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 gained through an economic rationing of material. The accumulation of prestige then affects the material economics and pricing of scholarly research. In truth, it is difﬁcult to think through the economics of open access, or even of scholarly communications, without ﬁrst understanding quality control mechanisms and the means by which they are appraised. This is because the economics of scholarly publication are concerned with scarcity, supply and demand, which are all aspects mirrored in the processes of quality control that condition the ﬂow of academic material.

For those versed in Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of material, social, cultural and symbolic capital, whereby ﬁnancial and reputational forms become interchangeable, this link between prestige and material economics will not come as a surprise. In fact, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu writes of a ‘conversion of material capital into symbolic capital itself reconvertible into material capital’.3 In this particular instance, a piece of research work is a demonstration of an author’s cultural capital; it is the product of the skill, knowledge and ability of the author(s). The acceptance of such research by publishers who possess both material capital (needed to undertake the labour and effectively disseminate the work) and cultural capital (knowledge of publishing and academic systems) constitutes a payoff in the form of social capital (endorsement and support) for the author that can be re-converted back into the symbolic capital (prestige/reputation) that is needed for peer respect and a job/ promotion (material capital). Acquiring authors with high levels of cultural, social or symbolic capital for their list improves a press’s own social, symbolic and material capital (in the ability to sell research).

However, Bourdieu also notes that this very phenomenon of interchangeability is often denied by participating societies. In the case of scholarly communication this stems from the conjoined facts that prestige is useful to academics but also that the academy and especially the humanities often wish to distance themselves from market economics. Indeed, as Bourdieu puts it, ‘The endless reconversion of economic capital into symbolic capital, at the cost of a wastage of social energy which is the condition for the permanence of domination, cannot succeed without the complicity of the whole group: the work of denial which is the source of social alchemy is,