Major Academic Press Calls for "Publish or Perish" Reform

"without urgent, sector-wide reform, the global academic publishing ecosystem is at risk of collapsing."

"We urge academic institutions to weaken the link between academic reward and recognition and journal article output, and to adopt more holistic approaches to evaluating academic performance and contribution,"

"We encourage publishers to develop new metrics for research outputs and to support new approaches to building a new culture and infrastructure for research."

Cambridge University Press warned that without urgent sector-wide reform the global academic publishing ecosystem faces collapse. The press urged academic institutions to weaken the link between academic reward and journal article output and to adopt holistic approaches to evaluating academic performance and contribution. Publishers were encouraged to develop new metrics for research outputs and to support new approaches to building culture and infrastructure for research. A survey of more than 3,000 respondents from 120 countries found only 32 percent believe the existing system is in a good position to meet future challenges and only 33 percent think reward systems are working well. Publication pressures have led to paper mills, research fraud, overloaded peer review, and generative AI has exacerbated those problems. The number of indexed articles increased by 897,000 between 2016 and a later period.

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