Supporting academic freedom as a human right: challenges and solutions in academic publishing

ABSTRACT

This article explores academic freedom as it relates to scholarly publishing. While most discussions of academic freedom as a human right focus on threats to individuals’ personal safety and careers, we open this out to include the ‘soft repression’ that it is possible to encounter during the publication process, and its potential impact on the scholarly record. An overview is given of some of the ethical issues encountered by editors and publishers working with authors experiencing academic, intellectual, or political repression – for example, the manifestation of these issues in authorship, metadata, transparency and reproducibility, research ethics, and competing interests. We go on to formulate suggestions on managing such conflicts while upholding academic freedoms and the integrity of the scholarly record.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic freedom
• publication ethics
• academic publishing
• authorship
• censorship

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Cambridge University Press partner societies and editors for sharing their experiences, and to Dr Mohammad Hosseini for his helpful input on the scholarly literature on authorship. We also thank the reviewers and special issue editors for their helpful comments and feedback.

Disclosure statement

Wright, Avouris, and Hoffmann are employed by Cambridge University Press and have encountered many of the scenarios discussed in the paper through their management of a research integrity team (Wright) and the editorial management of a list of journals (Avouris and Hoffmann). Frost declares none.

Notes

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