Changing the Landscape of Archaeological Publishing

I was pretty excited to read an article titled “Changing the Landscape of Archaeological Publishing” in Current Anthropology. As readers of this blog know, this is something that I think about often. Indeed, just last week, I speculated that the “landscape” of academic publishing has produced a culture where AI interventions by students and, sadly, scholars is all too easy to justify.

The article has over 20 authors (23, I think, by my count) and includes many scholars whose work I appreciate and respect. With so many authors, the article has no excuse not to be ambitious, and it is. The authors outline many of the challenges facing academic publishing in archaeology these days. Many are well known: ethnic and gender imbalance in authorship, unequal access to journals (and the role of publishing as “gatekeeping”), pressures to publish (and the rise of “smallest publishable units”), the role journal ranking have in exacerbating the divide between contributions from the “Global North” and “Global South” and English language publications and all others. The article also notes that journals owned by for-profit companies nevertheless ask reviewers to do uncompensated labor, the growing pressure on faculty time, and the challenge of getting research promoted in mainstream media. This article is a very useful summary of the state of the crisis (or crises) in publishing. That the authors also drew upon examples from South America. The different models of publishing in this context not only shows how different academic (and governmental structures) produce alternate forms of publishing, but also implicit alternatives to the problematic system that currently exists. Much of this covers well known ground.

What makes this article significant is the suggestions that it makes in the final pages of the discussion. These offer a series of “low,” “moderate,” and “high” impact interventions that the authors feel can change the publishing landscape. In general, these are all very good suggestions, although I wonder whether the difference between the highest impact and the lowest impact interventions are really all that great. 

To my mind, the problems with the current publishing landscape are structural. The role that publishers play in the current academic landscape, for example, gives them exceptional power over the early career trajectories of faculty. Having a book accepted at a prestigious press and published in the often compressed timeline required for tenure and promotion not only involves publishers, editors, and reviewers getting on the same page, but also authors (and to a certain extent advisors) adapting their research (topics, theory, and methods) to expectations set by the publishing industry. Even if we allow that the best presses pay some lip service to working closely with scholars in various fields, the publishing industry still functions according to certain market pressures that privilege measurable (e.g. sales, citations, impact, or whatever). Even Open Access publishing, once thought to be a way around the pressures of market, is often measured according to traditional metrics related to impact, citations, or even “downloads.” In this way, the traditional publishing infrastructure has drawn OA publishing into its orbit and defanged some of its potential as transformative practice. 

Folks like Samuel Moore in his Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons (2025). have attempted to propose a new models for understanding the publishing landscape based on the idea of the commons. I’ve blogged about this before and there is much to recommend this change of thinking. In some ways, the thoughtful implementation of practices associated with  “commoning” academic knowledge represents a much higher impact kind of intervention than those suggested in the article.

Indeed, to my mind very metaphor of landscape might not be exactly right in that it could contribute to the idea that somehow publishing represents a kind of passive space in which academic life transpires. I recognize that this is an outdated view of landscape (and one that as a sometime landscape archaeologist, I would reject). At the same time, I wonder whether it makes better sense to see academic publishing as an ecosystem which requires different approaches to disseminating knowledge to thrive. Such a metaphor might better capture the dynamism of the system and highlight the potential of collapse (or radical imbalance) in a way that traditional views of landscape cannot.

This approach could also prioritize the need not just to control the operation of so-called “keystone species,” but to make sure that that the predominant forms of academic practice don’t lead to “trophic collapse” by destabilizing the entire network. My fear is that the present operation of academic publishing has little need — much less motivation — to change if they do not accept that the current system is unsustainable for the production of significant knowledge. The exclusion of voices from the Global South, the growing distrust of peer review as a sustainable guaranteer of academic rigor, and the increasing reach of AI-mediated dissemination, outsized impact of impact factors and other metrics, and the diminishing resources to support traditional models of publishing create an ecosystem that seems out of balance in significant ways. This is likely not something that more sabbatical time, promotion of citational awareness and practices, and new institutional policies will fix.

The real fix is involves the support and promotion of alternate forms of publishing — scholar-led, open access, university based, or whatever — that emphasizes academic publish as fundamental to knowledge making (and not as a landscape that is foundational, but somehow separate from scholarly work). By cultivating not only these alternate forms, but also these alternate ways of thinking, we create space (or reinforce the existence of space) for scholars who do not want to participate in traditional forms of publishing (and their tradition of exploitative practices), and show that the landscape of publishing — however mutable — does not dictate the fundamental character of academic work. In other words, there are “higher impact” alternatives to publishing as it now exists that are entirely consistent with our priorities as scholars.