Less is more: Academic publishing needs ‘radical change,’ Cambridge press report concludes 

An interesting article about the challenges facing the academic publishing enterprise.  There is, of course, nothing surprising in what it says, for anyone who makes a living by publishing.

As long as academics wear publication counts and citation metrics like badges of honor, universities parade “highly cited scholars” as their most prized assets, and profit-driven “non-profit” ranking agencies embed these statistics in their secret formulas underwriting what is essentially a zero-sum game, the arms race for numbers will continue to be a race to the bottom. The real winners in this game are the arms dealers: the publishers, the ranking agencies, and the businesses that help write papers and “manage” citations. The players themselves—the academics and the institutions that employ them—end up as victims of their own success.