Centre for Global Higher Education Working Paper series

An Index, A Publisher and An Unequal

Global Research Economy

David Mills

Working paper no. 91

July 2023
 Published by the Centre for Global Higher Education,
Department of Education, University of Oxford
15 Norham Gardens, Oxford, OX2 6PY
www.researchcghe.org

© the author 2023

ISSN 2398-564X

The Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) is an international

research centre focused on higher education and its future development.
Our research aims to inform and improve higher education policy
and practice.

CGHE is a research partnership of 10 UK and international universities,

funded by the Economic and Social Research Council,
with support from Research England.

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An Index, A Publisher and An Unequal Global
Research Economy

David Mills

Contents

The rise and fall of Robert Maxwell .......................................................... 7

How a photocopied pamphlet changed the world of science ................. 10

Growing pains ........................................................................................ 15

What gets left out? ................................................................................. 18

Is Open Science the answer or the question? ....................................... 19

References ............................................................................................. 23

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 An Index, A Publisher and An Unequal
Global Research Economy
David Mills

David Mills is Associate Professor (Pedagogy and the Social Sciences) at the
Department of Education at Oxford. He is Deputy Director of the Oxford Centre
for Global Higher Education (CGHE) and a Co-Investigator on CGHE’s
Research Programme on Supranational Higher Education. He is also Vice
President of Kellogg College, Treasurer of the European Association of Social
Anthropologists, and a director of the African Books Collective.

David uses ethnographic methods to study higher education and academic

publishing. Trained in anthropology, his research interests include the colonial
history of disciplines and universities, research methods, and the political
economy of the global science communication system. He is currently writing
about the impact of the global research and publishing economy on institutional
research and publishing cultures in African universities.

His books include Ethnography and Education (Sage, 2013) and Difficult Folk:
A Political History of Social Anthropology (Berghahn, 2008). His 2023 book,
‘Who Counts: Ghanaian Academic Publishing and Global Science’ is co-written
with colleagues in Ghana and Oxford, has been published Open Access with
African Minds.

Abstract

This is the story of how a publisher and a citation index turned the science
communication system into a highly profitable global industry. Over the course
of seventy years, academic journal articles have become commodities, and
their meta-data a further source of revenue. It begins in Washington at the end
of a second World War, when the US Government agrees a massive increase
in funding for research, after Vannevar Bush champions basic research as the

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‘pacemaker of technological progress’. The resulting post-war growth in
scientific publishing creates opportunities for information scientists and
publishers alike. During the 1950s, two men – Robert Maxwell and Eugene
Garfield – begin to experiment with their blueprint for the research economy.
Maxwell created an ‘international’ publisher – Pergamon Press – charming the
editors of elite, not-for-profit society journals into signing commercial contracts.
Garfield invented the science citation index to help librarians manage this
growing flow of knowledge. Over time, the index gradually became
commercially viable as universities and publishers used it to measure the
‘impact’ of their researchers and journals.

Sixty years later, the global science system has become a citation economy,
with academic credibility mediated by the currency produced by the two
dominant commercial citation indexes: Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivate’s Web
of Science. The reach of these citation indexes and their data analytics is
amplified by digitisation, computing power and financial investment. Scholarly
reputation is now increasingly measured by journal rankings, ‘impact factors’
and ‘h-indexes’. Non-Anglophone journals are disproportionately excluded
from these indexes, reinforcing the stratification of academic credibility
geographies and endangering long established knowledge ecosystems.
Researchers in the majority world are left marginalised and have no choice but
to go ever faster, resorting to research productivism to keep up. The result is
an integrity-technology ‘arms race’. Responding to media stories about a crisis
of scientific fraud, publishers and indexes turn to AI tools to deal with what is
seen as an epidemic of academic ‘gaming’ and manipulation.

Does the unfettered growth in publishing ‘outputs’, moral panics over research
integrity and widening global divides signal a science system in crisis? And is
the ‘Open Science’ vision under threat, as the ‘author-pays’ publishing business
model becomes dominant? With the scientific commons now largely reliant on
citations as its currency, the future of science communication is far from certain.

Keywords: Academic publishing, Science communication, Citations, Citation

index, Open Access, Bibliodiversity, Inequality, Research economy

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Acknowledgment: This Working Paper is being published by the ESRC/RE
Centre for Global Higher Education, funded by the U.K. Economic and Social
Research Council (award numbers ES/M010082/1, ES/M010082/2 and
ES/T014768/1).

