DEMARCATING LEGITIMATE and PREDATORY SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING: the INFLUENCE of STATUS on INSTITUTIONAL LOGIC CONFLICTS1 Kyle Siler
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1 DEMARCATING LEGITIMATE AND PREDATORY SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING: THE INFLUENCE OF STATUS ON INSTITUTIONAL LOGIC CONFLICTS1 Kyle Siler Innovation Studies Group, Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development Utrecht University k.s.siler [at] uu.nl October 1, 2018 Preliminary Draft: Comments Welcome! 1 Thanks to Koen Frenken, Vincent Larivière, Antony Puddephatt, Cassidy Sugimoto and the VICI group on Breakthrough Innovations at Utrecht University for helpful feedback on previous versions of this manuscript. 2 ABSTRACT: The emergence of online academic publishing has altered incentives and opportunities for scientific stakeholders and publishers. These changes have yielded a variety of new economic and scientific niches, including journals with questionable peer review systems and business models. ‘Blacklists’ of ‘predatory’ publishers have emerged to identify and stigmatize illegitimate scientific publishers and journals. Demarcating boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate science is subjective and contested. In institutionally complex environments, status influences relationships between different institutional logics. High institutional status benefits publishers by reducing conflicts between – if not aligning – scientific and economic logics, which are more likely to conflict and create illegitimacy concerns in downmarket niches. Status and legitimacy underpin the social acceptability of profit-seeking in scientific publishing, rendering low-status publishers vulnerable to being perceived and stigmatized as ‘predatory.’ 3 Introduction Science is comprised of complex inter-professional relationships involving universities, industry, business, politics and other public institutions (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000). Stakeholders compete for professional turfs and jurisdictional control over scientific institutions (Abbott, 1988). Diverse stakeholders and their professions possess different interests, priorities and institutional logics. Consequently, science and its institutions possess significant institutional complexity. Greenwood et al. (2011) defined institutional complexity as when organizations confront incompatible prescriptions from multiple institutional logics. Scientists and their institutions must balance scientific and economic logics, which often prescribe different – sometimes conflicting – values and behaviors. In particular, scientific institutions balance values of the pursuit of knowledge for public good, versus the exploitation of proprietary knowledge for economic rewards (Thornton and Ocasio, 1999; Popp Berman, 2012). Differing institutional logics can interact in a variety of manners, along the continuum between conflict and complementarity. Individuals and institutions strategically frame and combine institutional logics from various domains to create value, pursue goals and establish viable niches in competitive fields (Douglas, 1986; Binder, 2007). Publication in scientific journals institutionalizes and disseminates new research and knowledge, underpinning the professional and intellectual reward structures of science. As the Internet has supplanted the printed page as the primary means of disseminating knowledge, scientific publishing incentives have changed for researchers and gatekeepers. Online publishing reduces barriers to entry in publishing by largely obviating the need for printing presses or complex 4 logistical resources for distributing print journals. Digitization renders information as a non- rivalrous good, as opposed to a rivalrous possession in a printed book or journal. Consequently, scientific journal paywalls are becoming anachronistic and increasingly difficult to enforce. As a result, even large ‘legacy’ publishers who built their empires on subscription-based print journals are pursuing Open Access (OA) business models. This shift is partly out of necessity in an increasingly digital world2, and also because OA articles published via Article Processing Charges (APCs) have potential to be even more profitable than via traditional subscription-based business models (Shulenberger, 2016; Matthews, 2017). In online scientific publishing, the combination of low barriers to entry and general newness of the OA scientific publishing market has created opportunities and niches for disreputable ‘predatory’ publishers. Since APC-based OA publishing involves remunerating publishers based on how many articles they publish, this can create perverse incentives to accept as many articles as possible to maximize revenue. In turn, some unscrupulous scientific publishers and journals – often labeled as ‘predatory’ – operate in such a manner, eschewing legitimate peer review or other types of quality control. Jeffrey Beall – a now-retired University of Colorado- Denver librarian who maintained a prominent and controversial list of ‘predatory’ publishers – defined predatory publishing as “... [publishers] that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit” (Beall, 2012). Similarly, Clark 2 The controversial website Sci-Hub provides access – mostly pirated – to almost the entire corpus of published science. Sci-Hub is widely used; 28 million article download requests were served between September 2015 and February 2016 (Bohannon, 2016). Publishers acknowledge that Sci-Hub significantly erodes their negotiating leverage with traditional subscription-based business models, as scientists and scientific institutions are less afraid of losing access to journal subscriptions (Pollock, 2018a; Schonfeld, 2018). Open Access scientific publishing is also burgeoning beyond extralegal sources. Piwowar et al. (2018) estimated that 28% of the entire published corpus of scholarly literature is legally available in some Open Access format, including 45% of articles published in the most recently analyzed year (2015). 5 and Smith (2015) characterized predatory journals as “taking large fees without providing robust editorial or publishing services.” Implicit in these definitions is the notion that in some markets, non-economic ideals and norms should temper – if not supersede – profit-seeking behaviors (Zelizer, 1995; Fourcade and Healy, 2007). This is especially true in science, where norms of communalism (common ownership of intellectual property) and disinterestedness (scientists should act for the collective good of science, as opposed to personal gain) are prevailing social norms (Merton, 1973). Assigning monetary values to goods with special societal significance – such as science and knowledge – is difficult, subjective and contested (Fourcade, 2011). Yet, scientific publishing is a multi-billion dollar industry involving intense competition for scientific eminence and economic rents. In turn, there are often tensions between economic and scientific logics in academia. The APC-based model of scientific publishing makes these tensions especially apparent. The recent proliferation of online journals has created new challenges with identifying legitimate science in the age of digital knowledge. This a contemporary incarnation of familiar professional and intellectual challenges in science. Demarcating science from non-science (Gieryn, 1983) and professional knowledge turfs (Abbott, 1988) have long been contested by scientific stakeholders. Evaluating scientific quality and legitimacy is also contentious. Scientific publishing is comprised of a vast array of upmarket and downmarket niches, evaluated through a heterarchy of criteria and priorities from different stakeholders (Stark, 2009; Lamont, 2009). As large for-profit scientific publishers consolidate market power (Larivière et al., 2015), generating anomalously high industry profit margins, this raises questions of how profit-seeking motives of publishers can co-exist with the communal, public good ethos of science. 6 This article examines the problem of ‘predatory’ publishing to reveal how professional and economic legitimacy are established in science. The digitization of knowledge has altered business models and publishing incentives, creating new conflicting and complementary relationships between economic and scientific institutional logics. When online journals derive revenue from publishing fees, as opposed to annual subscriptions, this renders journal rejection rates and price levels as strategic choices with economic, scientific and moral implications. This article analyzes how scientific legitimacy – and profitability – are defined and established in markets with conflicting scientific and economic institutional logics. A corollary of the establishment of legitimacy in scientific publishing is how rent and profit-seeking behaviors are perceived in a quasi-sacred field like science. Scientists, institutional entrepreneurs and publishers strategically establish and publicly frame professional niches, attempting to justify legitimate claims to scientific knowledge and rewards, whether intellectual and/or economic. Status is proffered as a central factor that influences perceptions of the legitimacy of both science and publishing business models in academic journals. By reducing conflicts between – if not aligning – ordinarily conflicting economic and scientific institutional logics, this inures profit-seeking behaviors of upmarket journals and publishers from charges of predation. More broadly, scientific publishing offers a context to analyze valuations of professional and economic quality in uncertain, contentious, highly-competitive markets. The Emerging Problem of Illegitimate