The scholarly publishing landscape

The last 50 years have seen, perhaps more than at any time since the invention of the printing press, massive changes in research and publication practices. There has been an explosion of journals, papers, and researchers with the globalisation of research and the insistent demands of publishing metrics on scholars across the planet. The period has also witnessed the increasing specialisation of journals; the concentration of publishing into fewer corporate hands; the growth of multiple, even mega-authorship; an increasing strain on the review system with a decline in the reviewer pool, the move to online publishing; the diversification of publishing genres; and the dominance of English as the international language of scholarship. The quantification of research outputs as a basis for funding and career advancement means there is now greater pressure and more explicit incentives among academics to publish. This fiercely competitive context has created an environment in which plagiarism, salami slicing of studies and paper retractions have all increased. It has also generated a new breed of publisher, established on the basis of the ‘writer pays’ Gold Open Access model, which threatens research standards and publishing ethics by guaranteeing publication following cursory ‘peer review’. This chapter discusses this changing landscape.