The 5 stages of the ‘enshittification’ of academic publishing

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

:/

Feels like we've had the term way way longer than that.

Websearch first results all say November 2022.

Feels like we've had the term way way longer than that.

I could have swore we were saying it in at least 2014.

Citation attribution enshitification detected.

Academic publishing was definitely a contributing factor to why I left academic research.

I also believe we should incentive peer-review. Maybe every researcher should be evaluated on how many articles they peer-review each year, relative to the amount they publish. I knew some researchers who would publish dozens of articles every year, would peer-review zero of them, and then complain about poor quality peer review.