Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/66

 To expand upon the above introduction to the symbolic capital of reputation in academia, prestige, in terms of publication venue, is accumulated through an economy of scarcity. It is deﬁnitively gained through exclusivity, in which one decides to publish only the best material. The deﬁnition of ‘best’ is formulated through a negotiated process of peer review to ascertain likely future winners in terms of content. The process is ‘negotiated’ because review is mediated, in all cases, by an editor. This can be an academic editor who may choose to apply different criteria, or a commissioning editor of a monograph who may also have to balance the marketability of an individual book against a set of glowing reader reports while also taking into account the overall list coherence (both in terms of the intellectual coherence of a publisher’s offerings and in terms of the economic sense in taking on a title).

Prestige, however, is a proxy measure for quality. It economically mirrors academic labour scarcity because it stands as a surrogate in order to avoid the labour-intensive practices of constantly reappraising academic material in every situation. A journal’s or publisher’s prestige, then, can be considered as a labour-saving shorthand that, in theory, should denote a venue in which top experts deemed other material to be ﬁrst rate. If the experts in a ﬁeld can only be asked to review a certain quantity of material and if those producing topquality research can only submit a certain amount of work to a limited number of venues, the argument goes, then a prestigious journal or publisher will only take scholarship from the academics reviewed and favoured by those experts. However, because prestige is a proxy measure tied to labour scarcity, acting as a substitute for quality, it is not, therefore, right to think of quality and prestige as the same. In fact, it is possible that they can drift apart, which is where problems can occur. As Peter Suber puts it, primarily in relation to journals:

Quality and prestige overlap signiﬁcantly. Because quality feeds prestige and prestige feeds quality, this is no accident. But sometimes they diverge, for at least three reasons: because some journals are new and prestige takes time to cultivate, because prestige is a zero-sum game and quality is not, and because prestige can be based on inaccurate or outdated judgments of quality. It’s always convenient, and usually irresistible, to use prestige as a surrogate for quality. When quality and prestige overlap, that’s entirely