Why I hate academic publishing and why you should too

We’re now in the final months of this research project on geeks and focused on sharing what we’ve found. As our work is funded by a national research council and three of us are employed by universities, this takes the form of submitting academic articles to journals that score highly in international rankings. We’ve been subjected to two very long waits, four rejections, two conditional acceptances, and one lengthy editorial process. In this post, Heather Mendick discusses our experiences and explains why she hates academic publishing.

From 2003 when I finished my PhD to 2015, I worked in universities (except for three months of unemployment). In 2015, I was working in a toxic environment and decided to quit in the interests of my mental health. Without another job to go to, I did a couple of projects independently. I enjoyed this and have been freelance ever since. I have more autonomy in what work I do and how I do it. I no longer have to attend hours of, to use David Graeber’s term, bullshit meetings every week, or fill bullshit forms with fictional percentages of my time spent on different activities, or submit to a bullshit ‘ethics’ process every time I need to interview some people for an evaluation. I also, unless someone is up for paying me to do so, no longer use my time to add to the profits of corporations like Elsevier and Taylor & Francis, by writing and reviewing content for their ever-expanding empires of paywalled research journals.

However, this project has forced me to engage with journals again in earnest, reminding me of everything I dislike about this way of sharing research. I’ll begin with our experiences of the mechanics of it – the time it takes to get anything published. Then I’ll use one of our rejections to look at the absurd contortions required by the genre of the journal article. Finally, I’ll discuss the exclusivity of this way of communicating academic work, which has bizarrely become the gold standard.

When I do research and it helps me to think differently, I want to tell people about it and discuss it with them. Journal articles typically take over a year to make it from submission to publication, by which point, that initial energy has dissipated and I’ve had to move on to other things. We submitted one paper to a journal and six months later it was still ‘with the editor’. We spent about a month attempting to find out what had happened. When that failed, we spent a couple of weeks attempting to get it withdrawn so we could submit it to another journal. With no response, we resorted to Twitter tagging Taylor & Francis, after which they rapidly withdrew the article. A new journal gave us a quick rejection along the lines of: It’s interesting but not for us. It is now with yet another journal, awaiting judgement. 

In the same week that this paper got rejected, so did another, this time after reviewers had read it. The first and most damning of the two sets of reviewer comments opened: “Thank you for this interesting and thought-provoking read. Although I consider the paper to be of interest to the readers of [journal] since it taps into important issues of student positionings, access to technology and not least about who is accepted as knowledgeable, I recommend that the paper is rejected at this point. It simply needs more work to hold the academic standards required for the journal”.

They then make one point about the argument, with their three main points being about how we justify our work. They ask us to: make more links to similar research, clarify the purpose of the study, and say to what academic field it contributes. To me their comments expose the absurdity of the journal article genre. In most genres, it’s enough to write something interesting and thought provoking. For journal articles, you have to tell people why they should find it interesting and thought provoking. Indeed, telling people why something is relevant, interesting and important matters more than creating something that is genuinely relevant, interesting and important. As this same reviewer writes later, “I do not say that the study is of no importance, it just needs to be stated clearly in the paper”. Having thoroughly rejected the paper, the reviewer ends: “I will definitely look out for it”. 

One way I earn a living is by evaluating community science initiatives run by the lovely British Science Association. Most of the reports and case studies that I write for them are not published and are read by fewer than ten people. Nevertheless they feel more meaningful than my journal articles because those readers talk to me about what I found and use it to change what they do. Similarly the videos that I make and post on YouTube feel more meaningful than my academic writing, enabling an immediacy and a public dialogue that’s nearly impossible through paywalled journal articles. 

For one evaluation I spoke with some university researchers who were supporting community projects to tackle climate change. Despite their universities rhetoric, these community-driven projects conflicted with their day jobs. Reflecting on what they told me, I wrote:

The research culture in academia works against equitable collaborations between communities and researchers. The freelance researchers and doctoral students who participated in the scheme spoke of less constraints on their time than the researchers who work in universities. The latter want funders to support their efforts to carve out space for themselves to do these projects and to secure a broader cultural shift, which takes a less extractive approach to working with communities. For example, one researcher addressed the [funders] directly: “If you as a large funder, and if you tell your pals as well, to go about this in a different way, then very slowly the industry might start to change, but until that day folk’ll parachute in, steal data, run away, publish papers and get promoted because of it.” 

Although I enjoyed working on the two articles we’ve managed to get published so far, they will likely be read little, referenced less, and have zero impact outside of academia (if they even impact there). Instead they will play their part in maintaining the profits of the academic journal industry, and securing promotions though not payment for some of us. We desperately need this to change, for research to cease being private property, and for researchers to let go of the hierarchies of knowing that the journal system perpetuates and to put our skills to use in the communities in which we live.