{"id":40552,"date":"2025-09-12T07:15:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=40552"},"modified":"2025-09-16T09:15:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T16:15:13","slug":"publish-or-perish-evolutionary-pressures-shape-scientific-publishing-for-better-and-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/publish-or-perish-evolutionary-pressures-shape-scientific-publishing-for-better-and-worse\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Publish or perish\u2019 evolutionary pressures shape scientific publishing, for better and worse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thomas Morgan<\/a>, Arizona State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While developing his theory of natural selection, Charles Darwin was horrified by a group of wasps<\/a> that lay their eggs within the bodies of caterpillars, with the larvae eating their hosts alive from the inside-out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Darwin didn\u2019t judge the wasps. Instead, he was troubled by what they revealed about evolution. They showed natural selection to be an amoral process. Any behavior that enhances fitness, nice or nasty, would spread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Selection isn\u2019t limited to DNA. All systems of inheritance, variation and competition inexorably lead to selection. This includes culture<\/a>, and I\u2019m one of a team of researchers<\/a> at Arizona State University\u2019s Institute of Human Origins<\/a> who use a cultural evolutionary approach to understand human bodies, behavior and society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Culture shapes everything people do, not least scientific practice<\/a> \u2013 how scientists decide what questions to ask and how to answer them. Good scientific practices lead to public benefits, while poor scientific practices waste time and money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scientists vary. They might be meticulous measurement-takers or big-picture visionaries; cautious conservatives or iconoclastic radicals; soft-spoken introverts or ambitious status-seekers. These practices are passed on to the next generation through mentorship<\/a>: All scientific careers start with years of one-on-one training, where an experienced scientist passes on their approach to their students. A successful scientist can train dozens of graduate students; meanwhile, poor strategies lead to an early career exit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The currency of scientific success<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When scientists apply for jobs or funding, the primary way they compete is through their research papers: reports they write describing their work that are peer-reviewed<\/a> and published in scholarly journals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the sources of selection on scientists is how these papers are evaluated. Experts can provide detailed assessments, but many hiring or promotion committees use blunter metrics. These include the total number of papers a scientist publishes, how many times their papers are cited \u2013 that is, referred to in other work \u2013 and their \u201ch-index<\/a>\u201d: a statistic that blends paper and citation counts into a single number. Journals are rated too, with \u201cimpact factors<\/a>\u201d and \u201cjournal ranks<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All these metrics can incentivize some rather odd outcomes. For instance, citing your own past papers in each new one that you write can inflate your h-index<\/a>. Some unscrupulous researchers have taken this to the next level, forming \u201ccitation cartels<\/a>\u201d where the members agree to cite one another\u2019s work as much as possible, no matter the quality or relevance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"chart
Even as the number of Ph.D. degrees granted has declined, the number of research papers published has drastically increased. Mark Hanson, Pablo G\u00f3mez Barreiro, Paolo Crosetto, Dan Brockington<\/a>, CC BY<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Recently there have been moves away from these simple-yet-flawed metrics. But without better alternatives, institutions simply put more emphasis on the raw number of publications, selecting for scientists to publish as much as they can, as fast as they can. Perhaps you\u2019ve heard of the slogan \u201cpublish or perish,\u201d or maybe even played the board game<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The publishing landscape<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Scientists aren\u2019t the only organisms in the scientific ecosystem. There are also publishers, the owners of the journals. Publishers live in an often-uneasy symbiosis with scientists, publishing their work<\/a>, but also needing to make money off the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The traditional model was for journals to charge readers \u2013 or, more often, university libraries<\/a> \u2013 subscription fees. This setup selects for journals to carefully vet their contents, as otherwise they will lose readers. Indeed, prominent journals reject the vast majority<\/a> of submissions they receive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The downside is that subscription fees block access for readers who can\u2019t afford them. If you\u2019ve ever tried to read an academic paper but been presented with a paywall, this is why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Open access adaptation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Open Access<\/a> movement aims to make journal articles free for everyone to read and has led to many journals removing reader paywalls. But journals still need money, so most Open Access journals have swapped subscription fees for publication fees, paid by scientists on a per-paper basis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"journals
The academic publishing landscape is shifting, as who ultimately pays for journals changes. luoman\/iStock via Getty Images Plus<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This model allows anyone to read papers for free, but, as I have argued<\/a>, it has also changed the selection pressures on journals, leading to some perverse outcomes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are two ways for journals to succeed in this new landscape. For prestigious journals, they can leverage their reputation to charge large publication fees, sometimes over US$10,000 per paper<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For low-prestige journals, no one would pay such large fees. They must instead focus on quantity over quality. Like scientists, they must \u201cpublish or perish,\u201d and publishers are already adapting<\/a> to this new pressure \u2013 publishing more papers, opening new journals, increasing acceptance rates and expediting peer review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These changes created a new niche for scientists too, who are coevolving with the journals. An underhanded minority are adapting to laxer journal policies by using artificial intelligence to accelerate their research pipeline. The resulting papers are very low quality<\/a> and so risk the authors\u2019 reputations. However, until they are exposed, this strategy boosts research output and so brings rewards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alternatives<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Publication fees aren\u2019t the only model out there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Diamond Open Access<\/a> journals don\u2019t charge fees at all and instead rely on donations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some scientists share what are called preprints<\/a>, skipping peer review and putting their papers online for everyone to read for free. They may also publish them later in a conventional journal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"sepia
Frontispiece of volume 1 from 1665 of the journal Philosophical Transactions \u2013 still published today by the Royal Society. Royal Society<\/a>, CC BY<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Academic society journals<\/a>, which date back to the 17th century, often tie free publication to society membership and rely on interpersonal relationships and reputations to incentivize high-quality work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PCI<\/a>\u2019s or \u201cpeer community in\u2019s\u201d are groups of volunteer scientists aiming to wrest peer review away from journals entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of these are interesting options, and all would change the selective forces acting on both scientists and publishers. It makes sense to think about the evolutionary changes they could produce on the scientific landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why scientific evolution matters<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Darwin\u2019s parasitic wasps reveal two truths: Selection is both unavoidable and amoral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever the domain, selection can lead to outcomes you might not like. For science, these might include the emergence of paper mills<\/a>, mass retractions<\/a>, citation cartels, fraud, excessive fees or bizarre AI-written papers<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But science can also do tremendous good: It produced modern medicine, discovered electricity and computing, and put people on the Moon. Like Darwin with his wasps, those of us who care about the scientific enterprise don\u2019t need to limit ourselves to asking why some people do bad things. Instead, we need to ask why bad acts are selected in the first place and design better systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t blame the player, redesign the game. If we can put better rules in place, evolution will do the rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Morgan<\/a>, Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Morgan, Arizona State University While developing his theory of natural selection, Charles Darwin was horrified by a group of wasps that lay their eggs within the bodies of caterpillars, with the larvae eating their hosts alive from the inside-out. Darwin didn\u2019t judge the wasps. Instead, he was troubled by what they revealed about evolution. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":40554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293,37,5,292,276,10,25,3410],"tags":[3461,10740,16880,16878,5837,885,891,886,860,4251,16877,16881,16883,16879,16882],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40552"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40552"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40614,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40552\/revisions\/40614"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}