Academics have been complaining about the for-profit models of publishers like Elsevier, Sage, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Springer since I started my career as a graduate student in the early 2000s; it’s one of the reasons why my cohort of graduate students started an Open Access journal, reconstruction, in 2001! It’s a drag that they generate as much profit as they do off of the “free” labor of academics, who do all of the research, writing, and peer review that makes their journals run, but have you ever considered just not publishing with them?
I’ve published with Sage, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley over the years and maybe there was a time when they could have argued that their model worked better to provide authors, editors, and peer reviewers with the kind of editorial support that made doing their jobs easier. That was never my experience–some of my worst peer review and publishing experiences were with for-profit publishers–but that would be a solid counter-argument to the obvious profit-seeking those publishers do. I’m not an apologist for the Big 5 for-profit academic publishers, but I’ve accepted over the years that getting my work in front of the right audience means publishing in a journal owned by a for-profit business.
The sad reality is that getting tenure is a numbers game, and getting the right number of articles and books published is the only goal. I’ve accepted needing to peer review for for-profit publishers because I recognize that other peoples’ careers depend on that labor. I also accept that the profits generated go to creating more journals and publishing books, all of which have the downstream effects of getting more scholarship into the world–and helping academics meet the metrics they need for landing jobs and getting promoted. It’s not ideal and I wish every university had a not-for-profit press that published journals across fields, but this is the late capitalist world we inhabit.
That being the case, journals get readers because they’re prestigious, for lack of a better term, and if people stopped submitting their work to journals owned by the Big 5, their rankings will drop. Academia is a massive ship and slow to change course. Getting the overwhelming number of scholars who don’t have a problem peer reviewing for and publishing in–let alone doing the editorial work of–journals run by the Big 5 to stop doing that work seems very unlikely. The likelihood that a sea change could actually occur in the prestige of the Big 5’s journals is rather low; they will continue to publish a lot of work in your field unless people start opting out of working with them.
So, you could just accept that making money for other people is an unavoidable part of the job–like generating tuition dollars off of students and their families and overhead costs through grant writing–or you can opt out of publishing with the Big 5. How do you do that?
Publish in University Press and Society-Run Journals: Many fields have journals that are published by university presses, which tend to be not-for-profit business that receive state monies through university budgets. There are massive publishers, like Oxford, that publish journals across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences, and smaller publishers, like Duke, Minnesota, California, Texas, Chicago, and more. It likely won’t cost you any money to publish in these journals–unless you pay Open Access fees, if they have them–and they generate more funds through institutional and individual subscriptions (which helps support these publishers and their mission to publish books that help people get tenure!).
There are also Open Access journals published by many academic societies. Years ago, the Society for Cultural Anthropology moved to make their journal, Cultural Anthropology, society-funded and Open Access, and they’ve managed to keep it afloat since 2014. Similarly, Disability Studies Quarterly is funded by the Society for Disability Studies, and receives support from Ohio State Libraries, which publishes several other Open Access journals. You might need to be a member of the society, but the costs associated with that are likely significantly cheaper than paying Open Access fees at a large publisher. You can also consider publishing with publishers like Berghahn, that are committed to Open Access publishing.
Just Stop Publishing Articles: If you’re past tenure, and especially if you’re past full professorship, why are you still publishing journal articles? I’ve long thought that full professors taking up the limited amount of real estate for publishing articles in journals is a bad look. I recognize that reaching the right audience (and sometimes earning a raise) depends on maintaining a publishing presence. But as a full professor you likely already have a readership and can push out your own publicity regardless of where you publish–and your university probably doesn’t care too much if you’re publishing in a top tier or third tier journal. I’d even go so far as to say that publishing in a third tier journal is exactly what senior academics should be doing, since it helps to increase those journals’ prestige by driving citations (for better and worse).
Make Your Work Available for Free: Many state universities have agreements with for-profit publishers to allow their faculty to make their work published in for-profit journals available through public repositories, which Google Scholar will notify you about (and make available to people). If your university isn’t one of those universities, there is precedent in making this happen and working with your librarians and faculty senate might secure a better, Open Access future for your faculty. But you can often also post pre-print versions of your work on your own website or through services like ResearchGate and Academia.edu (if you want to aid their attempts at capitalization)–or you can post the actual copy of the article or book chapter and take it down if a publisher gets upset about it.
None of these are Seize the Means of Production! level suggestions, but failing the ability to meaningfully change the way academic publishing works, they are options that can support other models of publishing and dissemination. The next time you feel yourself itching to publish in a Big 5 journal, take 30 minutes and investigate whether there might be a university press or society-run journal you might publish with instead.
Maybe one day for-profit academic publishers will start paying their authors, peer reviewers, and editors, but I doubt it. It’s too profitable not to, and relying on the conservative nature of many academics invested in prestige economies is a super safe bet–maybe the safest! Even if publishers start to pay their contributors, it will likely never feel sufficient to the work that people do to support the journals. Instead, maybe the warm feeling of publishing in an Open Access, university press journal will suffice?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer 