The Political Economy of Scientific Publishing
How the infrastructure of research publishing was built, and what follows from it
The infrastructure through which knowledge is produced, evaluated, and distributed was built by particular people, with particular interests, at a particular historical moment. It did not arrive fully formed, and it was not designed by the researchers who now work inside it.
This project traces that history. Scientific publishing in its current form is roughly seventy years old, and the shifts that produced it are documented: journals moved from a service run by learned societies to a high-margin commercial product, citation counting moved from a finding aid to an instrument of governance over careers and funding, and a fragmented market consolidated into a handful of firms selling bundled subscriptions back to the institutions that produced the research.
What we are looking at
Commercialization. Robert Maxwell and Pergamon Press, from the 1940s to 1991, and the transformation of the journal from a society service into a business with margins to defend.
Metrification. Eugene Garfield, the Science Citation Index, and the Journal Impact Factor. A tool built to help researchers find each other’s work became a mechanism for governing their careers.
Consolidation and lock-in. The period from 1991 to the present: the major publishers, the bundled subscription, and how the current arrangement sustains itself.
Fragmentation. How the proliferation of journals reinforced disciplinary silos and made interdisciplinary orientation harder.
Alternatives. Open access, preprint culture, and community-led publishing, read against the history rather than in isolation from it.
Status
Early research and source collection, beginning March 2026. Current work is assembling an annotated bibliography and establishing which threads are tractable. Planned near-term output is a working paper with that bibliography attached.
Relation to other JOPRO work
The publishing system is the institutional infrastructure sitting behind several questions we already work on.
- FrontierMap treats orientation as a research problem. The publishing system is much of what makes orientation hard in the first place.
- Field Guide to the Futures Ecosystem maps an intellectual landscape that publishers helped shape. Pergamon published Futures, the Club of Rome reports, and World Development; which fields got journals was partly a commercial decision.
- Steelmanning the Problem Space has a demonstration case here. Scholarly publishing is a domain where genuine advantages and extractive dynamics coexist, which is exactly the situation that rewards defining the problem space before arguing about it.
Get involved
We are accepting proposals for The Political Economy of Scientific Publishing and Knowledge Generation, a fall 2026 research position on this work.