My niche industry

This is how I explain my industry to people outside it.

Academic publishing is pretty monopolistic. In a lot of fields, academics more or less have to publish in certain journals to get attention and security, and most of those journals are still owned by big companies that charge extortionate access fees. Research libraries are stuck paying the bill, since they have to provide their researchers access to that content. The proceeds don’t even go to the authors or their research, they just get used for production costs (outsourced editorial and technical labor) or siphoned off as shareholder returns. And because only the richest libraries can afford to subscribe to the big package deals, lots of content never reaches the wider public directly.

The technical side is also a bit of a mess. A lot of the tech that’s used to do the work of publishing is proprietary, outdated, or not fit for purpose. Microsoft Word is used to write book-length manuscripts, despite only ever being intended for corporate reports, and despite a tendency to glitch and crash with too many tracked changes. As for publishing systems, authors and reviewers have to make do with whatever tech the journal they submit to uses, even if it looks like 2006 wants their website back, and not in a fun retro way. There are some open standards like JATS XML and the LaTeX self-typeset system that help us get by, but these are not always feasible or usable.

A lot of people have tried to change things. The main push has been to make published works open access, in the sense of free to read. The big companies eventually got on board, but they sullied the concept by opening only a portion of their content, and using it as a hook for the rest. They then promptly reinflated their balance sheet by charging fees to authors as a condition of making their work open access. These article processing charges effectively created a pay-to-publish system, where open access only happens for authors with big pockets or the ivory-est of towers.

With all these weaselly shenanigans distracting the mind, we must remember that publishing does not mean taking something and locking it behind a paywall that is so steep that only a few rich institutions can pole-vault over it. Publishing means making things public. And with a thirty-year-old World Wide Web at our fingertips, making things public is not technically hard or financially expensive. The Web was and is public infrastructure by design, and it can serve the public good if social institutions know how to harness it.

Take Wikipedia, for example. It is a non-governmental entity that provides free access to shared knowledge. It is funded not by subscription fees or ads, but by voluntary contributions from readers. Wikipedia uses the Web platform to great effect by providing features for collaborative editing and commentary, translation, reader interface customization, open licensing of media, accessibility, moderation, and communities of practice dedicated to addressing systemic biases like disproportionate male authorship. It is a highly usable platform with a minimal and refined interface. It is blissfully light on the annoying pop-ups, distracting banners, and paywalls that the ad-driven Web trades in.

So now, my industry is having another go. We don’t just want pay-to-publish open-access from the for-profit publishers. We want articles that are free to read and free to publish, copyright that is retained by authors under open licenses, review processes that are controlled by journal editors, platforms that are open source and built with modern web standards, and funding that is collectively and voluntarily raised by the wealthiest universities choosing to pool their resources. There are many publishers doing many of these things. I work for a university press that is doing all of them.