How to explain academic publishing to a five year old

Last week I tweeted a cow-based academic publishing analogy in response to the prompt in the title, and the replies and quote-tweets extended the metaphor so gloriously, so creatively, so bleakly and hilariously at the same time, that I’ve pulled my favourites together below.

Here’s the original tweet:

Before we get into the epic farm based explainer, take a look at this excellent, cake-based alternative:

(It’s worth clicking on @DevilleSy’s original tweet to read the other replies to it, which are excellent.)

So, to the farm.

Someone asked me to explain who is who in the metaphor, so briefly: the cows are the researchers, creating academic outputs, peer-reviewing them for free, and the farmer is the publisher. He’s not even milking the cows, they are self-milking. The weakest part of the analogy is ‘the cows paying the farmer to take away the milk’, which lots of people have picked me up on - I know it doesn’t happen a lot of the time, but there are often costs associated with publishing an article. You might need permissions to use an image (author pays), colour printing costs (rare now, but author pays) there are predatory pay-to-publish journals (author pays) or legit-but-still-charging-you-some-money journals with submission or membership fees (author pays) - and there are Article Processing Charges (author or their grant / institution pays, an average of over 1,400 Euros a time according to this 2018 article).

I am, of course, hugely in favour of Open Access. The cow is paying the farmer but at least the farmer isn’t then charging the cows a second time, and all cows (and even animals who don’t live on a farm at all) can get to the milk whenever they need it. But speaking as an academic librarian, I know that libraries are paying just as much or more for journal and database subscriptions as we ever were, AND Universities and authors are paying APCs as well. So we’re getting there - but the farmers sure are making a lot of cash in the meantime…

Talking of OA, let’s get back to some choice Dairy metaphor continuations with one of my absolute favourites:

Some people picked up on the role the cows themselves play as peer-reviewers - if indeed the milk even gets that far:

That last one! Amazing. Not to mention the fact that the peer-review process often leads to milk being poured away entirely, or kept for so long before being available that it goes off:

Then we get to the fact that despite the best efforts of peer-review, academic publishing is a market, and quality is by no means the sole (or main) driver or which milk gets consumed.

Not all milk is treated equally.

Is there a vet in the house? Because some elitist cows just got burned.

What about that whole murkly business of recycling the milk into ‘new’ milk?

Fair warning, it gets especially bleak now… We turn to the subject of the cow who can’t produce enough high quality milk.

Ooof. On a happier note, one of my favourite tweets is this one from my colleague Anthony. I can’t believe how many Likes this got because it relies on a detailed understanding of obscure and rarely used subscription models based on the number of students on modules…

There was a reminder to sign up for ALCS royalties (if you’re in the UK); I did this with my own book and would highly recommend it.

And there are loads more great replies and quote-tweets but quite honestly I’ve lost control of my Mentions for now! Some people University presses took offence at my tweet and I apologise to them; it’s a glib tweet designed for a five year old so it didn’t go into much nuance… Lots of publishers do great work. They’re not all like the ones we’re looking at through this ultra-cynical lens.

One tweeter suggested my analogy was a ‘wonderful pastiche’ of ‘every dumb hot take on publishing’. That tweet was from… a publisher.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who chipped in - there’s a certain gallows humour approach to dissecting this whole system, which we’re all complicit in, and I really enjoyed just how far the cows-and-farmer take on things could go.


The cow pic in the Header is a CC0 image from Pexels.