Qualitative Publishing in a Neoliberal Universe and University

Abstract

Rapid transformation in the ecosystems of academic publication can be attributed not only to changing demands of the neoliberal university but also to factors in the broader economic, cultural, and technological world. The centralization of information flow has led to consolidation of academic publishing into fewer multinational media corporations who provide information to scholars in aggregated and disaggregated forms. Resistance by academics has focused on the availability of open access scholarship, but they have not solved how to make this system financially sustainable. This article reports on trends in this ever-more-unequal ecosystem, the challenges they raise, and options for scholars to solve them.

Double Blow to Scientific Research and Academic Freedom in Latinoamerica: Debt, Then Flames

“…Academic literature also became a business, charging fees to publish, raising prices, multiplying low quality journals and e-journals with correspondingly less qualified peer review or even no peer review at all. Publishers’ resistance materialized in initiatives such as Open Access and Creative Commons (Allen, 2017). The hidden colonial, classist and androcentric culture merged with meritocracy, the arithmetic value of academic work, rivalries between campuses and hierarchies, resulting in the cracking and polarizing of university life (Galcerán, 2010).…”

How Twitter is changing the meaning of scholarly impact and engagement: Implications for qualitative social work research

“…number of downloads) carries amplified risks for certain scholars, including qualitative researchers. For instance, a qualitative researcher may have a lower altmetric score because they tend to have smaller budgets, work in smaller teams (sometimes one researcher), and have fewer social media "followers" compared to large, multi-site, often quantitative studies that may include public relations personnel responsible for maintaining a social media presence (Allen, 2016).…”

Social Media Marketing of Qualitative Research: Blurring Commerce and Community

“…Although publishers were hiring social media marketers and perfecting their Twitter campaigns, the broader world of scholarly communication was going through radical changes (Allen, 2017). Two stand out in further muddying the community/commerce distinctions of publisher relationships with academics: The decline of journal articles and scholarly books as the main products of scholarly work and the shrinkage of the role of scholarly gatekeepers (Allen, 2018).…”

“…The impetus for developing today's robust qualitative community largely came from publishers who noted growing interest in these methods across the various disciplines they published. Thus, key publications that form the foundation of the knowledge base of qualitative inquiry such as the Handbook of Qualitative Research and this journal were launched by publisher invitation and not by scholarly initiative (Allen, 2017(Allen, , 2015. John Creswell (2009) points to Sage's active publications program as a key factor in the growth of mixed-methods research.…”