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The rise and fall of Robert Maxwell

Robert Maxwell’s body was found floating off Gran Canaria on 6th November
1991. He had disappeared overnight from his luxury motor yacht, the Lady
Ghislaine. Amidst fevered speculation about the cause of death, attention
focused on the huge debts facing his media and business empire. Two weeks
later, the Mirror newspaper, having initially run with the headline ‘The man who
saved the Mirror’, revealed that he had stolen £526 million from his Mirror Group
of companies: most of this was from the pension fund. Maxwell is now
remembered for his ambition, his ego and his fraud. Less recognised is that his
sprawling business empire was built on the profits and success of Pergamon
Press, the academic publishing venture he began in 1951.

Observers of the contemporary global higher education landscape tend to focus

on the latest fast-moving developments. But the commercial landscape of
today’s science communication system can be traced back to the policy
foresight of Vannevar Bush, the deal-making of Robert Maxwell and the data
skills of Eugene Garfield. Bush made the case for sustained government
funding for basic research. Maxwell was the first to realise just how profitable
scientific publishing could be, and seemingly no limits to the potential for scaling
up journal outputs. Garfield’s initial attempts to measure and quantify research,
and then to make money out of these measurements, similarly moulded the
unequal and stratified research terrain we now inhabit.

The first chapter of this story starts at the end of the second world war, and the
influence of Vannevar Bush on US Government policy. Bush was an American
engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II had
helped set up the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).
Bush oversaw US wartime military R&D, including research on radar and the
Manhattan Project. He pioneered digital circuit theory and ideas about
hypertext through his concept of the ‘memex’, expanded memory, in his famous
piece ‘how humans think’ (Bush 1945a).

Asked by Franklin D Roosevelt to develop a vision for the future of science,

Bush wrote ‘Science, the endless frontier’ (1945b). Declaring that ‘the pioneer
spirit is still vigorous within this nation…science offers a largely unexplored
hinterland for the pioneer’, he played on the American settler-colonial vision of
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science as a constant war against disease and aggression. He saw research
as the ‘pacemaker’ that underpins scientific progress and needed dedicated
funding and support. His tenure and influence was marked by a massive
expansion in US science funding, and a few years after the war, the National
Science Foundation was launched.

Vannevar was a skilled administrator, but not an entrepeneur. To understand

the commercial opportunities built into this emerging science system we need
to turn to first Robert Maxwell and then Eugene Garfield. Maxwell was born to
a poor family in Eastern Czechoslavia, and after escaping the Nazi occupation,
joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile during World War II. He later won a
military cross for active service in the British Army, and subsequently styled
himself ‘Captain’ Robert Maxwell. He was based in Berlin after the war as a
British military attache and later was revealed to have been a Russian double
agent. As the war came to an end, the allied powers were keen to profit from
German scientific knowledge. Maxwell used his Soviet army contacts to obtain
copies of secret Soviet documents about every important German industrial
plant along with scientific material. The plan was to strip much of this material
and remove it to the Soviet Union. During this time, he made the most of his
business and government contacts to help the German publisher Springer get
their journals out of Berlin, providing them with paper and fuel to restart their
business.

Until the second world war, academic publishing was primarily viewed as a
service provided by university presses and scholarly societies to their members.
Whilst a few Victorian popular science serials did develop large readerships
(Brock 1980), Nature was unique in sustaining its scholarly credibility and
commercial success (Baldwin 2015). Then geopolitics reshaped the European
scientific landscape. Long established German publishing houses struggled to
survive the convulsions created by the rise of Nazism. During the 1930s the
struggling Dutch publisher Elsevier benefited from the emigration of
experienced Germany editors and publishing staff to the Netherlands. Elsevier
made the most of this technical and science publishing expertise, publishing
more English and German scholarly texts. After the war, commercial academic
publishers in the US, Holland and Britain all benefited both from the post-war

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revival of international scientific collaboration, and the tough restrictions placed
on both German publishers (Brown 1947).

