From Airmail to AI: Dr Ashwin Mahalingam on the Future of Publishing | The Publisherspeak Podcast

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About The Publisherspeak Podcast

Real stories. Honest reflections. Conversations about leadership, change, and the work that shapes our world.

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Hosted by Sowmya Mahadevan, Chief Orchestrator at Kriyadocs, The Publisherspeak Podcast features interviews with people making meaningful moves—inside and outside the world of scholarly publishing. From academic leaders and publishing professionals to coaches and change-makers, each episode goes beyond job titles to explore personal journeys and the mindsets behind impactful work.

In this episode

In this episode, host Sowmya speaks with Dr. Ashwin Mahalingam—professor, systems thinker, and advocate for research with integrity.

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From the early days of air-mailed manuscripts to today’s open science ecosystems, Ashwin discusses how academia has evolved. The conversation explores the transformation of scholarly publishing, the importance of amplifying high-quality research from the Global South, and the need to build trust and accountability in a rapidly changing landscape.

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They also take on some big questions:

• How do we uphold research integrity in the age of AI and rapid dissemination?

• What would it take to truly level the global playing field in academic publishing?

• How can educators and institutions equip the next generation for a future we can’t yet predict?

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Get the full scoop below or watch the episode here.

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Full conversation

Sowmya: Today we are going to dive into Ashwin's experiences as an editor, a researcher, an author, a reviewer, and as well as a professor who guides earlier career researchers. Ashwin, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you here.  

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Ashwin: Thank you, Sowmya, and thank you to the team for inviting me to be on this podcast. It's an absolute pleasure. So, my name is Ashwin Mahalingam. I'm currently a professor of Civil Engineering at IIT Madras. And incidentally, I'm also now the Dean of Alumni and Corporate Relations at IIT Madras. I did an undergraduate degree in engineering many, many years ago in civil engineering from IIT Madras.

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At that point I had no inkling that I would ever publish anything, especially in journals and things like that. I was going to take up a career in industry at some point, but then I did a master's work for a bit and came back to do a PhD because research was very interesting. And then as I started doing research and this was all in the U.S. you know, you realize that it's not enough just to do research that you have to publish and therefore, I started my career in publishing.

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After I finished a PhD in the US, I came back to India and been at IIT Madras for 19 years now. And over the course of that period, just like any other academic, I've done a little bit of teaching, I've done a fair amount of research which has led to publications. I've also worked on several projects which have also led to some amount of publication. And then there's the. When you look at an academic, they do three things. They do teaching, research and what we call service. And there is service to the university, service to the professional community, service to the academic community. And as part of my service roles for the academic community, I currently am the editor in chief of one journal called the Engineering Project Organizations Journal. But also I'm on the editorial board and a reviewer for several other journals. And I've been sort of reviewing papers and helping with the editorial process for, for several years now.  

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Sowmya: That's fantastic. I think that's one of the reasons we were really excited to have you on the podcast is because you've worn so many different hats. The hat of an author, the hat of an editor in chief, as an editor, as a, as a student, as an early career researcher, as well, you know, interfere being part of this sort of an ecosystem. So, I want to hear a little bit more about your experience running this journal, the Engineering Projects Organization Journal, and your experience being the editor in chief and more around the nitty gritties, the practicalities of publishing the journal and things like that.  

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Ashwin: Sure. So, the Engineering Project Organizations Journal is a bit of a niche journal. It's published by a society called the Engineering Project Organization Society. So, EPOS and EPOJ and we have a conference called the Engineering Project Organization Conference called EPOC. So, they're all relatively alliterative terms.  

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This is a community that sits at the intersection of engineering projects and the social sciences. So essentially, it's a bunch of people looking at engineering projects, but looking at them through a social science lens. So about 20 years ago we sort of realized that when we sent our work to engineering journals, they would look at it and say, I mean, this is not quite engineering. And when we sent up our work to journals in sociology or in the social sciences, they would say there's a lot of practical content here because clearly you come from an engineering background, but perhaps not as much theoretical content as we typically publish in our journals. And so, the work that we were doing was, I thought, we all thought was interesting, relevant, etc. But it was falling through the cracks a little bit.

