Social functions of academic publishing

Software	None
Covers	Sociology, how academia works, business models
Skills Required	Interest in how sciences and other academic disciplines work
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ?? Programming

Brief Description

Scientists and other academic researchers rely on reading papers published in journals and in conference proceedings and other edited books. And they rely absolutely for career advancement on getting their own work published in journals, books and conferences. But electronic distribution of academic research papers and other documents is fast becoming vitally important to research. In some fields, including large areas of Physics, you can't keep up if you're not aware of new results long before they're published in journals. Even in slower-moving disciplines, journals and books (and inter-library loans) are very expensive. Most researchers rely on Google to find papers, by knowing which authors to look at, and by trying lots of astute keyword searches, and often get papers from the authors' own websites.

So how can academic publishing work? The traditional business model, in which readers (or their libraries) pay for access to books and journals which are published as commercial ventures that publish articles for free, is breaking. Printed copies of journals get looked at less and less, and libraries are always seeking to save money by cancelling journal subscriptions.

What are the alternatives? Lots of journals now have websites, and libraries increasingly pay for electronic access without keeping physical copies. But few electronic-only journals have thrived - and the actual printing and distribution of physical copies is only a small fraction of the cost of publishing a journal issue. Is the idea of a journal making money from subscriptions obsolete? Is author-pays a more viable model? Or is the traditional academic journal itself on the way out? Are there better ways to organize, manage and quality-control the publication of academic papers?

To address these questions, it's essential to recognise that making papers available to the people who might want to read them is only one of several social functions performed by publication in journals, books and conference proceedings. Authors can do that for themselves just by putting a document on a web server - five minutes' work for anyone at a university. So what does publishing a paper in a journal achieve? Why do it? What do people use a published paper for (besides reading it)? Can these functions be achieved by a different model of academic publishing, and if so, how might it work? Might it be more economically viable than the current capitalist model of journals selling in the marketplace? What different social institutions would be required?

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