Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/67

 legitimate. But when they diverge, favoring prestige harms university hiring practices, research funding practices, and the growth [of ] every kind of science and scholarship represented by new journals (which always lack prestige). Universities have a responsibility to notice when prestige and quality diverge, resist the almost irresistible temptation to favor prestige in those cases, do their best to recognize and reward quality, and give faculty an incentive to put quality ﬁrst as well.6

Because prestige is used as a surrogate for quality that acts to compensate for labour scarcity, it also rests upon particular ﬁnancial considerations pertaining to labour. The ﬁrst and most important of these observations is that the model of traditional review, in which material is pre-screened for worthiness, relies upon academic labour. Validation is performed through a process whereby academics confer value upon the piece in question. The system that is erected here is one wherein humanities academics cyclically confer prestige upon a journal or publisher twofold by submitting their pieces to the venue that they believe to be the most prestigious and by reviewing with strict (even if unquantiﬁable) standards for those same destinations. Reviewer selection is often the task of an academic or commissioning editor who knows the ﬁeld. In short: many of the major elements of authority and value that constitute the selection process and that therefore build prestige are undertaken by academics.

However, there are at least three reasons why academic labour is a necessary but insufﬁcient condition for prestige accumulation in scholarly communications. Firstly, this is because there is a coordination role in which publisher labour and expertise is deployed; cultural and material capitals. Secondly, there is a negotiated and mediated process of selection in which the publisher also participates to preserve its own necessary interests in the market and quality; another intersection of cultural and material capitals. Thirdly and ﬁnally, the existing possession of social, cultural, material and symbolic capital allows publishers to confer prestige; the various forms of capital historically acquired by publishers are bestowed, in turn, upon authors in a mutually re-enforcing cycle. Thus, while academic quality may be determined entirely by academics conducting peer review, the economics of prestige work very differently.

In terms of open access, there is, theoretically, no reason why a new gold open access venue could not accumulate substantial academic