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Digital Transformation of Academic Publishing: A Call for the Decentralization and Democratization of Academic Journals

Summary

Avital characterizes a market failure in academic publishing in which commercial publishers extract exorbitant profits at the expense of the scientific enterprise and society. He examines how emerging technologies — primarily blockchain (Web3) and AI — might help the scientific community restore an institutional logic that favors scholarship and public benefit. He proposes a two-pronged strategy to rebalance power and improve the publishing experience, calling on the IS community to transform journals "from monolithic monarchies to agile democracies."

Contribution

Argues for a two-pronged Web3-and-AI strategy to decentralize and democratize academic journals, framing this as a grand-challenge response that the IS community is well positioned to lead.

Method

Opinion piece; conceptual call-to-action without empirical evaluation.

Relevance to RISE

Avital (CBS) argues that academic publishing should be decentralized — relevant context for AI-native publishing venues like 1 and for the catalog's broader publishing focus value.

Critique / open questions

Single-author opinion piece without empirical evaluation or detailed technical design; the feasibility of the proposed blockchain-plus-AI two-pronged strategy is asserted rather than demonstrated.

  1. Zhang, P. et al. (2025). aiXiv: A next-generation open access ecosystem for scientific discovery generated by AI scientists. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15126 ↩