Nathalie Ann Köbli and colleagues, writing for Frontiers in Communication on gamification of social scientists’ publishing:
Quantifying publication outcomes to assess and financially incentivize research performance results in a highly competitive playing field where access to goods and services is denied to those who play the game poorly. The pressure to publish leads to unethical behavior and predatory publishing which are two side-effects of gamified practices. The reviewed literature also shows unequal starting conditions in terms of gender and language inequalities, as well as the dominance of the Global North. We conclude that the gamification of publication practices in the Social Sciences leads to stressful and dreadful environments.
It’s an excellent, sobering review, one that traces the gamified incentives to the university-market nexus. If anything, the authors’ core point—that publishing is miserable for everyone, and worse still for those on the academic periphery—could be deepened with a nod to author-excluding APCs.