Academic Publishing is An Exploitative Farce

Access to peer-reviewed publications costs thousands of dollars, but the authors aren’t paid. Why not?

In order to succeed in academia, you must succeed in academic publishing. The length of the published works section of your CV (the academic equivalent of a resume) determines whether you can get a full-time job, the prestigiousness of the institution you get to work at, whether you get grants, and whether you get tenure. If you do not publish, your chance of having a traditional academic career will die.

Different schools have different expectations for what an “adequate” amount of publications is, of course. A school that is not focused on research might expect to hire someone who has published 1–2 things per year; a more demanding school might expect far more. These publications, at least in the social sciences, must be empirical and novel, and should be in journals that are very well-regarded. If you publish theoretical articles, or reviews, you won’t be seen as contributing novel information to the literature to the same extent as someone publishing new work. Book reviews, in particular, are next to useless.

Along with securing empirical publications in high-tier journals, you are also expected to present your work at numerous conferences, in poster sessions, panel discussions, and talks. Going to conferences to share work is seen as a sign of “productivity”, but not an impressive one. You can put them on your CV, but they’re largely seen as commodities that are easy to get. Relatively few conference submissions are turned away, and they’re not peer-reviewed, so there’s little career benefit to doing them beyond the networking opportunities they provide. Refusing to do them, however, can be seen as suspect.

So, to get ahead, you need to conduct your own research, and you need to get it published. It needs to be in a journal that is well-regarded. And you have to do it a lot. Doesn’t matter how much service you do, how many students you mentor, how many committees you are on, or how sparkling your course evaluations are. You have to secure tons of publications, over and over again, year after year. An academic who fails in this task will not get tenure; they probably won’t even get a job in the first…