
Editorial board memberships:-
Planet@Risk e-journal (GRF Davos, Managing Editor, 2012)
Disasters (Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford) 1988-2002, 2015-present
Natural Hazards (Springer, Dordrecht), 1992-2011.
Natural Hazards and Earth System Science (European Geophysical Union), 2004-6
Disaster Prevention and Management (MCB University Press, UK), 1997-present
Environmental Management journal (Springer, New York), 2002-2020
Geomorphology journal (Elsevier, Amsterdam), 2002-present
Journal of Geography and Natural Disasters, 2011-present
Journal of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering (IIEES, Tehran), 2004-present
Integrated Disaster Risk Management Journal (Kyoto University, Japan), 2010-present
Alert (Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management) 2010-present
Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies (University of Potchefstroom), 2011-present
PLoS Currents - Disasters (Public Library of Science, UK), 2011-2018
Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research, 2013-present
Archives of Safety and Injury Research (Shaheed Beheshti Univ., Iran), 2015-present
International Journal of Earthquake and Impact Engineering (Inderscience) 2016-present
Geographies of the Anthropocene (Il Sileno), 2017-present
Continuity and Resilience Review (Emerald), 2018-present
Progress in Disaster Science (Elsevier), 2019-present
Italian Journal of Planning Practice (www.ijpp.it), 2019-present
Journal of Strategic Risk Management (Institute for Strategic Risk Mgt); 2019-present

5. Editor-in-Chief
1985-2001

6. Flatiron Building (1905)
175 Fifth Avenue NYC
Our editorial office

7. Julius Springer
Berlin, 1842
Springer (with Kluwer,
and Wolters) is now
owned by EQT
Investments Inc. and
Government of Singapore
Investment Corp.

8. Co-Editor,
2002-2015
formerly…

9. Founding
Editor-in-Chief
2011-2024

10. Launch
party,
Davos (CH)
August 2012

11. A world first: an
edible academic
journal made out of
Swiss chocolate!

12. Beijing
Special issues
Chennai
Production
Oxford
Management
Ireland
IT and training
Amsterdam
Co-ordination
A global enterprise

13. Trends in
academic
publishing

14. Rhodes W.
Fairbridge
1914-2006
With Dr
Rhodes
Fairbridge, I
edited this
encyclopedia
over the
period 1991-
1999 (and
wrote one
sixth of it).

15. The changing ownership of a scholarly book series
Encyclopedias of Earth Sciences, 1950s-present:-
•Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross
•Hutchinson Ross
•Van Nostrand Reinhold (Thompson, Wiley)
•Reinhold
•[D. Reidel Company]
•Chapman & Hall (Routledge, Taylor & Francis)
•Kluwer Academic Publishers
•Springer-Verlag
•Springer Science
•Springer Nature

16. UCL Press (1993)
Chapman & Hall
Taylor & Francis
Kluwer
Routledge
CRC Press
...possibly others
Currently
UK£67.13 new,
£1.66 used!

17. The big academic publishers:-
•some international professional
and learned societies (e.g. ASCE)
•Cambridge University Press
•Oxford University Press
•Reed Elsevier (RELX)
•Springer Science+Business Media
•Wiley [with Blackwell]
•Taylor & Francis
•Sage

18. About 70 per cent of academic
publishing is for personnel reasons:
•getting a job
•keeping a job
•getting promoted
For reasons of personal and
institutional prestige, the field has
become intensely competitive.

19. The big problems with academic
papers, when they are not good,
are:-
•unoriginality
•repetitiveness
•mediocrity
•plagiarism

20. per
capita
inspiration
gap
Time
Disaster research
Quality Participation

21. Journal Date
Papers
published
Date
Papers
published
Natural Hazards (NHAZ),
Springer
1990 45 2024 605
Natural Hazards and
Earth System Sciences
(NHESS), EGU
2001 33 2024 239
International Journal of
Disaster Risk Reduction
(IJDRR), Elsevier
2012 16 2024 866
The relentless increase in academic publishing

