Academic industry is a beautiful ecosystem that has contributed a lot to human. It’s more easy to criticize something that is supposed to be perfect and pure.

This is an article based on paper The junkification of research by Martina Linnenluecke and Carl Rhodes:

The 5 stages of the ‘enshittification’ of academic publishing

Martina Linnenluecke, Carl Rhodes | The Conversation | January 5, 2026

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… Enshittification 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.

Academic enshittification

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

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

I don’t think 1 implies 2 implies 3 implies 4 then implies enshittification. It feels more like the industry’s publish-or-perish culture naturally leads to the bad equilibrium. And the above 5 points are just properties of this equilibrium.

Academia is a market filled with clever, strategic, incentivized agents. The benign, upright motive of “human’s purist pursuit of knowledge” is just so fragile compared to the incentives and lure that people face to cheat and game the system in all ways that doesn’t stand up to the highest quality that one anticipates for it. It’s a miracle that academia flourished til today with its contributions. But with proper design, guidance, and regulation of the system, it can probably do better than it is doing right now.

[1] Professor’s Richard Tol’s discussion about bribery and manipulations in Journal Publication. See his blog Tol Tales’s late 2025 articles.

[2] The Cost of Knowledge’s Statement of Purpose (if the link failes archived here, I don’t own copyright) gives a clean and neat dissection of the incentives and structure of the academic journal publication market.

Disclaimer. This post reflects my own views and interpretations. References to external papers, articles, or discussions are provided for context and critique, not as endorsements. I do not necessarily agree with the opinions or conclusions of the cited authors, nor do I claim to represent their positions accurately beyond what is explicitly quoted. Any errors, interpretations, or judgments in this post are solely my own.