The transformative relation between publishers and editors: academic autonomy at stake

Abstract

Academic edition features the persistent willpower of scholars to give part of their time to an endeavor that is frequently a thankless task and subject to intense pressures. Nurtured by the market shift to open access, the daily life of journals and editors revolves around the demands of authors and reviewers, editorial quality, the risks of predatory practices and financial sustainability. However, a major hinge divides academic edition in the commercial circuit from journals indexed in other publishing circuits. To explore this hinge, we first delve into the evaluation criteria applied by the Latin American indexing systems, showing that the academic quality is determined by the anchorage of the editorial team and the publishing institutions. Secondly, we offer an empirical examination of the editors, the publishers, and the structure of 1,971 journals, stressing the differences between diamond and commercial journals, observing editorial teams, publishing institutions, and the incidence of APC charges. Eventually, this paper revisits the dispute of classifications that is behind predatory publishing, showing to what extent it replicates the belief in the backwardness of the journals published outside Scopus and Web of Science, while commercial practices are increasingly affecting the legitimacy of the mainstream circuit.