Scholarly publishing operates on trust. Researchers are trusted to conduct research ethically. Journals are trusted to assess quality through peer review. Publishers are trusted to maintain standards. Universities are trusted to uphold academic integrity.
The system has largely worked but the environment is vastly different to even just ten years ago. It is now larger, operates a lot faster and is much more commercialised than it ever was.
Academic publishing is now a global industry worth billions of dollars[[1],[2]]. Publication metrics influence university rankings, institutional reputation, academic careers, promotion decisions and research funding. Entire ecosystems now exist around citations, journal indexing and publication visibility.
Yet despite the scale and influence of the sector, nobody has authority over academic publishing?
A system built on voluntary cooperation
In many professions, there are organisations with real regulatory powers.
Doctors can lose their licence to practise. Lawyers can face disciplinary proceedings. Financial institutions can be fined. Architects, accountants, engineers and sportsmen/women often operate within formal regulatory frameworks that impose enforceable standards. If you are employed within these sectors and you breach the rules, you will face the consequences and possibly be prohibited from working in that sector, possibly for life.
Academic publishing does not have these governance structures.
There are organisations that promote good practice and ethical standards. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has played a significant role in developing guidance for editors and publishers. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has helped improve transparency and quality within open access publishing.
These organisations carry out valuable work, and the sector would be weaker without them. However, they largely operate through influence, guidance, membership and voluntary compliance. They do not possess regulatory authority in the conventional sense. They cannot force a retraction, close a journal, suspend a publisher or impose financial penalties.
In practice, academic publishing remains largely self-regulated.
That raises an increasingly important governance question. Is voluntary self-regulation still sufficient for a sector of this scale, that has this much influence and has a turnover measured in the billions of dollars?
Publishing is no longer a small scholarly ecosystem
Many discussions about scholarly publishing still make it sound like a community-driven academic activity. In fact, it is a highly competitive commercial industry.
Large publishers manage thousands of journals and process enormous submission volumes every year. Universities compete for rankings and reputation. Researchers face intense pressure to publish. Citation metrics increasingly shape careers and institutional strategies.
These incentives create tensions.
When publication volume becomes financially valuable, quality control systems inevitably come under pressure. When metrics become tied to promotion and funding, researchers begin optimising those metrics. When journals compete for submissions and visibility, commercial incentives can begin to conflict with editorial oversight.
None of this necessarily implies misconduct. But it does create conditions where governance becomes more difficult.
The strain on peer review is just one such example. The traditional peer review system, which can be traced back about 350 years, was developed for a very different publishing environment. Today, reviewers are expected to assess growing numbers of increasingly specialised papers, often without formal recognition or compensation. Journals are under pressure to process submissions more quickly. The added influence of open access has only added to the tensions, pressures and challenges that are now present.
The result is a system that is showing signs of fatigue.
The rise of integrity concerns
Over the past decade, concerns around research integrity have become far more visible.
Paper mills, manipulated peer review, citation cartels, questionable editorial practices and fabricated references are now part of mainstream discussions within scholarly communication. Even established publishers have faced challenges managing quality control at scale.
The Hindawi case[3] demonstrated how governance pressures can emerge. Concerns surrounding special issues, editorial oversight and peer review management became highly visible across the sector. More broadly, publishers have had to retract increasing numbers of papers linked to organised manipulation.
Controversial publishers such as OMICS[4] have shown how difficult it can be to exert meaningful control across international publishing environments. Even where legal actions occur (resulting in a USD 50 million fine, which remains unpaid), the broader ecosystem continues to operate largely through fragmented oversight and reputational mechanisms.
Every system faces misconduct. The deeper issue is that there is no universally recognised authority with the power to intervene decisively when systemic problems emerge.
Who decides when a there is misconduct?
If a journal repeatedly demonstrates weak editorial practices, who determines whether it should continue operating?
If a publisher consistently fails to maintain adequate peer review controls, who has the authority to impose sanctions?
If authors repeatedly engage in unethical publishing practices across multiple journals and countries, who coordinates meaningful accountability?
At present, the answer is, essentially, no overarching regulator has the authority to act.
Retractions may occur, but they can take years. Journals may be delisted from databases, but they can continue operating, and then get indexed again. Publishers may face reputational criticism, yet remain commercially successful. Universities may investigate individual academics, but institutional responses vary considerably.
In effect, the system relies heavily on distributed responsibility without central authority and in truth, the various actors are as interested in protecting themselves as they are in upholding academic integrity.
Historically, that may have been acceptable because scholarly publishing functioned primarily as a trust-based academic enterprise. The question now is whether the sector has outgrown that governance model.
Would regulation even work?
This is where the discussion becomes more complicated.
Calls for stronger oversight raise difficult questions around academic freedom, censorship and political influence. Few researchers would welcome government control over scholarship or centralised approval of research findings.
There are also major practical challenges.
Academic publishing is global. Journals, publishers, universities and researchers operate across different legal systems and regulatory cultures. Creating an international regulator with meaningful authority would be extraordinarily difficult.
Moreover, not every problem in publishing can be solved through regulation. Research integrity also depends on institutional culture, incentives, leadership and academic norms.
The alternative, however, is to continue relying primarily on voluntary compliance in an environment that has become increasingly industrialised, commercialised and metric-driven.
A governance discussion the sector may need to have
Perhaps the future does not involve a single global regulator.
Perhaps stronger accreditation systems, enforceable transparency standards or more coordinated international oversight mechanisms could emerge instead. Perhaps publishers themselves will strengthen governance frameworks before external pressure forces change.
But the broader conversation now feels unavoidable.
Academic publishing influences public trust in science, university reputation, career progression, research funding and policy development. It is no longer a niche scholarly activity operating quietly in the background of academia.
It has become a critical global infrastructure for knowledge, reputation and institutional competition. And yet, unlike many sectors with comparable influence, it still relies heavily on soft power, reputation and voluntary cooperation.
The question is whether that model remains sustainable.
What do you think? Do you think that there should be a scholarly publishing regulator that has the authority to act against those that are acting in an unethical and/or unprofessional way?
About the author
Graham Kendall is Acting Vice-Chancellor of GlobalNxt University and an Emeritus Professor at University of Nottingham. His work focuses on higher education governance, research strategy, scholarly publishing and institutional leadership. He regularly writes about the systems, incentives and governance structures shaping modern higher education and research.
[1] Kendall, G. 2024. Are open access fees a good use of tax payers money? Quantitative Science Studies, 5 (1): 264-270. DOI: https:doi.org/10.1162/qss_c_00305
[2] Kendall, G. 2025. Erratum: Are open access fees a good use of taxpayers’ money? Quantitative Science Studies, 6: 876-878. DOI: https:doi.org/10.1162/qss.x.10
[3] https://katinamagazine.org/content/article/open-knowledge/2026/what-the-collapse-of-hindawi-reveals-systemic-risk, accessed 23 May 2026
[4] Kendall, G. 2024. The OMICS Group and its agents: An evidence base. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 55 (2): 219-247. DOI: https:doi.org/10.3138/jsp-2023-0095