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Academics and the Field of Academic Publishing: Challenges and Approaches

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Abstract

The article aims to identify the academic publishing environment of academics by analysing the existing literature in the studies related to academic publishing. A socioeconomic and political approach to academic publishing is adopted in this article to identify the multi-dimensions of the academic publishing. The analysis reveals that challenges as well as the perspective of publishing industry dominate the existing literature in academic publishing. Though, the existing studies address the business and economic perspective of academic publishing, the role of academic publishing within the field of higher education needs to be examined and end explored to understand the dynamics of the relationship, and inter-dependency between academics and the field of academic publishing. In the process of achieving the aim of understanding academic publishing, this article offers a foundation for establishing the relevance of adopting Bourdieu’s concepts for exploring the publishing practices of academics.

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Notes

  1. In this article, the term ‘field’ is used in the Bourdieusian sense rather than referring to ‘discipline’.

  2. The term ‘field’ is used to refer to the publishing industry and used interchangeably with (publishing) ‘industry’.

  3. Even though the OA business model is predominantly followed in STEM disciplines, any practice in STEM subjects over the course of time have been implemented in HASS disciplines. Therefore, the issues of OA and publishing challenges are discussed to provide a better understanding of the publishing field and publisher practices.

  4. It should be noted that most of the discussions around the quality of content and the peer review process are based on journal publications. The review for books, in most instances, happens during the book proposal phase.

  5. An arithmetic calculation of mean value of citation count measured as central tendency [72, 116] is used for the bibliometric analysis. Bibliometric analysis also includes other citation factors such journal impact factor, where the quality of the journal is measured by calculating the frequency with which the article of a journal is cited in others’ work [47]. Bornmann et al. [13] argue that, as there are various factors that influence bibliometric factors, various statistical tools such as Box plots or Lorenz curves should be used to calculate bibliometrics.

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Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges and thank Dr. Emsie Arnoldi, Dr. Catherine Gomez and Dr. Rober Crawford of School of Media and Communication, RMIT University for their suggestions and feedback that helped her in assimilating her ideas.

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    Padmapriya Padmalochanan

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This article partly contributes toward the doctoral thesis titled “Publishing Practice(s) of Academics from Group of Eight Universities in Australia” submitted to RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

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Padmalochanan, P. Academics and the Field of Academic Publishing: Challenges and Approaches. Pub Res Q 35, 87–107 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-018-09628-2

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