David Glance, Director of the Centre for Software Practices at University of Western Australia wrote in The Conversation on the 8th July 2012, a thought provoking article on the long tail of academic publishing. The main point being, that the high publication rates of a few high achieving academics is generally matched by the many academics with modest outputs and that universities should not overlook this fact.

David Glance stated:
As a consequence of government funding approaches and global university ranking schemes, universities have been encouraged to look at the quantity of overall output from their institutions. This has caused some universities to focus on the "short head" part of the distribution, imagining how good it would be to expand that section by having every academic be a "hit" and move into the head of the distribution.

Visit The Conversation to read this article - The long tail of academic publishing and why it isn't a bad thing.