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.

The big business of commercial academic publishing

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 tech giants such as Microsoft and Google.

This expansion has brought signs of enshittification. The rise of large open-access and predatory journals prioritise profit over scholarly integrity. This has led to a surge in low-quality publications. Many of these are disguised as contributions to “special issues”.

These trends mirror the degradation seen in online platforms, where user value is sacrificed for financial gain. The parallels prompted us to investigate the forces reshaping scholarly communication.

Research as a commercial commodity

Since the 1980s, academic publishing has become increasingly commodified. It is now shaped by profitability, competition and performance metrics. Universities have adopted market-based management practices and rely more and more on performance metrics to assess their staff.

Science is bought and sold, and is increasingly shaped by corporate funding and managerial logic. Scholars have described this shift – exemplified by commercial academic publishing – as “academic capitalism”. It influences what research gets done, how it is evaluated and how careers progress.

The open access movement was originally meant to make knowledge more widely available. However, major publishers including Wiley, Elsevier and Springer Nature saw it as a way to push their production costs onto authors – and earn extra money.

Publishers introduced article processing charges, expanded their services, and launched new titles to capture market share. When the highly prestigious journal Nature announced its open access option in 2021, it came with a per-article fee for authors of up to €9,500 (roughly A$17,000).

The shift to “article processing charges” raised concerns about declining research quality and integrity. At the other end of the spectrum, we find predatory journals that mimic legitimate open access outlets. But they charge fees without offering peer review or editorial oversight.

These exploitative platforms publish low-quality research and often use misleading names to appear credible. With an estimated 15,000 such journals in operation, predatory publishing has become a major industry and is contributing to the enshittification of academic publishing.

These trends intensify (and are intensified by) the long-standing “publish or perish” culture in academia.

Academic enshittification

Based on these trends, we identified a five-stage downward spiral in the enshittification of academic publishing.

1. The commodification of research shifts value from intellectual merit to marketability

2. The proliferation of pay-to-publish journals spreads across and expands both elite and predatory outlets

3. A decline in quality and integrity follows as profit-driven models compromise peer review and oversight

4. The sheer volume of publications makes it difficult to identify authoritative work. Fraudulent journals spread hoax papers and pirated content

5. Enshittification follows. The scholarly system is overwhelmed by quantity, distorted by profit motives, and is stripped of its purpose of advancing knowledge.

Reclaiming academic publishing as a public good

Our research is a warning about enshittification. It is a systemic issue that threatens the value and development of academic publishing. Academia has become increasingly guided by metrics. As a result, research quality is judged more by where it is published than by its intrinsic worth.

But why are users (and academics) not simply leaving their “enshittified” experience behind? The answer is the same across various online platforms: a lack of credible alternatives makes it hard to leave, even as quality declines.

Countering this trend demands interventions and the creation of alternatives. These include a reassessment of evaluation metrics, a reduced reliance on commercial publishers, and greater global equity in research.

Some promising alternatives already exist. Cooperative publishing models, institutional repositories and policy initiatives such as the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment all advocate for broader and more meaningful assessments of scholarly impact.

Reclaiming academic publishing as a public good will require a return to not-for-profit models and sustainable open-access systems. Quality, accessibility and integrity need to be put ahead of profit.

Change is needed to help protect the core purpose of academic research: to advance knowledge in the public interest.