Academic publishing and open access: Costs, benefits and options for publishing research

AuthorChristopher May
Published date01 February 2020
Date01 February 2020
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0263395719858571
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395719858571
Politics
2020, Vol. 40(1) 120 –135
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395719858571
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Academic publishing and
open access: Costs, benefits
and options for publishing
research
Christopher May
Lancaster University, UK
Abstract
This article briefly sets out a political economy of academic publishing, exploring what the costs
and benefits of this model are/were for the academic community. It then moves to explore forms
of open access publication available to the social science (politics and international relations)
community in the United Kingdom and beyond. The article concludes by asking why (given its likely
advantages), the open access model is not ubiquitous and suggests that the future of publication
lies in the hands of early career researchers.
Keywords
academic publishing, intellectual property, open access, political economy
Received: 25th October 2018; Revised version received: 8th March 2019; Accepted: 26th April 2019
For many years, I researched the international/global political economy of intellectual
property rights, looking at how the narratives of justification around copyright, patents
and other intellectual properties varied from the real world political economy of making
property out of knowledge. One aspect of this issue (and indeed the intellectual property
issue that academics and researchers are most often aware of) is how we (which is to say
the academic community) have organised the publication (and thereby formal communi-
cation) of the results of our work. In this article, I focus primarily on academic journals,
as while there are parallel issues in the publication of books, this aspect of publishing
currently seems less fraught or problematic for the university research community.1 It is
also clear that there is some disquiet about the operation of peer review as part of the
academic publishing process, but while this can impact on researchers’ ability to get their
work published for reasons of space I have left a discussion of reforming peer review to
others.2
Rather, this article focusses on the development of open access as an alternative to the
traditional model of academic publishing, and in doing so returns (again) to a theme I
Corresponding author:
Christopher May, Lancaster University, County South, Lancaster LA1 4YD, UK.
Email: c.may@lancaster.ac.uk
858571POL0010.1177/0263395719858571PoliticsMay
research-article2019
Article
May 121
have explored before. Given the advent of Plan S (see a later section) alongside the slow
uptake of open access by politics and international relations (PIR) scholars, it seemed like
a good time to again pose the question, to my senior colleagues, but also to early career
researchers brought up in a world where free-to-view content (via social media) seem
ubiquitous: why are we not publishing via open access routes more often? In this sense,
this article is intended as a provocation!
Writing in European Political Science in 2005, I concluded my assessment of the then
current state of open access publishing in PIR by suggesting that given that much of the
substance of scholarly reputation is related to citation rates, if we were/are really inter-
ested in re-shaping the political economy of academic publication then we needed to seek
out open-access sources to cite for ideas we wish to engage with, rather than relying on
the journals controlled by commercial academic publishers (May, 2005). Some, 8 years
later, writing for e-International Relations, I suggested that it remained unclear ‘how
readers might judge the quality and/or value of what is available on-line, given the acad-
emy practically lacks confidence in open access’ (May, 2013). While there have been
some significant changes to everyday practices in the academy much of the standard
model of academic publishing remains stubbornly in place.
Therefore, this article briefly sets out a political economy of academic publishing,
which in the UK at least paralleled the significant expansion of both the number of uni-
versities that supported research by their staff (organisationally and financially) and, also
especially in the last couple of decades, the growth in form(s) of oversight and manage-
ment of research ‘quality’. This leads me to say something about what the costs and
benefits of this model are/were before exploring the forms of open access publication
available to the social science (and specifically PIR) community in the United Kingdom
and beyond while also briefly setting out one recent and important political innovation
(Plan S). I conclude by asking why (given its likely advantages) the open access model is
not ubiquitous, briefly speculate why researchers in politics have been reticent in their
adoption of open access and suggest that the future of publication lies our hands.
A political economy of academic/scientific publishing
The (now) standard model of academic publishing finds its origins in Robert Maxwell’s
Pergamon Press which was an early mover in recognising that the expansion of university
research would also lead to an expansion in the demand for the dissemination of results.
Moreover, seeing the commercial competition raise the production standards of journals,
many non-profit professional and disciplinary associations decided their interests were
best served by selling their journals to the new arrivals in the market (Buranyi, 2017).
Perhaps the key insight that Maxwell had (and which was then picked up by his succes-
sors) was that the generation of academic knowledge would expand to meet any increase
in journals (even if they were essentially complementary in focus) and that academics
(having no need to pay for the journals themselves) would stoke demand by ordering
subscriptions for their institution’s library.3 Maxwell and those who followed him were
able to construct a form of market intermediation where it had hitherto been under-devel-
oped or even non-existent.
Indeed, this move to commercialise an intellectual resource might be regarded as a
new form of enclosure (to use a phrase popular in the discussion of the reach of intellec-
tual property at the turn of the millennium) or as a form of primitive accumulation
(Glassman, 2006; Perelman, 2000; Sassen, 2010). The latter analysis would identify a

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