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And therefore, while many of us had some success publishing in both of these worlds, engineering and the social sciences, we felt that there was a need to start our own journal. And we talked to a few people and a bunch of people told us this would be really great. So again, I'm sort of forgetting my timelines now, but I think somewhere around 2010, 2011, was when we started the journal EPOJ. In the beginning, EPOJ was actually published by Taylor and Francis. And if you go back and look at some of the early editions of the journal, you will see the Taylor and Francis logo on them. And then at some point we decided that we may actually be better off just publishing it on our own. Primarily because, you know, I think Taylor and Plants is a, is a great publishing house, but some of these publishing houses tend to then bundle journals into packages. And again, having an interdisciplinary journal like ours, you often get bundled into the wrong package. And therefore, we thought it would be better to sort of just set ourselves up.  

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And we made the transition from a very traditional journal where somebody pays to subscribe to the journal and authors of course, publish for free, to an open access journal where essentially, we put all our papers out online, open access and anyone can sort of access them and things like this. There have been, of course, several challenges as you sort of chart this path. The launch of our journal coincided with the launch of all of what we call these scientometric matrices, citation indices, impact factors, H indices and things like that. And if you're a new journal, then you typically are going to start off scoring very low on several of these parameters because you just don't have enough papers that you publish that have made an impact. There are not enough people reading your journal to cite and increase your hedge indices and things like that.  

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So, you know, unfortunately this is a bit of a chicken and egg situation. As a young faculty member, you're obviously going to come up for promotion. At some point you're going to go from assistant to associate professor, associate to full professor, and people are going to ask you these questions, what's your hedge index? What impact factor journals are you publishing? And things like that. So as a young faculty, it's obviously a little bit of a risk to publish in these journals, even though your work may be extremely appropriate. So, we initially thought that it should be senior faculty who would then, who don't have anything at stake. I mean, they've already been promoted, they are full professors, etc. Who would then publish here. But it turns out that Senior faculty have PhD students who are aspiring to become junior faculty. And therefore, those PhD students again want to publish in outlets which will help them land a faculty gig somewhere or the other. So, one of the challenges with starting a journal was this chicken and egg solution, or chicken and egg problem where you need to be big enough for people to want to publish. But if people don't publish, how do you ever become big enough? Right? And again, I mean, we muddled through that.  

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There are luckily enough people in the community who are willing to take a risk, and the journal did sort of gather some kind of momentum. It's a bit of a niche known journal in that area. And so some universities said, even though you guys are new, we know the strength of your editorial board and things like this. And therefore, one of the things we learned was that the editorial board is therefore very critical. Because even if you're a new journal, if somebody comes and sees that there are faculty from Stanford and MIT and IIT and these kinds of people places on your editorial board, then the credibility of the journal develops and that's the way in which you start getting some momentum going forward. But the other sticky factor is you need a critical mass in the community for a journal to be successful. Look, I mean, everyone publishes a handful of papers a year. Not all papers are in exactly that same topic. And sometimes even when they're in the same topic, you don't want your resume to show that all of your papers are in one publication. You want to distribute them a little bit so that you can show people that you can publish them in a number of places.  

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So really in a particular journal, you're looking at a very active faculty submitting a paper once every other year, right? On average. And therefore, you need a large, I mean, you can do the math, but if you want to sort of publish a certain number of papers a year, and if people are not going to be publishing every year, and things like that. Generally, the rule of thumb is that you need a community of at least about a thousand people who are sort of active in that community, come to conferences and things like that. Some of them will be core to the community, some of them will actually be peripheral to the community.  

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And if you say there's a higher probability of the core people publishing a little bit more frequently, the peripheral people publishing a little less frequently, you need that kind of a number to be able to get enough submissions every year to run a journal. Because again, you've got to factor in the fact that just because you submit a paper doesn't mean it's going to get published. So typically, depending on the quality of the journal, acceptance rates are of the order of magnitude of, say, 50% or even less sometimes. So again, another challenge that you run into is if you start your journal a little too early when the community hasn't grown as much. And in some sense, that was the case with us.  

