Academic publishing rewards volume because everyone in it is behaving rationally
The research industrial complex needs no bad actors. Each participant — researchers, universities, funders, publishers — responds sensibly to the incentives in front of them, and the collective result is a publishing culture that consistently puts metrics before knowledge and quantity before quality.
Research industrial complex
One-sentence definition: The research industrial complex (RIC) is the interlocking system of incentives across academia — publication metrics, grant decisions, promotion criteria, and publisher revenues — that rewards output volume over meaningful contribution to knowledge or practice.
The term borrows from Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex: interconnected institutional interests creating self-perpetuating cycles that serve those institutions more than the public they claim to serve. In academic publishing, the perverse incentives show up at every layer:
- Universities evaluate staff on publication counts and journal impact factors.
- Funding bodies use the same metrics for grant decisions.
- Researchers need publications for career advancement, and early-career academics need them most.
- Publishers benefit from a steady, growing stream of submissions.
Each actor responds rationally to their incentives. Together they push researchers to slice work into minimum publishable units, prioritise novelty over replication, and chase citations from other academics in place of evidence that practice has changed (Edwards & Roy, 2017). One consequence is that large fields slow down: as the volume of papers grows, attention concentrates on already-established work and new ideas struggle to break through (Chu & Evans, 2021). In health professions education the pressure reaches clinical academics and teaching-focused staff whose promotion cases are judged on the same publication metrics, even though their contribution is largely to how practitioners are taught.
How AI intensifies it
Unless institutions take deliberate countermeasures, generative AI is more likely to speed these dynamics up than to disrupt them. AI tools cut the time it takes to draft manuscripts, respond to reviewers, and repackage existing findings in new forms, which lowers the cost of publication without changing what is rewarded. The risk is an AI-enabled paper mill: more papers, faster, with less connection to the careful inquiry that advances knowledge or improves patient care.
There’s also a structural concern. Several major publishers have entered commercial partnerships with AI companies, licensing their content for training frontier models. That adds a new commercial incentive, producing training data, which sits even further from the mission of advancing scientific knowledge.
The collective action problem
Individual will can’t fix this. No researcher can safely abandon traditional publication metrics while promotion committees still use them, and no journal can slow down to prioritise discourse while its competitors speed up. Change needs coordinated action across researchers, journals, institutions, and funders, which is why earlier reform efforts have struggled despite widespread agreement that the system is dysfunctional.
For journals, the more useful response is to use AI to deepen discourse: surfacing connections, making peer review a dialogue, and measuring impact by changes in practice more than by citations among academics. Publishing with purpose develops that argument.
Sources
- Chu, J. S. G., & Evans, J. A. (2021). Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(41), e2021636118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2021636118
- Edwards, M. A., & Roy, S. (2017). Academic research in the 21st century: Maintaining scientific integrity in a climate of perverse incentives and hypercompetition. Environmental Engineering Science, 34(1), 51–61. https://doi.org/10.1089/ees.2016.0223
- Rowe, M. (2025). Using AI to enhance scientific discourse by transforming journals into learning communities. Archives of Physiotherapy, 15, 90–96. https://doi.org/10.33393/aop.2025.3442
Notes
The analogy has limits: publishers aren’t deliberately sustaining health problems for profit, in the way defence contractors might sustain conflict. Its value is structural. It names the mechanism by which institutional self-interest can override mission without anyone intending that outcome.