Khelfaoui, M. et Gingras, Y. (2020). Branding Scholarly Journals: Transmuting Symbolic Capital into Economic Capital. Montréal : Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie.
In this paper, we analyze a relatively recent commercial strategy devised by large academic publishers, consisting in the branding of their most prestigious scientific journals. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s model of capital conversion, we show how publishers transfer the symbolic capital of an already prestigious journal to derivative journals that capture part of the prestige of the original brand and transform it into new economic capital. As shown by their high impact factors, these new journals, bearing the mark of the original journal in their titles, are rapidly adopted by researchers. Through manuscript transfer mechanisms, publishers also use part of the papers rejected by their flagship and highly selective jour-nals to recycle and monetize them in lower impact or open access derivative journals of their lists.
This content has been updated on 9 October 2020 at 10 h 02 min.