Growing attention is paid to structural issues in academia, including trust in science and the role of metrics and rankings. In the open-access book Fixing Academia, I focus on another, but related problem: the dominance of a small number of academic publishers, the Big Five: Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Sage, Wiley, and SpringerNature.
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Academia is in a credibility crisis. A record-breaking 10,000 scientific papers were retracted in 2023 because of scientific misconduct, and academic journals are overwhelmed by AI-generated images, data, and texts. To understand the roots of this problem, we must look at the role of metrics in evaluating the academic performance of individuals and institutions.
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Berend van der Kolk 