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THE 5 STAGES OF THE ‘ENSHITTIFICATION’ OF ACADEMIC PUBLISHING  
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Martina Linnenluecke and Carl Rhodes
January 5, 2026
The Conversation
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_ Enshittification isn’t confined to the online world. It’s now
visible in academic publishing. The same forces that hollow out
digital platforms are shaping how a lot of research is produced,
reviewed and published. _

A smiley face wearing a graduation cap, image: Rohit Tandon /
Unsplash

 

When writer Cory Doctorow introduced the term enshittification
[[link removed]] in 2023,
he captured a pattern many users had already noticed in their personal
lives.

The social media platforms, e-commerce sites and search engines they
were using had noticeably deteriorated in quality. Many had begun to
prioritise content from advertisers and other third parties. Profit
became the main goal.

Doctorow frames this decline as a death spiral: the online platforms
once offered value to their users, but slowly shifted their focus to
extracting value, with little regard for consequences.

But our recent research [[link removed]],
published in Organization, shows that enshittification
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isn’t just confined to the online world. In fact, it’s now visible
in academic publishing and occurs in five stages. The same forces that
hollow out digital platforms are shaping how a lot of research is
produced, reviewed and published.

The big business of commercial academic publishing

Academic publishing has grown substantially over recent years.

Between 2016 and 2022, the number of papers indexed in major databases
rose from 1.92 million to 2.82 million
[[link removed]]. The industry is estimated to
generate more than US$19 billion annually
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In this sense, academic publishing rivals the music and film
industries. Some publishers report profit margins
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comparable to tech giants such as Microsoft and Google.

This expansion has brought signs of enshittification. The rise of
large open-access and predatory journals prioritise profit over
scholarly integrity. This has led to a surge in low-quality
publications. Many of these are disguised as contributions to
“special issues” [[link removed]].

These trends mirror the degradation seen in online platforms, where
user value is sacrificed for financial gain. The parallels prompted us
to investigate the forces reshaping scholarly communication.

Research as a commercial commodity

Since the 1980s, academic publishing has become increasingly
commodified [[link removed]]. It is now
shaped by profitability, competition and performance metrics.
Universities have adopted market-based management practices and rely
more and more on performance metrics to assess their staff.

Science is bought and sold
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and is increasingly shaped by corporate funding and managerial logic.
Scholars have described this shift – exemplified by commercial
academic publishing [[link removed]] –
as “academic capitalism
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It influences what research gets done, how it is evaluated and how
careers progress.

The open access movement was originally meant to make knowledge more
widely available. However, major publishers including Wiley, Elsevier
and Springer Nature saw it as a way to push their production costs
onto authors [[link removed]] – and earn extra
money.

Publishers introduced article processing charges, expanded their
services, and launched new titles to capture market share. When the
highly prestigious journal Nature announced its open access option in
2021
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it came with a per-article fee for authors of up to €9,500 (roughly
A$17,000).

The shift to “article processing charges” raised concerns about
declining research quality and integrity. At the other end of the
spectrum, we find predatory journals that mimic legitimate open access
outlets. But they charge fees without offering peer review or
editorial oversight.

These exploitative platforms publish low-quality research and often
use misleading names to appear credible. With an estimated 15,000 such
journals [[link removed]] in operation,
predatory publishing has become a major industry and is contributing
to the enshittification of academic publishing.

These trends intensify (and are intensified by) the long-standing
“publish or perish
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culture in academia.

Academic enshittification

Based on these trends, we identified a five-stage downward spiral in
the enshittification of academic publishing.

* The commodification of research shifts value from intellectual
merit to marketability
* The proliferation of pay-to-publish journals spreads across and
expands both elite and predatory outlets
* A decline in quality and integrity follows as profit-driven models
compromise peer review and oversight
* The sheer volume of publications makes it difficult to identify
authoritative work. Fraudulent journals spread hoax papers and pirated
content
* Enshittification follows. The scholarly system is overwhelmed by
quantity, distorted by profit motives, and is stripped of its purpose
of advancing knowledge.

Reclaiming academic publishing as a public good

Our research is a warning about enshittification. It is a systemic
issue that threatens the value and development of academic publishing.
Academia has become increasingly guided by metrics. As a result,
research quality is judged more by where it is published than by its
intrinsic worth.

But why are users (and academics) not simply leaving their
“enshittified” experience behind? The answer is the same across
various online platforms: a lack of credible alternatives makes it
hard to leave, even as quality declines.

Countering this trend demands interventions and the creation of
alternatives. These include a reassessment of evaluation metrics, a
reduced reliance on commercial publishers, and greater global equity
in research.

Some promising alternatives already exist. Cooperative publishing
models, institutional repositories and policy initiatives such as the
Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment [[link removed]]
all advocate for broader and more meaningful assessments of scholarly
impact.

Reclaiming academic publishing as a public good will require a return
to not-for-profit models and sustainable open-access systems. Quality,
accessibility and integrity need to be put ahead of profit.

Change is needed to help protect the core purpose of academic
research: to advance knowledge in the public interest.[The
Conversation]

Martina Linnenluecke
[[link removed]],
Professor at UTS Business School; Centre for Climate Risk and
Resilience, _University of Technology Sydney_
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and Carl Rhodes
[[link removed]], Professor
of Business and Society, _University of Technology Sydney_
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This article is republished from The Conversation
[[link removed]] under a Creative Commons license. Read
the original article
[[link removed]].

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