I’ve just seen more evidence that academic publishing, and the research assessment mechanisms based on it, are fatally broken – yet another over priced journal on a narrow field and three books I should read priced at $180 each. I don’t agree with burning books, but I’ll happily torch some publishers

It just happens that this mornings ire is all directed at IGI Global, but similar arguments could be made about every academic publisher these days. They now produce an ” International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments (IJVPLE)” which is something I should read given my research interests, but the institutional subscription to this is $575. Our library may well get it much more cheaply as part of a package, but that really does not address the issue of why I should pay for a fairly new journal on a restricted field which may fade away in a few years? Digital tool use in pedagogy is a field where there are already established, peer-reviewed journals with high impact so why is there yet another small journal? With epublishing being the main channel for academic publishing now, page count no longer imposes a limit in a amount of good material which can be published in established journals.

Part of the problem is our broken methods of counting research activity, for which peer-reviewed publication is a “key performance indicator.”  There is a presumption in our system that an ever-increasing pool of academics can produce an ever increasing amount of original research worthy of peer-reviewed publication, and I don’t necessarily think that is the case in every field. Equally, there is a belief that if you can’t get into the print queue for an established journal, you should get together and set up a new journal, with some colleagues as peer-reviewers, and in that way meet the metric of peer-reviewed publications. This has long been recognised as a problem.

However, if you look at, for example, the high scoring departments in the UK RAE 2008 and see where their work is published, you will find that the top research units publish in the top, old, established journals. They don’t score by publishing in the new journal of something obscure. 1 article in a major journal is worth more than any number in a plethora of minor new journals.

Edited volumes are just as bad. IGI’s website suggested, correctly, that I might also be interested in “Physical and Virtual Learning Spaces in Higher Education: Concepts for the Modern Learning Environment.” (ebook, $180), or “Multi-User Virtual Environments for the Classroom: Practical Approaches to Teaching in Virtual Worlds” (ebook, also $180) or “Teaching and Learning in 3D Immersive Worlds: Pedagogical Models and Constructivist Approaches” (ebook, guess the price…) and I would but these three together add up to more than my share of our Depts annual book fund so no thanks, lads. I won’t buy them, I won’t order them for the library. I might order them on inter-library loan and I might use some of them in that way but today IGI is getting $0 from me, whereas if they were priced at, say, $20 each, I’d have all three on library order.  If I can’t afford them, I can’t cite them and those authors lose citations and therefore lose out on “impact” which is another KPI for research.

In the struggle between “peer-reviewed” and “impact” it seems to me that peer-review is merely the gatekeeper, and impact is the real measure of top research publication. Which is better – 10 articles in minor journals which are cited once or twice, if at all, or 1 article in a major journal which earns, over time, 10 citations?

Another issue with the proliferation of journals is that in many of the articles I’ve read recently, few cite anything older than 2008. There are exceptions – in the field of scholarship of teaching and learning, there are often references to Dewey, Shulman, and other giants in the field. In games, Gee and his generation turn up regularly. Many of the other references, however, are to people I’ve not heard of, and to papers which often consist of many references to contextualise content that really only amounts to a few paragraphs of slightly new research. There is a great deal of heat be produced to feed the fires of academic publishing, but not much which will endure. Why, then, should I bother reading 20 or 30 journals every month just to keep up with going nowhere fast? Who benefits apart from the publishers? It doesn’t help me to advance my work, it doesn’t really help the authors who are looking for top research rankings and it doesn’t produce enduring advances in scholarship. It does waste a great deal of my time, it does fill up pointless research reviews and it enriches people who add no real value to the work.

There are alternatives.  There is no reason why communities of practice cannot peer-review and publish research papers in various repositories, which might include free journals on the web – after all, what is a journal but a form of repositiory? It is possible in the humanities that we might achieve more by more jointly authored papers, combining several minor contributions into one more weighty offering? It is also possible we could follow the model long popular in science-fiction (and I imagine in other literary genres) where established editors publish annual “Best of ..” collections. Perhaps learned societies also need to look at using annual prizes to recognise the best work. All of these would allow us to rely less on the ever-increasing (virtual) pile of over-priced journals.