Scholarly Publishing: Reforms for User Friendliness and System Efficiency

In academic publishing, editors and publishers may think they give too much leeway to authors and scholars in terms of content, quality control, and scheduling of production, while academic contributors grumble that they are cold-shouldered, pushed around, manipulated, and even abused by the publisher and the printing establishment. There is obviously room for reform and change. This paper proposes ten different ideas or measures for institutional reform in scholarly publishing. The underlying intent is to make academic publishing a user-friendly operation and an efficient system that serves individual scholars for a productive, successful, and satisfactory academic career.