the future of academic publishing

Academic publishing is a sector that relies more heavily than most on political and institutional changes.

Library Funding 

Libraries are particularly important to the academic publisher, and cuts to funding can be extremely harmful to business. Recently, this Guardian article noted that UK library budgets had been cut by 60%, and £1.5 million. This threat to the industry can be worked around by exporting to the developing and BRIC countries with a high concentration of english-speaking people. These governments in some instances are increasing their public education budgets by a $100billion and are likely to buy academic textbooks from the UK. 

REF

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a government-run system that works to allocate the £1.6 billion funding to Higher Education institutions. The validity of this framework is debatable, in short because the universities that house the best academics might not necessarily be the institutions with the best teaching standards. If the academics are putting such time into their research, it follows that lecture planning and student support could be insufficiently prioritised. 

Academics in the framework must complete one substantial piece of research each six years to receive payment and maintain their position. This is most often presented in the form of a monograph, and must be published by a reputable academic publisher. Work must be submitted 14 months before publication. 

The ethical issues with the framework concern the inclusiveness of young researchers who need to teach to improve their position, and female academics who could require necessary time off for maternity- time which is still categorised as 'research time'. For these reasons, it could be argued that the framework favours older men. 

If these logical and ethical pitfalls in the framework become more widely discussed in the near future and the REF is dismantled, this could pose a large threat to academic publishers, who rely on monograph publication to sustain their businesses. However, it is difficult to see how these issues can be overcome without analysing an alternative system. 

Open Access

The term 'double dipping' is defined by a publisher seeking an unwarrantable increase in revenues by levying article processing charges (APCs) for publication in a journal, while not providing a decrease in subscription costs.To overcome this, ideas about Open Access have been discussed in business thinktanks, who believe that this practice is immoral. 

Open Access would mean that every journal would be made available to the public, through the gratis or green model, or with an extra charge for additional rights under the libre or gold model. This would open up a much greater power dynamic between the author and publisher, with the author attaining more say in the publication of their work.

 This could provide a large threat to the academic publisher, as a lot of the revenue and holdings could be taken away. However, a move toward less journal publication could be a way to overcome this problem, and a rise in print and monograph editions could follow.