I am currently working on a second edition of one of my co-authored writing books, Writing for peer reviewed journals. Strategies for getting published. The book was published in 2013 and written in 2012. A lot has changed in the publishing world since then. My co-author Barbara and I now have to decide how to address: large language platforms like Chat GBT, Open Access policies and possibilities, the increasing expectations of early career researchers, the growth of PhDs by publication and the ramping up of institutional pressures on individual academics to publish particular kinds of “outputs” in “highly ranked” journals. It’s clearly not a simple updating job.

In order to get ready for writing I’ve been accumulating relevant materials – editorials, teaching resources, papers and books. And getting pretty vexed  –  but I did promise myself and you that I wasn’t going to dwell on bad writing advice. So that’s not this post. This post is thinking in public. The kind of thing you might write in a researcher notebook as you work out what’s going on.

I’m using what some call a review of the literatures to sort out my thinking. Now I’d just say here that I am not finding a gap. I am not reviewing to summarise everything that’s out there and evaluate the state of the art. No. I’m reading selectively so that I can help myself think. I’m trying to find a way through what seems to be a pretty difficult thicket of problems related to understanding the contemporary world of academic publishing.  I will put the ideas I find in the stuff I’ve accumulated in conversation with the ideas that are already in the book. I call this reading-for-thinking-through-problems. 

Oh, and I’m going to use this blog to think aloud. So, as a starter for ten, here’s a small example of how I’m reading-for-thinking-through.

One of the editorials I’ve recently read was about how to choose your journal. It was written by a senior and well respected chief editor of a very respectable OA allied health journal. The editorial began by discussing the importance of making an informed choice about your journal – something Barbara and I also advocate strongly and provide strategies for. Then the editor writes The key is to understand: what is the role of the journal?  This is exactly what Barbara and I argue for too. It is not enough to learn how to write a paper, you need to understand what game you’re getting into.

The editor then goes on:

At its essence, the scholarly scientific or professional journal is at the center of a market, between a lot of buyers (readers) and a lot of sellers (authors). The role of the journal is to serve as both a filter and a curator for both sides of the market: to deliver novel, relevant, quality-assured articles to the reader; and to bring a large, specific, relevant audience of readers to the author. For the reader, a journal will have a sufficiently defined aim and scope to be a “go-to” resource, and high quality standards so that readers trust the content and value the journal as a place they can go to find “the good stuff ” that is relevant to them. For the author, ideally, a journal should target exactly the type of reader the author intends the article to be read by, preferably directly—such as by subscription delivery—or at least to be likely to be discovered by such readers.

Reading this paragraph made me stop and think. I would not normally think about journal publication through the metaphor of a market. But I could see that thinking about the journal as a market rather than a forum for discussion or a series of asynchronous conversations (my more usual metaphors) did do some helpful work. The metaphor of a market makes the journal an active entity – providing, filtering, ensuring “quality”, curating, delivering, targeting. Well yes it’s not exactly the journal, it’s the editors and editorial board who do this work, but seeing the agency embedded in the journal is useful. You’re not writing for some kind of neutral entity. And focusing on the “fit” between the interests and knowledges of the authors and readers is a useful pointer to find a journal with already interested readers and then writing for them. Not writing for yourself or an examiner but writing for particular readers. Snd the market metaphor makes it clear that readers are also active choosers, they don’t have to read what you write. So far so good.

But I was also quite troubled by the metaphor. This is not because I think a market is necessarily a bad thing. The trouble with the metaphor is that it describes – and the closest I can come to is – a kind of farmers’ market. The farmers (authors) drive their trucks  into the market place (journal) where there is quarantine checking (reviewing) in place – no fruit fly here. Then once past the quarantine checkpoint, the farmers can set up a stall with their produce (papers). The buyers (readers) then wander around the stalls and select what they want.

Well that’s Ok isn’t it? Mmm. Not quite. The problem with this metaphor is that the journal is not just a stand-alone farmers’ market but also part of much larger market system. Without labouring the point, journals are situated in three actual markets:

1. The academic publishing market where big, small, independent and wannabe commercial newcomers all compete for giant profits. We all know that we academics largely donate our writing reviewing and editing labour and then our institutions buy back our work, and pay even more to have it made freely available.. We also know that there are unscrupulous operators out there in the marketplace and some highly ethical independent publications ( like the publication I have quoted from) which need to gain professional and institutional approval. That’s largely to do with …
2. The higher education market where reputations and rankings of institutions are in part derived from the collective publications of staff. Rankings and reputations are important for enrolment, funding and research income. Ranking and reputations are not neutral activities nor are they equitable. They are also big business. But they matter – because publications are also currency in…
3. The academic employment market in which individual publications – quantity, combined with quality stand-ins such as journal rankings and individual citations – are used to make judgments about academics’ individual and collective value. And these are  not equitable judgments but they are increasingly important.

My concern is that seeing each journal as a farmers’ market for readers and writers pushes these larger and actual markets into the background. And they matter. How they matter. They affect our choices of journal, what to write, for whom, and how often. And whatever decisions we make about the journal and publishing, these wider markets are implicated.

So I don’t find the metaphor of markets for journals totally helpful. In part yes, but in part no.

Metaphors are always like this of course. They do some things and not others. While they can be a great help to understanding they can also close off other important issues.

Yes, I’m musing about metaphors to help make sense of academic publication because I’m writing a pedagogical book. Perhaps the solution for the book is to use more than one metaphor and draw attention to the work that each does and doesn’t do. And maybe that is also a helpful approach more generally if we are to make sense of what we publish, when and where?