Robert Maxwell competed with Elsevier to dominate this emerging market (Cox
2002). Making the most of his Berlin contacts, in 1951 Maxwell paid £13,000 to
buy UK distribution rights for Springer Verlag publications: six science journals
and two textbook series. By 1960 his new company, Pergamon Press, was
distributing 59 ‘international’ scientific journals, and circulation grew at 5-10
percent each year. Working closely with ambitious academic editors, he rapidly
expanded Pergamon: its profits underpinned the broader Maxwell publishing
empire. Pergamon aggressively launched new journals from the profits of
existing serials, sold textbooks throughout the world, and developed a highly
profitable series of encyclopaedias. Maxwell was proud of his relationships with
senior journal editors, offering them favourable contracts to secure their
business. He wooed scholarly associations and journal editors with extravagant
holidays and lavish parties at Headington Hall, where Maxwell based his
companies. According to one colleague, Maxwell was smart because ‘he knew
just what to offer to buy a person – fame or money’ (Preston, 2021). In the early
years, he also benefited from Cold war paranoia, landing a lucrative US state
department contract to translate huge numbers of Russian scientific papers.

Maxwell’s recipe involved a combination of journal expansions and acquisitions,

skilful marketing and creative new business models. Journals that previously
had a national remit became ‘internationalised’ with new editorial boards and
titles. Emerging sub-disciplines were also targeted, with Maxwell claiming that
there were endless opportunities for journals to support ever smaller specialist
fields. Both Pergamon and Elsevier focused on growing institutional rather than
individual subscriptions. Many American and European scientific societies were
persuaded to outsource their journal publishing to commercial ‘partners’,
attracted by the income it would provide for conferences and membership
benefits. In the 1950s and 1960s few academics could have foreseen the
consequences of this new publishing economy. English replaced German as
the international language of science (Gordin 2015), and ever more English-
language science journals were launched fostering new international research
communities (Meadows 1980). By the time Pergamon was sold to Elsevier in
1991 for £440 million, it had published 7000 monographs and launched 700

9
journals, of which more than 400 were still active. Cox argues that Maxwell had
a ‘profound effect’ on scientific publishing, which the debacle of his death, his
debts and his misuse of the Mirror’s pension funds ‘eclipsed from history’ (Cox
2002:274).

How a photocopied pamphlet changed the world of

science

Commercial publishing is only one part of the story of contemporary science.

The other is the challenge of managing and measuring this huge new flow of
information. One could equally argue that the contemporary global research
infrastructure has its roots in a photocopied pamphlet, entitled Current
Contents, initially printed in a hen coop by an entrepreneurial young US
information scientist – Eugene Garfield.

Born in the Bronx to second-generation Lithuanian immigrants, the young

Garfield was inspired by the science fiction of HG Wells and his vision of a
‘World Brain’. For his doctoral degree in Chemistry and Library science, he
developed an algorithm for converting chemical nomenclature into formulas.
Garfield’s vision was of a new field of ‘information science’. Frustrated at the
conservatism of traditional abstracting services, he wanted to make research
knowledge accessible. Garfield felt that research funding was not being
matched by financing for research communication, and that new technologies
of data management could help create ‘efficient’ information systems.

Garfield’s first big innovation was refreshingly low-tech. Realising how hard it
was for librarians to keep abreast of new research, he started sending out a
weekly photocopied and stapled pamphlet of the contents pages of 150 life-
science journals. Printed on cheap airmail paper in a converted chicken co-op,
it became essential reading for librarians, sparing them having to browse
through individual journals. Current Contents, as it was known, started in the
life sciences in 1958 with 150 journals and demand rapidly grew. By 1967
Current Contents covered 1,500 journals in physics, chemistry and the life
sciences.

Setting up the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) as a company in 1955,

naming it after a Moscow research institute, Garfield also provided reprinting
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and alerting services. His first customers included major pharmaceutical
companies. Corporate subscriptions enabled ISI to expand, but also ensured
that ISI’s offerings were responsive to commercial needs. By the late 1970s,
Current Contents was indexing more than 4500 journals. With new journals and
fields lobbying to be included, Garfield was ambitious to make it as
comprehensive as possible.

