The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Publishing (in Finance) – An Author’s view

Abstract

This note originated as part of the author’s regular research publishing activity. The author’s and colleagues’ experiences suggested broadening the usual examination of potential outlets. What we encountered was not “more of the same” from previous searches for outlets but very significant fundamental changes in the academic/scholarly publishing landscape. We first review the standard research process in the context of academic tenure and promotions. The we proceed to identify and enumerate potential publishing outlets, which we further classify into groups reflecting these critical differences meaningful for academic authors and their supervisors: nature of the outlet (for profit, not for profit; commercial, academic, and professional), open versus restricted access, peer-reviewing, and nature of the final article depository. What we consider the usual way to go about publishing shows many disruptions that do not benefit authors, such as major (commercial) publishers favoring a certain type of article and engaging in massive desk-rejection practices as well as less powerful publishers either closing down or imposing restrictions (words, reviewers), with serious unintended consequences. The traditional scholarly publishing model of requiring a given number of articles every x years may have become unsustainable, as it is extremely expensive and does not favor disinterested research. On the plus side, we find increasing publishing opportunities for authors, but these alternative opportunities might imply decisions that do not fit the traditional evaluation approach and might require innovative agreements between faculty and their academic supervisors.