The Changed Publishing Culture of Science

This article addresses the question of whether the ‘freedom of science’ (or ‘academic freedom’) is affected by the various measures of evaluation and performance measurement that have been introduced into research and higher education. The assumption is that the political, economic and technical changes that have taken place over the last three quarters of a century have had profound effects on the communication of science in general and on scientific publishing in particular. The crucial developments are: overall growth of science, the change of science policy in response to it, especially with respect to the governance of universities; the commercialization of academic publishing companies and the concentration of the journal market; the digitization of academic publishing and the capture of the process of evaluation internal to science by the publishing companies via the production of performance indicators, as well as of communication on digital platforms. All of these developments are interrelated in specific ways and, as such, unfold their effects on the publishing process and specifically on the publishing behaviour of academics. Rather than concluding that academic freedom is curtailed by evaluations and the application of performance indicators, these have led to a fundamental change of the publishing behaviour of scholars, and more generally of the culture of communication in science.