The 5 stages of the ‘enshittification’ of academic publishing |
When writer Cory Doctorow introduced the term enshittification in 2023, he captured a pattern many users had already noticed in their personal lives.
The social media platforms, e-commerce sites and search engines they were using had noticeably deteriorated in quality. Many had begun to prioritise content from advertisers and other third parties. Profit became the main goal.
Doctorow frames this decline as a death spiral: the online platforms once offered value to their users, but slowly shifted their focus to extracting value, with little regard for consequences.
But our recent research, published in Organization, shows that enshittification isn’t just confined to the online world. In fact, it’s now visible in academic publishing and occurs in five stages. The same forces that hollow out digital platforms are shaping how a lot of research is produced, reviewed and published.
Academic publishing has grown substantially over recent years.
Between 2016 and 2022, the number of papers indexed in major databases rose from 1.92 million to 2.82 million. The industry is estimated to generate more than US$19 billion annually.
In this sense, academic publishing rivals the music and film industries. Some publishers report profit margins comparable to........