It is important to preface this piece by acknowledging that the issues we discussed previously are widespread and systemic. We recognize that there are no ‘quick fixes’ and that we need structural change to truly create a better future of academic publishing.

Nonetheless, with increasing recognition of the current system’s dysfunctionality, it is essential that we take action. To start charting a route, we present some practical steps that could progress the future of academic publishing.

With increasing recognition of the current system’s dysfunctionality, it is essential that we take action.

Transparency

The system of academic publishing can be difficult to enter without prior or insider knowledge. This exclusivity might be intentional: academic journals may want to keep their aims and scope exclusive and share their high rejection rates with pride to demonstrate prestige.

This black box needs to be opened. Academic journals can be more specific in describing articles that suit their aims and scope or whether editors welcome authors to pitch their ideas. This kind of transparency can contribute to less work and a smoother publishing experience both for authors and journal editors. One other potential option is to create an open FAQ on the journal’s homepage that is updated on a regular basis with common questions, and that is also open to questions submitted by ECRs and others. Journals and publishers might also offer free workshops to help ECRs navigate writing and publishing processes.

Representation

Privilege and resources play a major role in academics’ access to and progression in the publishing world. Journals must make more of an effort to represent a diverse set of researchers and authors. This must be extended beyond descriptive representation to include methodologies and approaches that sit outside the current orthodoxies of our field.

This could be aided by bringing in more editors from underrepresented backgrounds, or taking authors’ context and lack of resources into account during the editorial process and devoting more editorial support to them based on potential. At the same time, we do recognize that this will require extra work and effort from journal editors, potentially disproportionately so for those who are already marginalised and giving free labour to academic service. Such initiatives thus need to be properly resourced, recognised and remunerated by both journals and academic institutions.

ECR Communities

Some faculties and research centres are starting to create ECR lead roles to create a community where people can share knowledge, ask questions and address individual and collective concerns. This also serves as a hub to organise training on publishing and bidding processes and events to showcase ECRs’ work. In principle, this is an excellent initiative but it raises a few dilemmas. Often, these roles are not recognised as part of one’s workload.

In the end, as one of us pointed out, academic institutions have no incentive to introduce more published scholars into such a saturated and competitive environment. In the neoliberal universities in which all of us were socialised, the relationship between department and PhD candidate is transactional with departments assessed primarily (although not exclusively) on completion rate of PhDs.

With universities under pressure to make profits or collect external funding, and to educate primarily for employability, increasing competition on the academic job market means universities have little incentive to make attractive offers to their ECRs. These neoliberal pressures have been particularly pervasive to the Humanities.

Therefore, whilst fostering ECR communities can support PhD candidates on an individual and community level, their positive impact is mitigated when they take place within existing university structures. Formal recognition of these roles is essential. Further, open and reflexive discussions on structural constraints in academic career progression should be central to any ECR communities if they are to have transformative potential.

New Voices

Our third recommendation revolves around creating spaces specifically for ECRs and others who are trying to publish their work for the first time. A yearly ‘New Voices’ issue would enable a journal to give space to those who have not yet published, either because they are early in their academic career or because they are practitioners working in the field. We believe creating a space for those as of yet unpublished voices will give an overview of the new directions that ECRs and those outside academia are taking in the field of participatory and deliberative democracy. It could include practitioners, facilitators and policymakers working in or on deliberative practice, which would also foster dialogue across the multiplicity of actors working in our field.

Creating a space for those as of yet unpublished voices will give an overview of the new directions that ECRs and those outside academia are taking in the field of participatory and deliberative democracy.

Of course, running a special issue like this would require a deviation from the standard publication process: editors would need to dedicate additional time and support to new authors, and consider possible adjustments to the peer review process. Journals could also encourage inclusion of ECRs within special issues, as one of the criteria for publication. Similarly to how it is now common practice to reject all male panels at conferences, journals could include criteria to promote diverse submissions within special issues and symposiums, with consideration to gender balance and geographical representation.

Conclusion
Democratising knowledge production is an important concern of deliberative democracy. Existing research has thought about how to define core concepts of democracy from the bottom up or how to employ a multiplicity of methods, approaches and traditions to drive democratic innovation.

At the same time, the confines of the current academic publishing system constrain such efforts by limiting who can access knowledge, who is able to navigate the system, and who gets published. These constraints disproportionately affect ECRs, and scholars working in ‘global south’ institutions and others marginalised by a lack of access to financial and other scholarly resources, including social and professional capital. These inequalities were reflected in our own conversation, where the majority of us were working in White, Western institutions, and who have the resources and privilege to travel to a conference in the UK in the first place.

We hope that this series will stoke an emerging debate and encourage concrete steps towards a more inclusive, transparent and open process for academic publishing and more broadly, academic career progression. ECRs often are the backbone of our HE institutions, carrying out much of the teaching and research fieldwork, managing unsustainable workloads on often precarious contracts. They deserve the space, security, support and recognition to develop the innovative research that the field needs to keep evolving towards more inclusive and diverse thinking and practice.

About the authors