Since the 1980s, academic publishing has become increasingly commodified. It is now shaped by profitability, competition and performance metrics. Universities have adopted market-based management practices and rely more and more on performance metrics to assess their staff.

Science is bought and sold, and is increasingly shaped by corporate funding and managerial logic. Scholars have described this shift – exemplified by commercial academic publishing – as “academic capitalism”. It influences what research gets done, how it is evaluated and how careers progress.

The open access movement was originally meant to make knowledge more widely available. However, major publishers including Wiley, Elsevier and Springer Nature saw it as a way to push their production costs onto authors – and earn extra money.

Publishers introduced article processing charges, expanded their services, and launched new titles to capture market share. When the highly prestigious journal Nature announced its open access option in 2021, it came with a per-article fee for authors of up to €9,500 (roughly A$17,000).

The shift to “article processing charges” raised concerns about declining research quality and integrity. At the other end of the spectrum, we find predatory journals that mimic legitimate open access outlets. But they charge fees without offering peer review or editorial oversight.

These exploitative platforms publish low-quality research and often use misleading names to appear credible. With an estimated 15,000 such journals in operation, predatory publishing has become a major industry and is contributing to the enshittification of academic publishing.

These trends intensify (and are intensified by) the long-standing “publish or perish” culture in academia.

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.