Abstract
Academic journals have undergone substantial transformation in the past two decades. The transition from paper submission and paper publication to electronic submission and electronic publication has had profound impacts on academic publication. The printed journal once read cover to cover is a relic of the “pre-Internet age,” and the old, incumbent barriers to discoverability of information have now fallen to the wayside. Rather, we have “mega-journals” that seek to publish all scientifically valid manuscripts, making discoverable quickly by Internet search engines. The net result has been an expansion of the amount of material published, as well as a substantial increase in the number of journals. These changes have altered the nature of scientific exchange, but nevertheless, there has been little difference in the manner by which scientific publications are valued by their “consumers.”
This expansion in the capacity to curate information and knowledge empowered a new model of scientific publication, in which any valid study was worthy of publication. This is a true revolution in itself. The number of journals has increased to meet the demand of a larger scientific economy; however, this larger economy has led to an increase in the disparity of perceived success of authors. If the “wealth” of a scientist is measured in the number of articles published, or number of citations obtained, the overall effect has been an inflation of both the overall number of manuscripts authored and total citations received. This constitutes inflation. However, a deeper evaluation of the model demonstrates a great “disparity in success,” with highly published and cited authors seeing the highest gains, while the remainder continue to struggle for recognition.
Results of this inflation include concerns about the reproducibility of work, frustration over the nature of peer-review, outrage over journal metrics, and complaints about the cost of publication, in both the subscription-based, open-access and hybrid journals. Ultimately, little has changed, aside from having a larger market place to publish one’s work. Stepping back, the changes in academic publishing directly mirror the globalization of economies. Selection is broader, some prices are less, quality is critical, and the buyer-beware paradigm in scholarly publishing is more true today than it was 20 years ago. In this model, peer-review functions as the quality control that consumers depend on in selection of a product, resulting in citation of a paper.
If science is an economy of information, the portal for this information is Google and to a lesser degree other search engines. Google relies on other databases, functioning as “middleware” to drive discoverability. Any search of a biomedical science topic will demonstrate that Google places a higher economic value on studies that appear in PubMed-indexed journals. The old statement “Not published, not done” can now be paraphrased to “Not in PubMed, not done.”
The next level of the scientific economy is the journals, which are fundamentally the merchants of the products of scientific research. Journals run the gambit from mega-journals that publish across all subjects to highly specialized journals with well-defined scopes. The mega-journals could be considered the Amazon of publishing. Nearly any product can be obtained at Amazon, and it is up to the consumer to determine the value of the product. Amazon ensures a bare minimum of specifications for a product. Amazon will list any product a seller wish to list, but the value and sustainability of that product in the marketplace is dependent on the sales. The same is true with publications in mega-journals. Their success is measured mostly by citations, and not the journal they are published in.
In contrast are specialty merchants which carefully curate their products to appeal to specific consumers in the marketplace. Luxury Merchants could be used as an example, where the name is as important as the product. The merchant seeks to avoid products that won’t sell to its customers, but on occasion makes an error. Many “one-word title journals” would fit in this category and are characterized by careful curation, high citation, and exclusivity. In the middle are a substantial number of journals, many of which are published by scholarly societies. Society journals are the specialty vendors of the economy, providing a high-quality, well-vetted product at a fair market price. These products may have limited marketability (sales) across the wider economy, yet have a substantial value to the consumers for whom they are intended.
What does this tell us? First and foremost, the basics of economics can be applied to many scenarios. Second is that the real value of a product is best measured by the economy in which it is used. This upends the paradigm that the journal defines the impact of the product. Quality matters, and specialty vendors—society journals—foster high quality through stringent peer-review. These specialty journals must offer value-added benefits to survive, just as specialty vendors who compete against Amazon must do. These benefits align with customer service, to both authors and readers: quality review, promotion of product, and publication of an article that enhances communication by enhanced content, format, and figures.
Finally, the current measures of journal quality are irrelevant. The impact factor, defined by the number of citations a manuscript receives during a predefined calendar year, is a legacy of a hard-copy journal world, where determining the citations of an article was laborious. The measure of a scientific publication remains citation, which can be measured in real time, over any defined period. Any author with a Google Scholar account can attest to this. The move to electronic publication has been transformative. All participants of this economy must adjust to a valuation system less based on prestige of the journal, but the scientific communities value of the work based on citation. Fundamentally, the measure, citations, has not changed, but the role of the journal as the communication platform has been transformed.