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Then again, you're sort of scrambling to, you know, to get enough papers in because the community isn't big enough. And of course, there are some papers coming in, but not all of them are of the quality that you would like to publish. And therefore, you stretch things forward a little bit. Here again, one of the solutions that we found was to sort of start looking at special issues, because special issues are very thematic and it's easy to get people, a small group of people, to coalesce around the theme rather than sort of open general issues where you get papers from everywhere and you can't really judge the quality. So, some of the lessons we learned were, number one, I think you need a community of a critical size.  

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Number two, you need to start in your early stages looking at editor special issues. Number three, you need to have a really strong editorial board that would attract people to your journal and give credibility. Number four, you've got to really be very active at running conferences as a society. See, the journals, the society and conferences are all linked together. If you have a vibrant society, you have a good quality conference, you will have a vibrant journal.  

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If you don't have a vibrant society, you don't have a good quality conference, you're probably not going to have a good quality journal. And so that vibrancy of the conference was something. And of course, finally there's this sort of marketing, which you obviously have to do. There are lots of journals out there. How do you rise above the clutter? So, these, I think, are all things that editors should sort of keep in mind. As far as we are concerned, I think we did a pretty poor job at marketing and therefore didn't quite have the impact we wanted to have or don't quite have the impact we want to have on that. But all the other parameters, I think we have a really strong editorial board that's helped, special issues have helped, we have very vibrant conference, and very often we invite the best papers from that conference to come and present, and that's helped and so on. So those are some of my learnings as an editor. By the way, I was not the founding editor of the journal.  

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A colleague of mine, Paul Chinowsky, who used to be at the University of Colorado, was the founding editor of the journal. He ran it for a period of time, and I've then taken over and I was part of the editorial board from the beginning as well. So, again, I think it's important too. Some journals are associated with an editor, and I think that's not a great practice. I think journals need to be associated with the community, with people changing around.  

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So, you get slightly different points of view, slightly different energy and so on. So that's again, that transition is again another lesson I think that editors would do well to remember.

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‍Sowmya: That's fabulous. I think that's almost like a masterclass that you took in terms of how you grow the journal, how do you build the community. And what I'm hearing from you is that the journal is actually the output of a vibrant community. So, it's very important to kind of nurture the community through fantastic conferences, through great content, through a fabulous editorial board, a very accomplished editorial board, and a very good marketing initiative as well, to make sure that the community is kept alive. And I think that's really nice to hear. One of our major audience for the publisherspeak is going to be obviously publishers. So, one of the things that publishers would like to hear about is actually from an author's perspective and in your introduction, you talked about how you have published at various stages in your career through several journals, through several publishers. So I'd like to hear about your experience with this ecosystem, with this publishing ecosystem, and how has your experience been, first as an author, then as perhaps, I'm sure you reviewed a bunch of different papers and been on the editorial board of several journals, and then your experience wearing that editor's hat as well.  ‍

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Ashwin: So let me start off from the author's perspective. Now, I've been in this game, you know, long enough that things have changed considerably. The very first paper I submitted, I had to Print out three copies, right, and put them in an envelope and mail them to the editor. Because the editor would then take those three copies and in turn mail them out to three reviewers. And the reviewers would then type out their review comments, and it would come in and then those comments would make their way to me. So that was definitely a bygone era, but that's how things were when we started.  

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But it's very interesting that, and this is a little bit of an aside, I'll just get back to the topic in a second. But I think it will reinforce some points I will make later today. When authors write papers, you will find things like they sort of refer to as Table 1 shows or whatever it is. And then below that they'd say in brackets, table one about here. Tten the table will actually be right at the end of the document.  

