Does the early career ‘publish or perish’ myth represent an opportunity for the publishing industry?

Academia is not an area of employment within which it is possible to just tick along, at least not until you have secured that fulltime tenure-track university appointment (Grove, 2016). What happens in the meantime? How does one attain this goal? In some cases, employment happens fast, straight after completing a PhD, but in others, it can take decades, sometimes not at all. It is an old story, but everyone who looks into academia from the outside thinks they knows the answer: Publish or perish. In other words, try to publish as many papers as possible and try to get them into the best journals possible: I know, I have been there. I have worked for almost 20 years as an academic researcher in the USA, Ireland, the UK, and Hungary. The pressure can be intense, especially on early career researchers (ECRs, usually postdoctoral researchers on short-term contracts or newly appointed academic staff ). research articles is only part of the story, however, as the pressures facing researchers at the beginning of their careers are actually mutifaceted and field-dependent; from the point of view of the publishing industry, it could actually do a lot to help ease these pressures. Some suggestions for the ways that this can be achieved are described in this short article. The employment structure of academia is distinctly pyramid shaped (as well as being markedly male dominated, a discussion for another time) (Grove, 2016); there are vastly more graduate students working on their Masters and PhDs than there are postdoctoral positions and, similarly, vastly more ‘postdocs’ than fullor even part-time academic positions. This has led to a crisis in university teaching assistants in the USA, for example (Altbach & Finkelstein, 2015), where well-qualified individuals take up two or more assistantships, often for very low part-time wages, in the hope of keeping their research going and 1 day securing a tenure track or full-time position. This issue has been labelled as a crisis simply because this key career stage, both for teachers and students, is clearly not being adequately funded from either direction (Altbach & Finkelstein, 2015). The academic publishing industry is also changing in ways perhaps not seen since the early days of Robert Maxwell. Open access is on the rise (since approximately 2007; Craig, Plume, McVeigh, Pringle, & Amin, 2007) and researchers are gaining greater control of the publication process. This change is driven in part by the funding agencies and the culture of peer review. European, UK, and other national funding bodies are requiring academic authors to place their work in open access outlets (e.g. OpenAIRE, 2018; but see Rabesandratana, 2018; Van