Early career researchers (ECRs) are arguably one of the most vulnerable groups in the academic system (Laudel & Gläser, 2008). Due to job insecurity, ECRs must jump between temporary positions while facing heightened pressure to produce in order to secure their future careers. An important challenge facing ECRs is thus to resist, improve upon, the prevailing ‘publish-or-perish’ culture that has symbiotically developed alongside contemporary institutional performance expectations.

The academic community is increasingly cognisant of a major ethical issue with the current academic publishing system: the disparity between who pays and who profits. Certain publishers exploit the current publish-or-perish culture to achieve enormous revenues and profit margins by offering authors the opportunity to publish in high-impact-factor journals for an unreasonably high cost. Although technological advancements in the digital era of publishing have reduced the actual cost of publishing, publication fees charged to authors have only escalated (Khoo, 2019). By charging authors fees of several thousands of dollars, and by charging libraries huge subscription fees, these publishers have generated billions in revenue (Aspesi et al., 2019) with the net income for stakeholders totalling in the millions (i.e. $17 USD Millions in 2023 for Wiley,1 $1634 USD Millions in 2022 for Reed Elsevier2). Despite these profits coming from publicly-funded research and the donated time of academic peer reviewers and editors (Aczel et al., 2021), the wealth is rarely recirculated back into the academic community (Racimo et al., 2022). In some cases, the quality of the scientific peer-review process is even compromised in favour of publishing large quantities of papers (Bohannon, 2013). These issues have created an unethical system (Racimo et al., 2022) that harms the fields of Ecology and Evolution.

Given their vulnerability, ECRs are disproportionately affected by these negative consequences. When publishing profits are not recirculated back into the academic community (i.e. through academic/learned society affiliations), the provisioning of crucial opportunities for ECRs is reduced, which impedes professional growth and development. The facilitation of scientific conferences (e.g. the annual meeting of the British Ecological Society (BES); New Phytologist next-generation scientists) and other opportunities that are instrumental to fostering burgeoning careers (e.g. the Strategies for Ecology Education Diversity and Sustainability program within the Ecological Society of America) depend on the recirculation of publishing profits, as does the funding of many awards, travel allowances, and research grants (e.g. the Early Career Researcher Award offered by Ecology Letters; the Tansley Medal offered by New Phytologist; BES small research grants, aimed at ECRs; Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research by the American Philosophical Society).

Furthermore, publishing charges take up a larger proportion of ECRs' limited research budgets (Williams et al., 2023), reducing the amount of funding ECRs have to actually carry out research. In this viewpoint, we, the authors – a group of ECRs of different age and gender who have worked at western institutions in the fields of ecology and evolution – present our collective views on the current publishing landscape and its effects on ECRs. We propose adaptive and transformative actions that can be implemented by and for ECRs to work towards a more ethical publishing system.

Suggestions have been made on how to reorient the publishing system, which principally involve avoiding interactions with unethically profitable journals. The majority of these actions focus on changing the publishing practices of individual scientists as such recommending scientists to only publish in ethical journals or refuse to review for unethically profitable journals (Racimo et al., 2022). While these individual-level practices can be quick to implement, they can be ineffective at providing long-term, profound change if completed in isolation since they do not tackle the root causes of the problem (Abson et al., 2017; Meadows, 1997). Actions that do target the systemic causes of the problem (e.g. shifting journals to more ethical business models or altering the peer-review process) require the collective action of multiple individuals in positions of influence. Notable recent examples of collective actions highlight a growing demand for systemic change. For instance, the entire editorial board of the high-profile journal Neuroimage resigned in opposition to the journal's high publication charges, referring to them as ‘unethical and unsustainable’ (Sanderson, 2023). Additionally, at the Journal of Biogeography, 85% of the associate editors went on strike against a range of Wiley editorial policy issues changes including inequity in the open access publication models, over-inflated growth targets and an increasing emphasis on transferring rejected manuscripts to ‘cascade’ journals (Williams et al., 2023). The strikers did not attain their desired outcomes from Wiley, thereby resulting in the resignation of the majority of associate editors.

In our social climate of increasing environmental and sociopolitical awareness, many ECRs feel a sense of responsibility to contribute to positive, systemic change in the publishing system. However, these aforementioned actions contain hidden costs for ECRs; the highly competitive job market presents a systemic barrier that prevents ECRs from taking actions to change the publishing system. The publishing choices of ECRs are highly influenced by the pressure to publish as frequently as possible and in high-impact journals, since this remains the prevailing measure of academic excellence that determines career advancement (McKiernan et al., 2019) despite extensive literature describing its inefficacy (DORA, 2012; Schmidt et al., 2021). This is especially true in ecology; roughly half of recent Assistant Professor hires at North American Doctoral Universities (Doctoral research universities with very high research activity) in ecology had published in Science, Nature, or PNAS at the time of hiring (Fox, 2020). Although some of the highest-impact journals in ecology and evolution are society owned, many of them are not. Thus, avoiding publishing in such journals can impact the career development of researchers, which renders the cost of choosing ethical publishing options disproportionately larger for ECRs and has been shown to cause serious repercussions for their mental and physical health (University and College Union, 2019). Therefore, for ECRs, taking action to oppose the unethical publishing system is associated with increased risk and sacrifice for those wishing to pursue an academic career, creating internal moral conflict.

CONCLUSION

The academic publishing system is in crisis, and systemic change is needed to make it more fair and equitable. While there is widespread motivation and desire to make large-scale publishing changes across the academic system, the task feels daunting. To address this, we suggest a set of actions to promote change that can be implemented by researchers across varying aspects of their academic lives – as readers, authors, reviewers, editors, evaluation committee members and colleagues. While many of the actions we propose are lower risk and can be implemented by ECRs, these actions must be complemented by higher risk ones undertaken by established researchers. While the main goal of these actions is to improve the publishing system in ecology and evolution, they will also address other inequalities, including the accessibility of research in general, and the evaluation of researchers for employment and promotion. Researchers in ecology and evolution could learn from fairer practices in other fields, such as the common use of alphabetical authorship order in mathematics and economics (Waltman, 2012), and the propensity to use preprint servers for studies in physics. Here, we focus on researchers as the primary engine of change, yet governments arguably have a part to play to ensure public funding is not lost to the large profit margins of private publishing houses. We hope that through taking these suggested actions, and with the support of established researchers, ECRs will be instrumental in advancing changes that create a more ethical publishing system. As a last note, acknowledging the biases that may arise from our collective experience in the field of ecology and evolution, we embrace the opportunity for feedback and open discussions on this topic, especially from those whose backgrounds differ from those of the authors.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Conceptualisation: AR, JB, SDA, AJH, NM, BFO, CPC, ERB, MS, AS, DV. Supervision: AR, JB, SDA, AJH, NM, BFO, CPC, ERB, MS, AS, DV. Writing – original draft: AR, JB, SDA, AJH, NM, BFO, CPC, ERB, MS, AS, DV. Writing – review & editing: AR, JB, SDA, AJH, NM, BFO, CPC, ERB, MS, AS, DV.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

The authors have no competing interest to declare.