Garfield’s most influential idea was equally straightforward: the concept of a

citation index. He was fascinated by finding ways to assess the utility of
research, and concerned about the citation of ‘fraudulent, incomplete or
obsolete’ data. The idea emerged from a US legal paper-based research tool
called Shepherd’s citation that allowed lawyers to research case law and track
precedent. Garfield felt that, in the same vein, scholars should also know about
the existing citations of an article they were also citing, and that links to earlier
work to help them to understand the ‘transmission of ideas’ and the intellectual
structure of thought. The total number of citations could be counted, so that
scientists could thus measure the ‘impact’, and hence importance of published
work. So was launched scientometrics, the science of measuring and tracking
the circulation and citation of scholarly knowledge (Garfield 1955). Garfield
struggled to get research funding to develop his ideas, but in 1959 the US Air
Force gave him a five-year contract to trial a prototype (Aronova 2021).

Garfield recognised that a comprehensive citation index ideally needed to cover

all published scientific journals, but he recognised the economic and logistical
impracticality of this. He turned to Bradford’s law of scattering, named after a
British mathematician, that held that that the most important literature in any
scientific field is published only in a narrow group of journals. Pareto’s law, or
what is called the 80/20 distribution, allowed Garfield to make the case for a
very focused selection of what he called the most ‘significant’ journals. Garfield
cited one study that showed that 75% of references in the life sciences were to
fewer than 1000 ‘core’ journals, and 84% were to just 2000 journals. This
justified an index based on the most influential and important journals in each
field (Garfield 1955). It was also an astute commercial decision, given the huge
logistical challenges and costs of indexing a potentially endless number of
citations, with only the most basic of computing facilities.

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After several trials, the first with just three genetics journals, Garfield’s prototype
index, published in 1963, assembled citation data from 560 scientific journals,
with 70% published from the US or UK, and nearly all the rest from Europe.
Garfield’s selection of ‘key’ journals drew on his US-centred knowledge of the
journal landscape, and primarily on the contents of Current Contents, which in
turn had evolved to meet the needs of commercial subscribers. The first
Science Citation Index (SCI), published in 1966, was similarly heavily reliant on
the US-based research ecosystem and the offerings of commercial publishers.
The academic geography of a Euro-American publishing economy was hard-
wired into the index from the very start. Two Chinese journals were included,
but none from Africa.

The index’s rapid growth paralleled that of Current Contents. In 1966 SCI
included more than 1150 journals, and by 1968 covered 2000 journals.
Gradually more non-European journals were indexed, but their overall
proportion remained very small, given the parallel growth in US and European
serials, a topic I return to below. Garfield made the most of emergent computer
technology to reduce the costs of indexing, and ISI employed a huge team of
100 data operators adding data to a central mainframe via desk tapes. Working
two shifts five days a week, they were able to process 25,000 references a day
(Garfield 1979). Like Maxwell, Garfield also benefited from Cold War tensions.
He had been inspired by the possibilities for data management enabled by a
centralised state, and later developed close links to Russian science
administrators and the scientometrician Vasilii Nalimov. He helped broker a
major contract selling IBM computers him to Russian ministries, profitably
wrapping in a 10-year subscription to SCI services (Aronova 2021).

Whilst Garfield’s original aim may have been to facilitate information searching,
the index quickly defined ‘reputable’ academic knowledge. Inclusion mattered
for journals, and publishers were prepared to pay the hefty subscription fees.
With ever more ‘international’ journals being launched by two rapidly expanding
commercial publishers - Pergamon Press and Elsevier - the index began to hold
a powerful gatekeeping role. In the subsequent two decades it doubled in size,
and by 1990 was indexing around 4000 journals. Garfield was skilful at
promoting sales of SCI across the world, requiring indexed journals to subscribe
(Garfield 1972).

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Many were critical. Some mocked the idea that objectivity could be achieved by
‘not reading the literature’ (Oliver 1970). Sociologists and science scholars
questioned the global coverage of the index (Narin,1976, Frame et. al. 1977,
Rabkin and Inhaber 1979, but see Garfield 1983), and the meaningfulness of
the data for different disciplines and regions (Cole and Cole 1971). A statistical
critique of SCI’s systematic discrimination against third world journals was
published in Scientific American (Gibb 1995), leading to a strong riposte by
Garfield (1997).

