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

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.