Academic Publishing, AI, and Broken Incentives

Since I’ve been a part of the academic publication ecosystem for decades (as have some of my readers), I’ll share some thoughts on the latest publication quality scandals:

Junior faculty are suffering from an ever-increasing squeeze for publication and citation metrics. This has been an issue with growing severity as long as I’ve been at a university. Some specialty areas find it easier to publish than others for many legitimate reasons.ChatGPT is just the latest form of shady authoring technique.The academic paper mills are symptoms, not the root cause. Effectively they are exploiting doctoral student => postdoc => junior faculty suffering for profit.Shutting down paper mills does not fix the problem. It just forces it to manifest some other way.All these pressures combined with MUCH more difficulty in raising research funding means that those same faculty are pressed to peer review more papers with lower quality with far less time — and effectively no professional compensation for doing so. On-line venues that exist to increase the number of publication slots available are just the latest form of publication metric arms races. The top-tier conferences in my field still have excellent peer review. But it is no surprise that other publication venues do not. And the situation is ripe for scam artists to set up what amount to fake journals with fake reviews to make money from low-cost web publications. Sometimes established publication names are duped. Other times it is worse.The academic publication cash grab has been a thing for a long, long time. (I recall $100 page charges for professional society journals when I was in grad school.) It has simply been weaponized along with the greater erosion of the publication industry we’ve been seeing overall.It does feel like this problem has “gone exponential” lately. But it is a long-standing trend (look up Beall’s list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beall%27s_List) The problem won’t be fixed just by killing off the most abusive journals, because the root causes run much deeper.
Ultimately this is difficult to solve because interdisciplinary evaluation committees find it easiest to count number of “scholarly” publications, and things like an H-index. “Impact” is hard to measure, and likely takes longer than the assistant=>associate professor timeline allows.

This is a systemic problem that will require senior faculty across the university ecosystem to resolve via deep cultural change. Clutching our pearls over ChatGPT showing up in papers should be directed to calling attention to the root problems (hence this post).

This is my personal perspective as an academic who, in the worst case, might be forced to retire as already planned in a few months. I hope that many junior faculty who do not feel they can speak up feel seen, even if I can’t offer you a solution.