Garfield may not have anticipated that universities, academics and publishers
would use the index to compete. Yet citation data allowed users to score and
rank journals based on their citation ‘impact factor’. Unwittingly or not, Garfield
had created the tools for academic game-playing and institutional
performativity. The shift was from maps to counts, from ‘descriptive to
evaluative’ (Biagioli 2018:250). Csiszar (2020:51) describes an encounter
where this risk is spelt out. In a packed Palo Alto seminar room at the first-ever
conference on science indicators in 1974, Merton warned Garfield that
‘whenever an indicator comes to be used in the reward system of an
organization or institutional domain, there develop tendencies to manipulate the
indicator so that it no longer indicates what it once did.’ Merton had coined what
became known as Goodhart’s law.

Initially the index had little commercial value, despite Garfield’s sales pitches,
and income from Current Contents subsidised the index until the late 1970s.
One obituarist described Garfield as ‘visionary’ rather than ‘book-keeper’
(Wouters 2017). The index had become a major drain on ISI resources, and in
1988 his business was bought out by another publisher for $24 million. The
indexes were fully digitised and sold on to Thompson in 1991 for $210 million.
Their commercial potential only became clear when the first global rankings of
universities were launched in the early 2000s, many of which used citation data
to assess academics. In 2011 Thompson sold the business for $3.5 billion to
Clarivate.

Clarivate’s Web of Science ‘core collection’ now covers more than 21,000
journals within four different indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE),
Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Arts & Humanities Citation Index

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(A&HCI) and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). Elsevier, the largest
of the academic publishing houses, based in Amsterdam and London, launched
a rival index, Scopus, in 2004. The latter indexes around 20% more journals
and has a more international profile, as its subscription services are actively
marketed to universities globally.

Both indexes have exacting metrics-based selection thresholds and evaluation

policies, indexing at the most 5-6% of all active academic journals. They publish
broad guidelines on their evaluation and selection procedures for new journals.
Web of Science1, the more selective of the two databases, employs an ‘in-
house’ editorial board of seven to adjudicate on journal inclusion decisions.
Candidate journals for the Web of Science core collections first must meet a
minimum set of quality and compliance standards. The 24 quality criteria
include adhering to community standards, a distributed set of authors, the
composition of editorial boards, and ‘appropriate citations to the literature’. New
journals are evaluated on these quality criteria before being accepted into the
ESCI. The impact criteria include assessment of content significance and three
citation-based metrics: including analysis of author citations, editorial board
citations, and comparative citation data. This citation data is used to select and
promote the most influential journals in their fields from ESCI into the SCIE,
SSCI or AHCI. Journals can also be demoted from the three databases to ESCI
if they lose impact.

Scopus journal selection is overseen by a group of Elsevier-appointed external

experts called the Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB) 2 . CSAB
consists of 17 Subject Chairs, representing different scientific fields. These
researchers, scientists and librarians, all with university affiliations, are
responsible for reviewing all titles proposed for inclusion into the Scopus
database. Furthermore, the CSAB also provides recommendations to Scopus
about new priorities based on Scopus user data. To expand its collections in

1
https://clarivate.com/products/scientific-and-academic-research/research-discovery-and-
workflow-solutions/web-of-science/core-collection/editorial-selection-process/editorial-
selection-process/
2
https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus/how-scopus-works/content/scopus-content-
selection-and-advisory-board

14
non-English speaking regions, Scopus has in recent years created four local
Expert Content Selection and Advisory Committees (ECSAC) in Russia,
Thailand, South Korea and China. Each of these is tasked with advancing ‘the
overall standards and quality of journals published in non-English speaking
countries.’ The rubric for these boards includes the aim ‘that titles published
primarily for a local audience but deserving of international attention’ are
included in Scopus. Elsevier’s assumption seems to be that journals not
published in English are by definition ‘local’ and aimed at national audiences.

The minimum criteria for inclusion in Scopus include peer-reviewing, journal

registration, statements on publication ethics, and the requirement to ‘have
content that is relevant for and readable by an international audience’ including
English language abstracts and titles. There are five further categories under
which journals are assessed: journal policy, journal content, journal standing,
publishing regularity and online availability. Each of these is assessed
numerically. For example, journal standing is assessed by the ‘citedness of
journal articles in Scopus’, whilst journal policy includes measuring the ‘diversity
in geographical distribution’ of editors and authors. Scopus also uses citation-
based peer benchmarks to adjudicate inclusion decisions, including evidence
of self-citation (greater than 200% higher than the average) and where citation
rates, numbers of articles, and number of clicks on Scopus are all less than
50% of the average amongst peer journals. All these metrics discriminate
against small journals, those published in languages other than English, in the
global South or catering primarily for national and regional scholarly
ecosystems beyond Europe.

