A university press’s efforts to assess the implications of open access pushed it to join a growing chorus of voices calling for reform of the incentive structures straining the academic publishing ecosystem.

Cambridge University Press argued in a report last week that “without urgent, sector-wide reform, the global academic publishing ecosystem is at risk of collapsing.”

“We urge academic institutions to weaken the link between academic reward and recognition and journal article output, and to adopt more holistic approaches to evaluating academic performance and contribution,” the report reads. “We encourage publishers to develop new metrics for research outputs and to support new approaches to building a new culture and infrastructure for research.”

The report’s call to action stems from the results of workshops, interviews and a survey the press conducted between April and July of this year. Of the more than 3,000 researchers, publishing partners, funders, librarians and publishers from 120 countries who responded to the survey, just 32 percent believe the existing system “is in a good position to meet future challenges.” Only 33 percent agreed that academic reward and recognition systems are working well.

The report’s release comes at an inflection point for the global academic publishing industry, which is also facing fresh scrutiny from the Trump administration.

‘The Real Strain’

University researchers who want to advance their careers have long been under pressure to publish a high volume of papers in widely cited journals. But over the past decade, as the academic job market has become increasingly competitive, that pressure has fueled the rise of paper mills and research fraud—a problem generative artificial intelligence is exacerbating—and overloaded journals and peer reviewers have more submissions than they can handle.

According to the report, the number of indexed articles increased by 897,000 between 2016 and 2022. But “the real strain lies in an even greater rise in submissions, which places significant pressure on infrastructure and editorial capacity,” said the report, which noted that the major publisher Wiley reported a 25 percent increase in submissions in the first quarter of 2025.

All of these problems stem from a pervasive “publish-or-perish culture,” Mandy Hill, managing director for Cambridge University Press and co-author of the report, told Inside Higher Ed. “If people were measured purely on the quality of their research—and not on where it’s published or the volume of their publications—many of these problems wouldn’t exist.”

At the same time, momentum to make more research articles freely accessible to the public is also building.

While many publishers still sell costly journal subscriptions to academic libraries, many others have also adopted full or partial open-access models in recent years, including Cambridge University Press, which now publishes about 75 percent of research articles through open access.

“We were hearing more and more in the market about how difficult libraries were finding it to commit to a full transition to open access,” Hill said. “We were worried that the [academic publishing ecosystem] would be left in this messy middle where libraries are paying for open access and subscriptions that’s making the system more complex.”

So, Cambridge University Press launched the survey to assess progress toward open access. It found that the research community is largely supportive of this shift, according to the survey. Sixty-six percent of respondents believe the move to more open-access journal publishing has been positive over all, while 86 percent desire a future where the majority of research articles are made freely available; 69 percent agreed that radical solutions are needed to accelerate the transition to open research journal publishing.

However, 47 percent also said the move toward more open-access publishing has increased pressure on the peer-review system, which typically relies on the unpaid labor of academics. More than half (54 percent) said they believe the increase in open-access journal publishing has encouraged publishers to prioritize publication volume and profitability “over editorial rigour and quality control.” And another 42 percent believed the transition toward open access has increased fraudulent publishing activity.

“There’s fear that peer review and research integrity will be harder to maintain if we don’t solve these problems,” Hill said. “There’s also a concern about what happens in a world where libraries cannot afford an increasing percentage of what’s being published. Will that lead to more inequities between rich and poor libraries?”

But those findings about open access also revealed the need for deeper reforms, spurring the report’s calls to reform academic incentive structures.

According to the survey, 64 percent of respondents believed the current system “fails to fully recognize contributions outside publishing articles in established journals,” and many others said they want a system that rewards “the full diversity of tasks in research publishing,” including peer review and mentoring.

“What we realized was that we can’t look at the transition to open access without considering this much wider landscape,” Hill said, acknowledging that researcher incentives aren’t something any publisher can change. “We want to catalyze these conversations by shining a spotlight on the critical nature of this problem and saying that enough is enough. We’ve reached a point where hoping someone else is going to fix this problem isn’t good enough.”

The survey’s findings were no surprise to the Declaration on Research Assessment, which has long called for reform of academic incentive structures and applauded Cambridge University Press’s work.

“This report also [emphasizes] the interconnectedness of all these issues—open access, research quality, research assessment and, crucially, equity in the scholarly publishing system,” Ginny Barbour, co-chair of DORA, said in an email. “CUP is aligning with what organizations such as DORA and [the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment] have been saying for a number of years: Reform of research assessment is no longer a niche idea, but, as this report reinforces, is essential for the future of academic publishing.”