Is Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid the Antidote to the Predatory Journal Problem?

Abstract

Academic capitalism has encouraged the development of pay-to-publish journals, and may have also encouraged the proliferation of poor-quality profit motivated predatory journals. Predatory journals undermine the confidence that people have in scientific research, and have created an ethical crisis. Alternatives to capitalist ideologies can reveal how an anti-capitalist intervention to the predatory journal problem might be developed. A response to the predatory journal problem might be developed using a collaborative behaviour referred to as mutual aid. Mutual aid is an organisational component of the anarchist communism proposed by Russian dissident, geographer, zoologist, and anarchist Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin. Networks of non-commercial not-for-profit online open access publishing houses and journals could be developed by faculty in higher education institutions using a mutual aid strategy. It is entirely possible that a gradual and sustained increase in (anti-capitalist) online open access journals would result in a gradual and sustained decrease in (capitalist) predatory journals.