Growing pains

According to UlrichsWeb periodical database, there are now more than 100,000
academic journals published worldwide. This is likely to be an underestimate,
as globally, higher education research continues to expand. Back in 1961 the
mathematician Derek de Solla Price predicted that science would continue to
grow exponentially, and that by 2000 there would be 1 million journals (Price
1961). He was broadly right about consistent growth: this is currently around
5.4% each year, according to the latest estimates (Bornmann et. al. 2021). Yet

15
he could not have foreseen the rise of mega-journals, pre-prints, and a
multiplicity of other ways of sharing research knowledge.

Four multinational companies dominate, each publishing more than 2000

journals each - Springer Nature, Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, and Taylor and
Francis. They are based in London, Amsterdam, Hoboken (New Jersey) and
Oxford, from where they seek to manage their global profiles. Together, they
publish more than 70 percent of all social science journals, and 50 percent of
journals in the natural sciences. Sage is in fifth place with more than 900
journals.

In a growing global tertiary education sector, new market opportunities

constantly emerge. For example, Hindawi, was founded in Egypt in 1997 and
became an innovative publisher of 230 Open Access journals. It later moved to
London and was bought by Wiley in 2021 for $300 million. MDPI was launched
in 1996 and Frontiers in 1997. Working from bases in Switzerland, both offer
similar gold Open Access publishing opportunities. They champion ‘customer’
service and rapid editorial decision making. Some journals review and publish
accepted submissions within a few weeks. They all require accepted authors to
pay article publishing charges (APCs), unless they qualify for, or are granted,
waivers on grounds of geography, career stage or institutional affiliation. MDPI
charges an average APC of £1,900, but, for now, most of its journals (especially
in the social sciences) waive between 70-100% of these fees. Frontiers – partly
owned by the major shareholder in Springer Nature - charges APCs between
£1,000 and £2,500, depending on the funding available in the field. In 2021,
Frontiers published 85,000 articles in its 140 journals, and was ranked the third
most cited publisher, whilst MDPI doubled its output to 235,000 articles. Both
make extensive use of special issues, with MDPI publishing more than 6,700 in
2020 (Crossetto 2021). At this rate, MDPI’s article output will soon rival the
430,000 articles published annually by Elsevier, which remains the largest of
the established commercial publishers.

Meanwhile, elite journal ‘brands’ have become tradeable marketing tools for
their commercial owners. Where there was once one Lancet, there are now 22
Lancet-branded journals. Springer-Nature’s ‘brand expansion’ strategy has
meant there are now more than 30 journals within its portfolio, all with Nature

16
in their title. Nature publishes the very strongest submissions it receives, but
the publisher ‘cascades’ rejected articles to other Nature-branded journals,
including to an Open Access journals with high publication fees. Nature has an
8% acceptance rate, Nature research journals have a 10% acceptance rate,
Nature Communications has a 20% acceptance rate (and a $5400 APC), and
Scientific Reports, Nature’s OA mega-journal, has a 60% acceptance rate.

Springer-Nature have also created their own journal ranking index, publishing
an increasing number of branded supplements, special sections and
‘advertorials’. It increasingly seems that scientific publishers are ‘responding
more to the logic of a market than to that of a community’ (Khelfaoui and
Gingras 2022, 196). The skills is to achieve commercial success and sustain
reputational credibility, with the latter measured largely by citations. The journal
impact factors of several Nature journals have increased by almost 50 percent
over two decades. At the same time, several long-established – and formerly
prestigious – scientific journals owned by professional societies have seen their
status, submissions and income decline.

In an unequal global research system, acceleration and productivity become

survival strategies. Universities are ever more focused on their national and
international rankings as they compete for students, funding patronage and
reputation. Many incentivize their staff to publish through financial incentives
and promotion pressures, changing academic practice. The commercial
academic publishing model requires growth to sustain profits whether from
publishing more in each issue, soliciting more special issues, or launching more
journals. Subsidies and institutional expectations foster an acceleration of the
research publication cycle. The logics of reputational stratification across a
hierarchical global science system require those at the peripheries (especially
precarious junior and adjunct staff) to publish more and faster to stay visible,
putting yet more pressure on the system.