22. Where it
all started
(in 1665)
Phil. Trans. set the style
of academic articles for
science ever since.

23. Founded in 2011. In its first four years it
published nine articles. Then it folded.

24. Paper or
digital?

25. Paper publication is limited by:-
•page budget
•size, price, frequency relationship
•cost of colour printing
•declining print subscriber base
•partly uncontrollable delays
in publication of articles

26. Digital publication:-
•unlimited page budget
•standardised cost and access
pay-walls
•rapid publication (e.g. "open
container" model)
•ability to link different media
•see Elsevier's "article of the future"

27. A typical
journal
workflow

28. 'Open container' model:-
•a volume or issue is inaugurated
on a certain date
•papers are added to it as they are accepted and
prepared for publication
•on a pre-determined date, the issue is closed
•this is a digital model, not a print one
•papers may be paginated independently and
labelled by a doi (digital object identifier) or
article number.

29. The underbelly of
academic publishing

30. Academic publishing unmasked
"We believe the publisher adds
relatively little value to the publishing
process... We are simply observing that if
the process really were as complex, costly
and value-added as the publishers protest
that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be
available." Deutsche Bank, 2005

31. "What Ranieri has done is simply to respond to
Boschi's appeal in Science. Science did not accept
Ranieri's eloquent response and asked him to
shorten it, which he did but [they] eventually
rejected it, as if Science "do not want to go into
the issue any more" ― which is incredible!"
Lalliana Mualchin,
International Seismic Safety Organization
Censorship or failure to be impartial?

32. 'Predatory' publishers:-
•do not observe proper academic
standards, for example in peer review
•put profit before quality
•invent their bibliometric measures
•do not uphold scientific objectivity
•may use names and reputations
improperly

34. The open access
controversy

35. Open access versus the pay-wall:-
•open access is NOT free -
someone has to pay
•there are different models of who
does pay
•ability-to-pay discrimination
exists in all models
•commercial publishers operate
via commercial logic

36. Open access:-
•gold: author pays article process
charge (publication fee) and article is
free to users
•green: article is behind publisher's
paywall but author can archive a
shareable version of it
•affects licence to use or reuse article

37. Article publishing options:-
•a paywall: access by subscription or payment
•open access: author pays to publish and
reader does not have to pay - there are no
subscribers
•hybrid journal: subscription / author pays
•sponsored journal: a sponsor pays for all
articles
•desktop publishing: do it yourself,
at minimum cost

38. A commercial publisher, but the journal
is paid for by the Chinese Government

39. Plan S: campaign for full and universal open access

40. Bibliometry: a phenomenon
that is fundamentally
meaningless, harmful and
unnecessary

41. What is wrong with bibliometry:-
•citations are the basis of bibliometry
•the number of citations does not denote a
good article, merely a well-cited one
•citation scores are easy to manipulate
•a paper could be widely cited because it is
wrong or bad
•citation rates vary by field, but this does not
measure the value of knowledge
•ideas matter, not numbers of papers or
citations

42. The peer-review
process

43. Basic review judgement categories:-
accept, revise, rewrite or reject.
A typical verdict: one 'accept', one
'reject' and one 'revise' or 'rewrite.'
Conclusion: academic judgements are
personal - there is no fundamental
objective truth about most articles.

44. Your editor's
perspective

45. Editor's pitfalls:-
•plagiarism, intellectual
property theft, dishonesty
•authors' and reviewer's egotism
•many academics don't understand how
publishing works
•unable to find reviewers
•reviewers decline to help or fail to respond
•reviewers agree to help and then don't

46. IJDRR:-
•published by volume, not issue
•started publishing in August 2012
•100 volumes published in 12 years
•some issues have contained more than
100 articles
•4000+ articles submitted in 2024
•90% rejection rate
•average 2.86 invitations to get one review
•record: 34 invitations to get two reviews

47. Conclusions

48. Potential sources of crisis in academic
publishing:-
•excessive number of journals
•excessive specialisation and duplication
of journals
•excessive publication rates
•excessive cost of journals...?
•personnel issues motivate many
(most?) journal article submissions

49. Future trends are unpredictable
but present trends are unsustainable.