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I see that even today. And that's a remnant of an era where we couldn't typeset things because we were sending things in hard copy. Somebody would actually then type it out to form the journal and therefore we would just put all our figures at the end and things like this. So, it was a very, very different world when I started publishing. Things would take years to publish. I mean, think about it. I would air mail things from India to the US that person would then air mail things to God knows where. They'd get air mailed back and things like this. Slowly email started making an appearance. But somehow, we didn't trust email to handle this process.  

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So, at best, you know, the editor would maintain an Excel sheet and would send out a reminder via email saying you haven't reviewed it. But the whole thing would sort of happen in sort of this very analog offline mode. So again, if I look at where the world was then and where the world is now, author experience has sort of is now a thousand times better. Right? But this is the same situation as, you know, talking to our grandparents who lived in an era without phones or televisions, etc.  

I think first of all, in general, the author's experience has gotten far smoother. But I think one of the points I wanted to make is as an author, your concerns are a little bit different depending on the stage of career that you're in. As a young, as somebody was finishing my PhD and starting to publish, or as someone who was a young assistant professor, speed was very, very important because you know, I was racing against the deadline to either submit my thesis or submit an application to a university or go to an interview and things like this.  

So speed was extremely important at that time. Then when you sort of, when I was sort of more of a mid-career researcher, it was really a little bit more about what is the kind of brand that I'm building as an author. And therefore, you know, good quality comments are things that were extremely important because it wasn't so much the numbers anymore because I mean those were always going to happen. But if the paper was going to be of really good quality and get cited and things like that, that's where your reputation sort of gets enhanced. And so, what you look for in a journal at that point is are you going to get reviews that are really thoughtful and are really pushing your paper forward?  

And then maybe today a little bit the considerations are a little bit different. You're looking more at what kind of legacy are you leaving and therefore where are you getting published? I mean, are you getting published in a special issue that a lot of people will read and things like this. So, I think when you look at the experience or how to enhance the experience of an author, I think it's also important to look a little bit at what that author is looking for. Now this is of course easier said than done in many cases, you know, all authors are homogeneously in the same period.  

But you're also got cases where, I publish with my PhD students and my PhD students are me 20 years ago. SSo,you know, it's not an easy problem to solve. But I think these are things to keep in mind. But generally, as an author, you know, again I go back to the fact that, you know, speed is of course always welcome at whatever stage of your career you're in. Very often what really irritates me is I wouldn't have gotten comments back for a long period of time.  

You can log into the system, and you will see that the paper is with editor. Okay, that is really irritating because if it's with the reviewer, I understand. I mean, as a reviewer I am more often than not late on my reviews because I've got so many other things to do. But as an editor you should at least be sending it out for review. So, I think there are certain basic hygiene things that the best journals and publishers put in place to ensure that while there may be delays that are not unnecessary bottlenecks.  

The second thing that's really more irritating is getting a review from someone who clearly doesn't understand what you're doing. Of course, nobody likes getting their paper rejected, and I've had my fair share of rejections coming. In at least half those cases, the rejections are actually valid. I feel extremely shortchanged the day the review arrives. But then my PhD advisor told me, whenever you get a negative review, forget about it, come back in three days and reread it and you'll learn a lot.  

Typically, when I reread it in three days, I see the points that the author, that the reviewers have made. You know, clearly very, very helpful things like this. But there are some papers where, which get rejected because it's very clear that the person who was reviewing was not the right kind of person to review. They didn't understand the literature that I was speaking to. Perhaps they were not an expert in the methodology.  

Perhaps they fundamentally disagreed with the kind of methodological turn that I took. For instance, there's this big fight that's been going on for centuries on qualitative versus quantitative research. Quantitative researchers will say numbers are what matter. Qualitative researchers will say numbers can be twisted to say anything you want. You really need to get deep into the.  

So, there are these ideological differences and sometimes when you get somebody from the opposite camp, you never stand a chance, right? Your paper was going to be rejected at the get go, which is a very unfair state of affairs. So, I think what I do try to do as an editor is trying to sort of ensure that the reviews are as thoughtful as possible. How do you do that? First of all, as an editor, I feel you have a responsibility to read the paper.  