In this context, it is not surprising that some academics take short-cuts to

survive. In China, as in other emerging economies, doctors and other
professionals need to have academic publications in ‘top’ journals to get
promoted. If they have no research or writing experience, the chances of getting
their work into SCI journals is slim. The only option may be to purchase

17
authorship, and there is a burgeoning demand for brokers and agents who can
help with this process. This has led to a series of high-profile mass retractions.
Science sleuths, aided by investigative media watchdogs such as Retraction
Watch, uncover problematic cases of indexed journals publishing huge special
issues, but whose contents are out of scope, plagiarized or just plain nonsense.

When academic publishers talk about the importance of integrity and trust, this
is because they are acutely aware that academic credibility and reputation is a
precious asset. Major scandals - such as that which hit Wiley’s Hindawi journals
in 2022 - directly impact share prices. It is little wonder that publishers promote
the burgeoning scholarly literature on so-called ‘predatory publishing’ (Inouye
and Mills 2021) or amplify media caricatures of Chinese ‘paper mills’. Fraud
gets portrayed as an existential threat to the integrity and future of science (Mills
et al 2021).

In response, many publishers are introducing elaborate AI-driven detection

tools as well as relying on citation benchmarks and metrics indicators to detect
journal ‘outliers’. This reliance on technology and aggregated publication
metrics means that journals with more distinctive profiles risk being seen as
potentially fraudulent or fake. There is less thought and reflection from the
publishing community on whether the tactics used by those on the margins are
just more extreme forms of the ‘gaming’ that is required by a metrics-based
system. Few ask if the accusations of fraud and ‘gaming’ are appropriate, given
that all the actors within this communication system are caught within an
integrity-technology ‘arms race’. Focused on tracking down misconduct,
publishers and integrity watchdogs dwell less on the systemic features of
mainstream science that are generating these mimetic practices and copies
(Jacob 2020, 256). For Griesemer (2020), to even frame the ‘gaming’ of metrics
as academic misconduct is to accept these metrics as appropriate normative
standards. He describes the problem as being ‘a prime mode of escalation in a
metrics arms race between standards imposers and gamers’ (ibid, 79). More
broadly, the discourse of ‘fraudulent’ science also serves to reassert the
boundaries of genuine science, and to shore up the exchange value of its key
currency: citation data.

What gets left out?

18
The unequal geographical representation of scholarly journals by the Science
Citation Index was first pointed out more than 50 years ago. Today, thanks to
the business models developed by Maxwell and his rivals, the hold of
commercial publishers is stronger still. Despite calls to decolonise Open Access
and promote bibliodiversity, the two commercial citation indexes cast a long
shadow across academic publishing in the global South.

Toluwase Asubiaro is an activist Nigerian information scientist who works to

document the impact on the visibility and status of African academic publishing.
Inspired by his doctoral supervisor’s long campaign to create an African citation
index (Nwagwu and Ahmed 2009), he has documented the impact of
international collaborations on the visibility of African research (Asubiaro 2018,
Asubiaro and Badmus 2020). Based in Canada, he has set up the African
Research Visibility Initiative, and uses his bibliometric skills to evaluate these
indices, and to find alternative ways to measure and assess African research,
such as the use of altmetrics, google scholar or Crossref.

Asubiaro and Onalaopo (2023) use Ulrichsweb and AJOL data to estimate
there are currently around 2200 active journals published in Sub-Saharan
Africa. Of these, only 166 were indexed in Web of Science (and 174 in Scopus),
around 7.5% of such journals. Of the 166 in Web of Science, around 75% were
published from South Africa. This means that only around 50 journals are
indexed in Web of Science from across the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. Many
African countries have no journals in the index. Only 21 Nigerian published
journals are indexed, four from Ghana, and five each from Ethiopia and Kenya.
Very few journals from Francophone Africa are indexed. This shows just how
much knowledge is ignored and effaced by these indices.

Is Open Science the answer or the question?

The modern Open Science movement begins in the early years of the internet.
Initiatives such as Project Gutenberg sought to make research publications
more widely available, whilst a number of publishers launched free to read
digital journals. A landmark 2001 conference in Budapest organised by the
Open Society Foundation set out a vision of Open journals that would make no
charge for the reader to access. The Budapest Open Access Initiative, as it was
called, led to further policy initiatives, such as the European Plan S in 2018.
19
This obliged scientists and researchers to publish their work under an open
Creative Commons license and in Open Access repositories and journals.

