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The Society for Research into Higher Education

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When papers become currency

by Carolina Guzmán Valenzuela

Over the last few months, I have found myself discussing academic publishing with young researchers in Germany and Chile. What struck me in both places was not excitement about ideas, journals or scholarly debates. It was anxiety.

At workshops on publishing strategies and scholarly journals (one at the HoFoNa Conference in Germany and another at the Institute of Education at the University of Chile) the conversations quickly moved away from writing itself and towards something far more pragmatic: survival.

Young researchers spoke about publishing in highly strategic terms. Which journals were ‘safe’? Which ones counted for postdoctoral applications and funding schemes? Which journals’ turnarounds were quick enough? Which journals offered the highest probability of acceptance?

Several participants openly discussed how they calculated publication decisions in relation to career survival. The question was often not where their work fitted best intellectually, but which journals were fast enough, prestigious enough and predictable enough to maximise their chances of securing a postdoctoral position, grant or future contract.

What I found quite revealing was how naturally many early-career academics now speak the language of optimisation. Quartiles, Article Processing Charges (APCs), turnaround times, indexing systems, impact factors and publication strategies are discussed with remarkable fluency. Many young researchers are being socialised into academia through the logic of strategic productivity before they have had the opportunity to develop a slower intellectual voice of their own.

And who can blame them?

Across many universities today, academic life has become increasingly precarious and accelerated. Temporary contracts, short-term postdoctoral positions, uncertain funding, metric-driven evaluations and intense competition have transformed publishing into something far more strategic than it was. In systems (such as Chile’s), where academic careers and funding schemes heavily depend on publications indexed in Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, papers increasingly function as academic currency.

Under these conditions, it is not surprising that publishers promising continuous publication, high-volume output and relatively predictable editorial processes have expanded rapidly. This is one reason why publishers such as MDPI and Frontiers have become so deeply embedded within contemporary academic life. Some of their journals are indexed in WoS and Scopus, which count towards grants and promotions and contribute directly to institutional rankings and evaluation systems. In other words, they are not operating outside the university system. They are increasingly part of how the system itself functions.

It is fair to say, though, that some established journals are reporting turnaround times that are not radically different from publishers such as Frontiers or MDPI. Elements of acceleration and compressed editorial timelines are also becoming increasingly visible across the wider publishing ecosystem, suggesting that these dynamics are no longer confined to specific publishers.

In any case, average turnaround statistics do not fully capture broader differences in selectivity, publication scale, editorial oversight and peer review intensity. During my years as Coordinating Editor of Higher Education, manuscripts frequently went through several rounds of major revision over many months. Reviewer disagreement, editorial discussion and substantial intellectual reshaping were often central parts of the process. The deeper question, then, may not simply be speed itself, but whether meaningful scholarly judgement, rigorous peer review and sustained intellectual critique can realistically be maintained under conditions of industrial-scale publication.

This becomes particularly important in a publishing ecosystem increasingly organised around scale. Large editorial boards, continuous publication models and relatively low desk-rejection rates create a parallel publishing universe in which the formal conventions of academic publishing are maintained, but where critique, filtering and editorial curation risk becoming increasingly compressed and uneven.

APCs have also reshaped inequalities within academic publishing. Publishing open access in prestigious journals often depends on fees that remain inaccessible for universities and researchers in Latin America, Africa and other underfunded academic systems unless institutions are able to absorb the costs.

At the same time, substantial APCs are no longer confined to traditionally prestigious journals. Many high-volume publishing models also involve significant publication fees, suggesting that what many early-career researchers are increasingly paying for is not simply open access, but speed, predictability and reduced temporal uncertainty within an academic system governed by short-term contracts, funding deadlines and metric-based evaluations. In short, they are purchasing life chances.

The irony is difficult to ignore. The same universities and funding systems that demand constant productivity often make meaningful participation in prestigious publishing circuits governed by international rankings, indexing systems and performance metrics.

Meanwhile, reviewers, the invisible infrastructure sustaining the entire system, are visibly exhausted. Every week, I receive multiple emails asking me to review manuscripts within ten or fourteen days. Some are oddly urgent in tone, politely aggressive, reminding reviewers about editorial targets and turnaround times. Many read as though they were generated from the same automated template. At this stage, I rarely even reply. I simply delete them. What concerns me is not only the pressure itself, but how normalised this publication culture has become.

Sometimes the system reaches extremes. In Chile, recent controversies surrounding publication incentives revealed academics producing absurd numbers of WoS indexed papers while receiving substantial productivity-linked salaries and bonuses. In some cases, this meant publishing well over one hundred papers in a single year. The issue here is not simply individual behaviour. The deeper question is structural: what kind of national research funding system rewards institutions according to publication output and, in turn, transfers these pressures directly onto academics?

Artificial intelligence is likely to intensify these dynamics even further. AI did not create the culture of academic hyperproduction, but it is accelerating it dramatically. Faster writing. Faster reviewing. Faster summarising. Faster publishing. More output everywhere.  And less time for, or even interest in, thought as a result.