There's a colleague of mine; Paul Chan. Paul is now at TU Delft. He used to be the editor of a journal called Construction Management and Economics, which is one of the top journals in the field of construction management. Gets hundreds or maybe thousands of submissions a year.  

I have no idea how Paul did it, but he would read every single paper. Every single paper he would read thoughtfully and carefully. I think that's a trait that an editor needs to have. You've got to read the paper. Having read the paper, you've got to make a very informed choice on what to do with that paper and who to send it to.  

You can make that informed choice only if you have a large enough network. I mean, I need to know literally hundreds of paper people in my network to be able to figure out who would be the two, three people who would be able to. Who I would be able to send that paper to. And that again is a function of the number of conferences you attend, the number of committees you are on, and how well networked you are. In many cases, the best editors of journals are not the ones with the best scholarship, but they're the ones with the best networks.  

I think those are actually the best kinds of editors who understand scholarship, have these networks and can really ensure that the right papers get sent to the right people. Very constructive comments come in, papers improve and that has a very positive feedback effect because once I know that is this kind of journal, then if I've got really good work, I submit it there. And conversely, I say this work is probably not good enough to pass muster in this journal, I submit it elsewhere, and the quality of the work naturally goes up. So, to me, two things to improve the author's, you know, experience. One is speed as much as possible and the second is, you know, putting together a system where you have this high quality reviewer selection process.  

I've been on the editorial board of several journals where through some algorithm some 20 names will show up. I would not note almost all 20 of them. And you know, you're, you know, expected to randomly select a couple of people. You have no idea. Right?  

That's just, you're just assuming that there are people in the system who are all equal, and therefore you can randomly select someone and get the same outcome, and there could be nothing further, you know, from the truth. Then of course there's a third part which I think publishers today do fantastically well, which is the actual publication. I mean once your paper has been accepted, you have this temporary euphoria, you know, that you've got something public published, but it doesn't count until it's out there, and it has a DOI and these kinds of things. And there I think sowmya, you guys have been at the forefront of literally in a day or so being able to take the final accepted draft, turn it into a journal ready digital document with all the metadata embedded in it, etc. And putting it up on the web, that, that is often very, very helpful and pleasing and really helps people, you know, as they go through their career.  

So yeah, speed of publishing, good quality reviews, speed of reviewing I think are some of my takeaways as having been an author across eras.  

Sowmya: That's, very valuable insight, a lot of very good insights. But I'm going to ask you this question, as you talked about finding good quality reviewers as an author. You want good reviews to come in. Now that you are an academician and you have PhD students, is that something that you train Your students to be like, how to give reviews and how to be that next reviewer.  

Because that's a huge challenge for publishers as well. You know, as you've seen, there's a random algorithm that goes out and tries to find people who match the particular subject area. But how do you train them to give the right kind of reviews?  

Is there even training? How do you pick that up and how do you nurture that?  

Ashwin: Different people have tried different things. I mean, I've done some of this. I haven't done it systematically.  

One of the things we've done is what we do. We used to call it a journal club. So, I used to actually take some of my papers and sort of say, here's a draft of the paper. And you get it. This was the first draft that I submitted.  

So just quickly read through, and here are the comments that I got. All right? And then we go through the comments, and we try to sort of figure out, was the reviewer, you know, were they analytical, were they biased, whatever. Then we sort of go through, again, as an author, how would you go about revising these comments? And then I can show the second draft of the paper I sent in.  

You can sort of take, you know, a submitted paper, and as an author, I have all of that data. Exactly. So that's one sort of way of doing it where people sort of understand, hey, here's what a reviewer does, and here's what a good reviewer does versus here's what a poor reviewer can do. And I've got all kinds of papers. I've got papers that I got fantastic reviews on, papers that I got nonsensical reviews on both sides.  

I've got papers where people, without giving me any reason, rejected. And I've got papers that, without giving, you know, any particular comments, got accepted as well. Right? So, we look at all of this. There's sort of enough material to do this.  

