The Academic-Publication Racket: Whatever Happened to Authors’ Rights?

Abstract

Academic publishing has become big business; and as a result both readers’ access and authors’ rights are under serious threat. This impedes communication and undermines academics’ incentive to do the best work they can. I begin by disentangling some of the many factors that have created this disastrous situation—focusing primarily on publishing in philosophy, though I suspect that things are equally bad across the humanities, and beyond. Then I describe some of the ways I have tried to make my work widely available and to maintain control of its re-use; and how, despite my best efforts, this has gotten harder and harder as academic publishing has grown more and more inhospitable to authors’ interests. Of course, simply writing about what a mess academic publishing has become won’t, by itself, improve things. But my hope is that, by articulating what’s gone so wrong, I can reassure readers that their frustration isn’t unique, and perhaps persuade them to fight back in some of the ways I will suggest in my concluding pages, and in other ways they can see that I haven’t thought of. And perhaps, if more of us turn our minds to thinking about what might help change the situation, and join in the effort, things might gradually get better.

Keywords: academic publishing, peer review, open access, author’s rights, academic communication, incentives