Harness your rage against the academic publishing machine

Academic publishing has gone rogue and threatens to devour academia. David Gauntlett proposes a way to fight back.

Academic publishing was always a hotchpotch. You had university presses that were non-commercial and dedicated to publishing the finest scholarly books. There were commercial publishers publishing books that were more accessible, successful, or student-friendly. And then you had the journals, often published by profit-making companies but disguised as a kind of service to academics.

This all worked fine in a time when there were not too many academic authors, and when things were published on the basis of being actually, you know, good.