I haven't done it systematically, but I think that's very valuable, that when PhD students go through the process, they sort of learn this. Another thing that sort of. That I know others have done, I've not quite done this is when I get a paper to review, okay? I actually give that paper to a. To a PhD student and say, why don't you take a stab at reviewing?  

They just read the paper, and come up with a review. But of course, you know, there may be some irresponsible faculty who just turn that review in, but the right way of doing it is then the faculty also Reviews and then sits with the PhD student and says, here are my comments, here are yours, and here are where our comments aligned and here's where I had something to say and you didn't pick this up and things like this. So, getting a PhD student to do a shadow review of a paper sometimes is also very helpful. The third thing is also, again, different universities differ.

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When I was doing a PhD, my advisor said, don't worry about publishing, you can do that after your PhD, but if you publish through the course of your PhD, which is more the norm today, then you also go through the cycle as an author, you get reviews, etc.  So, I think these are extremely important ways to help skill upcoming PhD students who are going to be faculty tomorrow in the art of reviewing. And it's really something that I think should be a responsibility of every faculty who's to going guiding a PhD student.  

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Sowmya: Yeah, I mean, I think that what you're doing sounds very interesting and very, I mean that's, I would say, part of the service that you're doing to give back to the, to the furthering science. Because getting the right culture in place, right. Publishing culture in place is absolutely important.  

That brings me to my next question. You know, today one of the hot topics that is being discussed amongst all publishers is research integrity. Right. With the amount of research that is being done in India and China, especially, especially going up, a lot of papers are getting, getting submitted to, to pretty much all the journals.  

I think there's a huge challenge of finding good quality reviewers, especially if the research integrity is at question now as a topic. Is research integrity something that in academia you discuss, you know, are there.  

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Where do you think this problem rises? And I'm especially asking it to you because, you know, you are an academician in India.  

Ashwin: It is something that everyone is aware of. We do discuss at IIT Madras. You know, we actually have a program that go through irrespective whether you're in the humanities, biotechnology, computer science, civil engineering, etc. Where research ethics and integrity and all of that are discussed.  

Right. But in practice, okay, it is extremely difficult to really, you know, figure out whether what has been done is genuine or not. Okay. The reason being, okay, there are certain cases, you know, I've written certain papers where I've also provided the data. So, if somebody wanted to run the same analysis and see if they could replicate my results, they could, but there are several, you know, I've also done my share of qualitative research where I go to, in my case construction projects and interview project managers.  

Okay, now how do you really verify the veracity of that data? I can put in transcripts if you like. But how do you know that that was actually what was being said? So maybe I should put in voice recordings. But how do you know that that was the actual interview that I could.  

Sowmya: See in today's world with AI, you know, all of these are.  

Ashwin: I think at some point it becomes very difficult in some areas, right. In other areas I think you can rerun simulations and, and things like this and you know, at least figure out if the analysis was above board. Again, the base data in many cases is difficult except when it was publicly available. So while journals are doing the right thing by saying, you know, show us your data and now most of them have these appendices where people, you know, show their data and things like this.  

It is, it is a bit challenging in some cases. In some kinds of research, the data is also confidential. The raw data. This might be something to do with defense. It could be biological research where you don't necessarily want that data out in the public domain and things like this.  

So, to me, I don't know if we've really cracked that problem. Again, it comes down to the integrity of knowing the people you know, knowing them because you've met them at conferences and things like that. But even then, I mean the, the previous president of Stanford University had to resign, the one just before Jonathan Levin, who's the current president, because the paper on which he had his name on had some sort of shady methodological underpinnings to it and he was not aware, unfortunately, may not have been his fault. It might have been a PhD student or whoever researcher on his team. But the point is you could be as accomplished as the president of perhaps the world's preeminent university and still fall prey to this.  

It is important. I just don't know if there's any foolproof solution to this, especially like you point out Sowmya, in this world of AI and deep fakes and things like this.  