Responding to Plan S mandates, the majority of commercial publishers have

developed ‘transformative agreements’, transitioning to Open Access funded
by Article Processing charges. Most have seen their profits grow through this
model, even if many are failing to meet Plan S timelines. Far from helping to
decolonise the publishing ecosystem, this commoditised model of Open
Science seems to be strengthening the position of commercial publishers,
raising fears of academic ‘platform capitalism’ (Meagher 2021, Knochelmann
2021, Mirowski 2018). It also sustains the marginalisation of researchers in the
majority world. When citations become the dominant currency of acemic
credibility and reputation, those at the peripheries are often forced to resort to
acceleration and productivism as survival strategies.

Today, Open Science is an increasingly contested concept. The UNESCO 2021

Open Science recommendation envisions research infrastructures that are
‘organized and financed upon an essentially not-for-profit and long-term vision,
which enhance open science practices and guarantee permanent and
unrestricted access to all, to the largest extent possible’ (UNESCO 2021). In
May 2023, the European Council recommended that European member states
‘step up support’ for the development of a not-for-profit publishing platform free
to both authors and readers (so-called Diamond OA). A series of Horizon
Europe funding projects, including DIAMAS and OPERAS have been tasked with
building a high quality, sustainable and community-owned scholarly
communication system, including a set of institution-funded technological
infrastructures and common standards for Open Access scholarly journals.

These policy visions are ambitious and idealistic, given that they pose a direct
challenge to commercial interests by redirecting resource flows to community-
owned infrastrucutures. The ideas are still embryonic, and scaling up a funder-
owned Open Source publishing infrastructure would need huge political will and
deep pockets, given that Elsevier alone spends billions each year on
technological development (Esposito and Clarke 2023).

The European Council’s vision of equity and sustainability is informed by

influential debates around ‘bibliodiversity’. The underlying rationale is that

20
equitable and sustainable community-ownership is the best way to promote a
diverse range of regional initiatives, publishing infrastructures and knowledge
ecosystems (Berger 2021). As Shearer et al (2020, 1) note in their call for action,
‘diversity in services and platforms, funding mechanisms, and evaluation
measures will allow the scholarly communication system to accommodate the
different workflows, languages, publication outputs, and research topics that
support the needs and epistemic pluralism of different research communities’.
Latin America offers an exemplar: a strong regional Portuguese and Spanish-
publishing research ecosystem supported by the community-owned SciELO
database and associated publishing infrastructures. There are a growing
number of ‘diamond’ Open Access publishing platforms and experiments, and
much policy interest in sustainable Open Science. It is an idealistic vision of a
more equitable research world in which, as Arturo Escobar puts it, ‘many worlds
might fit’ (Escobar 2020).

Conclusion: what comes after the citation economy?

Sixty years after Garfield launched his first citation index, and more than
seventy since Maxwell founded Pergamon, academic journal publishing has
been transformed into a profitable global industry. Commercially intertwined,
the indexes and the publishers have together built a citation economy. Today,
scholarly reputation and status is measured by journal rankings, ‘impact factors’
and ‘h-indexes’. The reach of these citation indexes and their data has been
amplified by digitisation, computing power and financial investment. Citation
metrics reinforce existing academic ‘credibility economies’, built around Euro-
American publishing networks and commercial interests. Maxwell and Garfield
have a lot to answer for.

This working paper has explored how non-Anglophone and regional journals
are rendered invisible by exclusion from these indexes, reinforcing the
stratification of academic geographies and undermining long established
regional knowledge ecosystems. Across the majority non-Anglophone world,
journals excluded from Scopus and WoS face constant challenges to their
legitimacy and reputation. The pressures on scholars at the margins have led
to academic acceleration and research productivism. This in turn has provoked
media concern about scientific fraud and an integrity-technology ‘arms race’,

21
rather than questions about the sustainability of a commercially-mediated
research economy.

Is there a way out of this recursive growth loop? Diamond Open Access
advocates, funders and researchers in Europe are beginning to envision a more
equitable research system built around community-owned publishing
infrastructures and standards. If this is to reach beyond well-resourced
European universities, governments across the world will need to adequately
fund national and regional research ecosystems. The first step on this journey
is helping scholars and universities to divest from the citation economy.

22
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