None of this means that traditional academic publishing represented an egalitarian system. It has long been shaped by oligopolistic publishers, exclusionary gatekeeping and profound global inequalities. Open access has unquestionably expanded the circulation of knowledge and enabled greater visibility for scholars outside elite institutions. Some forms of academic closure deserved to be challenged. But something important may also be getting lost.

During those workshops in Germany and Chile, I observed that many young researchers seemed caught between two incompatible temporalities: the time required for meaningful scholarship and the accelerated pace demanded by contemporary academic careers. That tension, more than any individual journal or publisher, surely represents one of the defining conditions of academic life today.

Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela serves on the SRHE Governing Council. She is a Serra Húnter Fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) and Senior Research Fellow at the Universidad de Tarapacá (Chile). Her work focuses on higher education, epistemic justice, decolonial perspectives, and inequalities in global knowledge production, particularly in Latin America.


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The Tao of plagiarism: when chi achieves enlightenment without you

by a mildly surprised emeritus professor

Academics are taught many things over the years. How to write grant applications in a tone of sober optimism. How to disagree politely while eviscerating an argument. How to pretend that Reviewer 2’s comments are ‘helpful’. But we are rarely prepared for the moment when our own work achieves enlightenment and returns to the world under a different name.

It began, as these things often do, with Google Scholar. Browsing innocently, I discovered that a paper I had written many years ago, first author with two colleagues, had been reborn. Here it was miraculously renewed: Freeing the chi of change: The Higher Education Academy and enhancing teaching and learning in higher education. Same title. Same argument. Same metaphors. Different authors. Different journal. Different universe.

This was not mere influence. Nor was it scholarly dialogue. This was something more metaphysical. The article had apparently passed through the cycle of samsara, shedding its original authorship like an old skin, and had re-emerged – serene, confident, and wholly unburdened by attribution.

Opening the paper produced a strange sense of déjà vu. Paragraphs unfolded exactly as I remembered writing them. The argument progressed through familiar analytical levels. The meso level was, once again, mysteriously absent. And there it was: the metaphor of chi – blocked, stagnant, yearning to be freed – flowing unimpeded across two decades and several thousand miles.

One could not help but admire the fidelity. This was not slapdash copying. This was careful stewardship. A lightly paraphrased abstract here, a synonym substituted there. “Examines” had matured into “takes a look at”. “Work intensification” had achieved inner peace as “an increase in workload”. The original prose had been gently guided toward a simpler, more mindful state.

The production values added to the sense of cosmic theatre. Running headers attributed the article to someone else entirely, suggesting either deep enlightenment or mild confusion. Words occasionally developed spontaneous internal spacing, or none at all, as if even the typography were observing a vow of non-attachment. Peer review, meanwhile, appeared to have transcended physical form altogether.

At moments like this, one is tempted to ask philosophical questions. What is authorship, really? If an argument is copied perfectly, does it still belong to its original creator? If a journal publishes without editors in the room to hear it, does it still make a sound? If a metaphor about blocked chi appears in the forest of academic publishing, does anyone notice?

And then there is Google Scholar, calmly indexing it all, like a Zen monk sweeping leaves while entire epistemologies collapse around him.

The emotional journey is predictable. Surprise gives way to irritation, which in turn yields to a kind of exhausted amusement. After all, it is not every day one gets to read one’s own work as if it were new – especially when it has been thoughtfully simplified for contemporary consumption.

Correspondence followed. Screenshots were taken. Appendices multiplied. Examples of verbatim overlap were laid out with the careful precision of a tea ceremony. The original article was cited. The reincarnated article was cited. Karma, it seemed, was being documented.

What lingers after the initial absurdity is not just concern about misconduct, but about the ecosystems that allow such reincarnations to flourish. Journals without editors. Publishers without addresses. Ethics policies without enforcement. A publishing landscape in which the appearance of scholarship is often sufficient, and coherence is optional.

Perhaps this is the true lesson of Eastern philosophy for higher education. When systems lose balance, chi stagnates. When oversight weakens, energies flow in unexpected directions. When scholarly publishing detaches from accountability, articles achieve nirvana without the inconvenience of authorship.

The good news is that the chi remains remarkably resilient. Even when blocked, it finds a way. It circulates. It reincarnates. It reappears – sometimes with better spacing, sometimes with worse.

As for me, I have learned a valuable lesson. Should I ever wish to republish my earlier work, there are evidently paths that require no revision, no peer review, and very little effort. I will not be taking them. But it is oddly comforting to know that my chi, at least, is doing well.

SRHE Fellow Paul Trowler is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at Lancaster University. His work focuses on teaching, learning, and organisational change, with a long-standing interest in how academic practices operate in everyday settings. More recently, he has been working on doctoral education and the practical use of AI within learning architectures that support research and learning. He continues to write and develop tools that emphasise dialogic, theory-informed approaches rather than transmission-led models.