Sowmya: I think, I think that certainly is a huge challenge that is there in front of all of us. I would assume that we have to figure out what are the methods and processes that can be put in place to handle the recent research integrity problem. And I know there's a lot of conversations, a lot of discussions going on around it, you know, coming to this, you know, you initially, you talked about building this vibrant community and all of that stuff.  

So where do you see the journal as an artifact evolving, you know, as we are looking, say three, four, five years down the line. What do you think is actually the publisher's role, the role of a journal? Because more and more the new generation is not even reading anything. They're all consuming information in a very different way than what it used to be. So I'd like to hear about your thoughts on where do you see all.  

Ashwin: Of this going again? And I've seen this transition over decades. Right. At one point we used to get physical copies of journals. They weren't even up online and you would have to wait to get a physical copy.  

I remember we used to look at this American Society of Civil Engineering Journal of Construction Engineering and management. My PhD advisor had a subscription, it would come to him, he quickly looked through, maybe read an article or two that he thought was relevant and then he put it in this box outside his office and then we'd go in and take a look and see what got published and things like that. So, there were a relatively smaller number of journals and there was this sort of ad hoc process. In fact, I've heard of people much older than me studying in say Anna University saying they would come to IIT Madrid, which is a different university, stand outside the library, wait for permission to go in and come and read a journal which their university would not have subscribed to. So accessing information, of course has become very different today.  

I think to your point, Sowmya, earlier on we used to read a journal like you read a magazine. This journal has come in, there are seven articles. Let me at least look at what seven articles there are. I mean only one may be of interest to me and I'll read that, but at least I'll read the table of contents, I'll read the abstract, etc. Today, and I can't remember when the last time was that I picked up a journal, right? It's really more I go to, you know, somehow I know that this article was published. Maybe I go to a conference, somebody told me about it or maybe I look it up Google Scholar, I go straight to that, to that article. So if you tell me, hey, what was published in the last issue of any of these journals? I have no clue, right?  

I only know that over the last year I have read these 25, 30 papers in this area from across these kinds of journals. So the nature of how we search for information and so on has changed considerably. But the academic, tenure and promotions process has more or less remained the same. I think there is still this notion that academic quality is judged by your publication in peer reviewed journal publications, journal outlets of a certain stature and so up. And I don't see that changing anytime soon.  

Although there is talk of bringing in other things into the mix. Maybe the number of patents you file should also count for something in things like that. I think journals are going to be an integral part of how academics are evaluated and therefore from that perspective, journals are not going to go away in that sense. But I think clearly the, you know, nobody wants to sort of read a physical journal anymore, so. And I don't even know how many people continue to print physical copies.  

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I think everything is online and things like this, when you're online, you don't necessarily, I think, need to be confined by volume and issues as you used to be, because that was essentially a page count. You had a cost, you could only print so many numbers of pages and therefore you had to restrict articles. You also had articles that were restricted to 10,000 words because you could only fit 8,10,000 word articles into a journal. I think all of those constraints can now go away and they are moving away in many areas that I look at. Things get published now on an ongoing basis.  

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Some papers are much larger, some are shorter. Another trend that I see happening, which I'm quite surprised hasn't happened as much already, is that there can be more dynamic content now that we are on, now that we are actually in this sort of digital age. More people embedding videos instead of just pictures into their journals, maybe even sort of linking those videos with live data so that every time you look at it, it sort of changes. And so, so I think from that perspective, journals, and like I said, I mean, it's happened here and there but hasn't quite taken off as I thought it might, but I'm sure it will. So, I think these are some sort of changes.  

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I am a firm believer that the economic model of journals is going to change quite a bit.

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Again, my sort of understanding is earlier, if I were running a journal, if I were a publishing house and you know, I'm talking about the 90s or whatever it is, then I needed a staff of copy editors who would actually, you know, type set things and make them camera ready as you would, as we call them, and photograph them and create these journals, then I needed all these people who would run around to universities and come and meet with professors and when I joined as a faculty, these guys would come in and try to sell me subscriptions, you know, and things like that. And therefore, you had to sell the journal at a certain price in order to cover all of those kinds of costs. But the actual, as we all know, the actual cost of the content is really literally zero. I mean, the authors are doing their research with someone else's grant money.  

