Power, Profit, and Privilege: Problematizing Scholarly Publishing

Reviewed by Crystal Betts-Green, Adjunct Professor, Old Dominion University on 7/18/24

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

This book is a great introductory text on scholarly publishing. Some areas could be more in-depth, but the Open Access sections are particularly good.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

To my knowledge and understanding, this text is accurate and represents the topic as factually as possible.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

The predatory and imbalanced nature of the scholarly publishing industry is a topic that needs to be more thoroughly covered in higher education. A concise and well written discussion on this topic, like this text, is something I could have used when teaching undergrad courses on Info Ethics as those students had no notion of how scholarly publishing works at all. As companies, policies, and the Open Access movement progress, this will need to be updated, but it's not something that will be outdated too quickly.

Clarity rating: 5

This text is quite accessible and would be useful in either undergraduate or graduate courses.

Consistency rating: 5

The terminology and outline of the text flows well and is consistent throughout.

Modularity rating: 5

The chapters are discrete enough to be used individually or as a whole.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

The text flows logically as do the added activities, etc. I do think having all of the references and links in appendices as well as at the end of chapters would be helpful.

Interface rating: 4

All charts and visual features were clear and useful. Some links were broken, including those pulled out as being hosted elsewhere, however.

Grammatical Errors rating: 4

I did note a couple of typographical errors and broken links, but overall, the text was well-edited.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

The text was not culturally insensitive in any way I could identify.

Comments

I'm glad to have found this text, as it will be useful in a research course I am teaching. This topic isn't covered enough in discussions of research and publication, and having a concise resource like this to hand to students is ideal. There are multiple solid references that will come in handy and that are not necessarily ones students will have heard of previously.

I do feel that the topics could have been expanded and discussed in more detail overall, however. And in one case, a text mentioned was linked but to its Amazon selling page rather than the publisher--a choice I found odd given that this is a book critical of the capitalist practices of publishing. The publisher website might not have been ideal either, but it would have been better than the Amazon link. That said, I will be using parts of this in my research course and future courses and hope to see expanded and updated editions in the future.