Moving on in uncertain times: a goodbye

This is the current Editorial Team’s last issue of Critical Public Health, following the mass resignation of the Editorial Board. We move on in uncertain times for scholarly journals. The current system is becoming financially unsustainable, as university libraries grapple with rising costs of article processing charges (APCs) as well as subscriptions. It is academically unsustainable, as researchers struggle to keep abreast of the massive overproduction of research papers and to meet the associated escalating demands on their time as peer reviewers. That system is also contributing to hardening epistemic inequalities, as author-pays publishing models further exclude authors from the global south (Smith et al., 2021) and entrench the status quo by crowding out critical discourse.

Profit maximisation by large commercial publishers may be a major driver of these problems (Larivière et al., 2015), but it is far from the only one. Adverse effects of good faith initiatives such as Plan S have also contributed, through incentives for publishers to use APCs to support funders’ requirements for open access, and then to ratchet up the volume of papers published and charges for publishing. Broader societal drivers of metrification have also driven hyperproduction, with temptations to measure the ‘quality’ of journals and authors by output volume and citations. Despite moves such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment to limit overreliance on single bibliometric indicators, there are tangled incentive structures that make it hard to resist both pressures to publish and pressures to publish in high-impact journals.

A number of radical interventions for new models of publishing have emerged to address this crisis. Many attempt to protect open access, but independent of the corporate sector. However, all face significant challenges. A primary issue is the costs of publishing, which have to be met somehow. To get research outputs not only into the public domain but also findable and credibly quality assured requires the labour of peer reviewers, editors, administrators, copy editors, type setters, librarians, abstracting services, and more.

Some of that labour might properly be considered part of academic citizenship. Certainly, if we expect others to peer review our work, we should expect to perform that service for others. Yet, with increasing numbers of academics in precarious positions, and rising demands for peer review, there is growing resistance to providing ‘free’ labour, particularly for profit-making journals. But beyond peer review itself, high-quality journals require the services of publishing professionals, who, quite rightly, expect to receive adequate remuneration for their labour.

While these additional roles can be taken on by volunteers, and frequently are, volunteer run collectives also have their limitations, and we have various examples of experimental journal ventures in which precarious and early career scholars were exploited (see Kalb, 2018), in addition to the self-exploitation that often occurs under the rubric of the ‘labour of love’. Conversely, if the labour of editing and preparing open access journals is undertaken solely by academics with the luxury of flexibility, capacity, and know-how, there are potentials for inequities to creep in, in the form of what questions are asked, how they are answered, and who decides.

A second set of challenges relates to establishing researchers’ trust in new outlets. In a mixed economy of journal publishing, bold new initiatives take time to build up content, impact factors and visibility.

Yet the time has come for members of the editorial board of this journal to take a risk of stepping into the unknown. As we argued in a previous editorial (Bell et al., 2021), it is possible in theory to juggle the tensions of maintaining a journal for critical scholarship within a commercial environment. For decades, Critical Public Health thrived – if at times uncomfortably – as both a home for debate and radical scholarship, curated on behalf of a wider community by the Editorial Board, and a (presumably) profitable commodity for its publisher. Indeed, it has been a unique space for innovative scholarship, and we are proud to have facilitated a forum for many cutting-edge perspectives and research fields that have now become mainstream in public health, and some truly exemplary papers.

However, the uneasy compromise became impossible to hold. Increasingly, we found ourselves unable to maintain the unique niche of the journal in the light of changes to the commercial publishing landscape and their impact on our ability to set the future strategic direction of the journal. The Critical Public Health Editorial Board included academics from across the world, from diverse disciplines and career stages, and political perspectives that range across dimensions of idealism and pragmatism. Predictably, Editorial Board discussions have tended to be a robust exchange of often very different views. Yet on the issue of our next steps, all but one of the 45 board members were in a rare state of agreement. If we wished to maintain our commitment to critique and honour the values and history of the journal, then we would need to resign as a Board to leave us free to take a risk on a new venture.

On behalf of that Board, its past members and editorial teams, and those of its predecessor, Radical Community Medicine, we thank all our authors, readers, and reviewers. We move on with deep sadness at saying goodbye to a successful journal that has earned the respect of authors, reviewers, and readers in the field. We have been privileged to have encountered innovative work at early stages and to have had a small part in bringing fresh perspectives to a wider audience. We have learned from the care and commitment of many of our reviewers in providing constructive and supportive feedback. We are immensely proud of the research and commentary we have published over the last 33 years.