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So therefore, they're writing for free. Reviewers are primarily reviewing for free. There is a little bit of an unhealthy trend in my view that has come up recently where editors and editorial board members of certain journals are actually remunerated, which you know, again is anathema to me. But again, we can sort of debate that. But otherwise, a lot of intellectual work is essentially free.  

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Now clearly there is a backend IT digital infrastructure that needs to be set up. You've got somebody who needs to prepare all the metadata, you need a server to host it and things like this. But I think this model of IT costs you x amount to subscribe to the journal or if you want to make your paper open access, it's going to cost you, I don't know, anywhere between $1,000 to $2,000 a paper. I think those economics to me don't really make sense. I think the cost of publication can come down dramatically, you know, the more we sort of automate and things like this.

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And therefore, I see that as one of the big changes going forward. At EPOJ, for instance, we are free and open access, you know, people submit, they don't pay to publish open access. There is a cost, we recover that cost through membership fees that we charge at our conferences and things like that. But yeah, it's, the paper is out for everyone to read and is essentially free to publish. And I think those are the kinds of changes that we're going to see going forward.  ‍

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Sowmya: Absolutely. And I think, you know, I didn't even mention the word AI in the future of journal, but there's going to be a lot of disruption that is going to happen with respect to how content is even consumed, perhaps even reviewed and, and you know, taken forth. So yeah, a lot of exciting things to look forward to and thank you so much, Ashwin. I think this was a very, very insightful conversation. I think one of the main reasons we were very excited about having you on the podcast today was, was to get that other side's perspective and especially as an academician staying in India and promoting research in India and contributing to all the well renowned journals in the world.  

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I think it was very insightful too, to get your perspective on this. Thank you so much once again for being on The Publisherspeak Podcast. Is there any other last comments that you would like to make to our viewers?  

Ashwin: Yeah, I think we've covered a lot of the key issues from the publisher's perspective, the editor's perspective, and the author's perspective.  

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You know, maybe something that may be of general interest is that. And I think we discussed this briefly before the podcast. There is this glut of papers coming in from, from places like India and China and things like that. So, the two questions, how do you improve the quality of the scholarship that comes from these kinds of places and therefore how do you improve the rest of that pipeline, the quality of reviewing, etc. And so on. I think these are now challenges that we really have to figure out.

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We can talk about training people at scale to both review and publish and things like this, but what we also need are, in my view, good quality local publications, right? So Indian journals, Chinese journals, right. Where people sort of start publishing within a community that understands what they are doing, who can sort of guide them in terms of what you do.  

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It's very difficult to get these large economies that are publishing so much to come up to speed with the help of journals that are headquartered in Europe or in the US and so on. So again, if I were, for instance, a publisher looking to create a new set of journals to cater to this demand, I would look at creating journals in these geographies rather than creating journals in the Global north, as we call it, and trying to sort of entice people to sort of publish. And I think that might be a trend that we might see is that there are more journals headquartered in the Global south in the future and therefore published out of that ecosystem than elsewhere. And that hopefully, if we can get that piece right, I think everybody's experience as a publisher, as an author, as an editor will be far more smooth. Otherwise, it's almost like you have a very narrow pipe and you've got a ton of things that are trying to go through that pipe and that's going to make everyone's job difficult, notwithstanding the ability of AI and automation to disrupt.  ‍

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Sowmya: Absolutely, I think that's a very, very interesting idea and a thought it's like moving the problem upstream and tackling it at the source and figuring out how to get high quality submissions from, from the Global south, as we call it, or from emerging markets, emerging areas. But yeah, that's a very, very interesting idea and thought here. Thank you. Once again, Ashwin: for being on our podcast. It was super insightful. I've certainly had a lot of takeaways and I'm sure our viewers would hear as well.  

Ashwin: Thanks so much, Sowmya. It was a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

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