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 discoverability mechanism; they can ﬁnd good material by knowing where it will be. However, if academics and/or the public are unable to access this material because of pricing, then did prestige help with dissemination? While it is absolutely true that the highest-prestige journals and presses might offer brilliantly targeted discoverability and dissemination, is it the case that a prestigious pay-for-access version could always and intrinsically be better disseminated than an open-access equivalent? Furthermore, in theory, should not targeted ampliﬁcation and dissemination also be possible with an open-access version? Access to academic materials is wider than ever before, particularly through partnership schemes with public libraries. For the speciﬁc question of whether prestige is causally connected to accessibility in the context of OA, however, this can be viewed as an issue of dissemination against discoverability.

3. How do prestige and quality interact? Using a branded proxy measure (a journal/publisher) to evaluate whether material is good (well selected by peer review) comes with advantages. It reduces the labour time in ﬁnding excellent research and makes the effort of hiring panels viable. However, if good research is determined by the academic community and through peer review, how does the publisher or journal brand correspond to that determination? Especially in smaller ﬁelds, the same reviewers often work for different journals and publishers, so the choice of where a piece was submitted could potentially have no bearing upon the reviewer pool. Under what circumstances do quality and prestige, therefore, diverge?

These critical questions are designed to make it possible to reconsider prestige as an economic force that is both constituted by and affects the academic community. The critical framing of these questions is certainly not designed to deny the pragmatic beneﬁts that come with prestige. As I outlined above, the over-supply of qualiﬁed individuals for a small number of posts attests to the need for proxy measures that accurately denote quality. Publishers’ and journals’ ‘brand-name’ prestige is one such proxy measure. It seems important, however, to explore these questions if an understanding of scholarly economics with regard to open access is to emerge.