Confronting your email inbox after the summer holidays has never been anyone’s favourite part of the job. It’s always meant hacking your way through weeks of undergrowth, armed only with a few weapons: caffeine, hope, and the ‘delete’ button. Here an advertisement for Japanese kitchen knives – delete! Take another sip of coffee. There an invitation for you, a sociologist, to submit your work to a journal of mechanical engineering. “Take that!”, you cry, clicking it through to your junk mail folder.
This year, though, I’ve noticed a difference. Not only is there vastly more outright spam, but there are also more emails that fall somewhere between legit and junk. An entire ecosystem of semi-predatory journals, conferences and services has sprung up not outside academia, but on its periphery. Think about the open-access publisher that sends you urgent weekly invitations to review articles that are marginally related to your work, but so badly written they should not have passed a desk review. Or the private academy that offers expensive trainings on how to write EU applications (the one you don’t remember giving your email address to). Or the social media company that promises to bring an old article to new audiences by turning it into a slick animated video.
It’s a problem of academia’s growing marketisation: as global competition builds and public budgets shrink, metrics and shallow “engagement” seem to matter more than quality. And to an extent you can understand the reasoning. If peer review matters so much, why not buy it? If EU funding can make or break a career, why not pay someone to help you get your hands on it?
The ‘problem’, however, is that quality does still matter. These emails might require a bit more reading—you have to at least glance at their content. But the really helpful emails—the ones that teach you something, bring genuine opportunities and put you in touch with interesting people—still rise above the clamour and the noise. And so, at least for now, I will continue clearing my path through the weeds, my trusty delete button by my side.
Elsje Fourie is associate professor of Globalisation & Development Studies