Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/68

 credibility and prestige over time, should it attract the prerequisite submissions and reviewers. Indeed, there are many reasons why a gold open access venue may fare better on prestige in the long run. For example, the fact that there is no need to ﬁll an issue in order to give subscribers value for money should make it possible to be more exclusive, if one desired.7 This is undercut, however, by a strongly conservative disciplinary mechanism. The hiring, ﬁring and promotion committees for which prestige serves as a useful proxy measure also fuel the need for academics to publish in existing venues that hold prestige. This same disciplinary mechanism, itself, partly restricts the ability for academics to publish wheresoever they might like with impunity; researchers sometimes select to publish in the venue that they feel will do the most for their research assessment return rankings or employability (its prestige) as a primary criterion. In many cases, ﬂedgling (OA) journals are not believed to fulﬁl these criteria. Prestige takes a long time to accumulate because the proxy measure requires a signiﬁcant sample to prove its worth and because new venues are competing within an economically regulated ﬁeld of symbolic capital.

From this logic, a partial answer to the ﬁrst of my questions can emerge: the accumulation of prestige, as a form of symbolic capital, is difﬁcult as the system is heavily weighted towards the normative. The use of prestige as a proxy measure by research exercises and hiring procedures has, to some extent, a disciplinary function that encourages publication in known venues. Likewise, publishers have an incentive to seek out academics who are known quantities (possessing social and symbolic capital), particularly in the monograph sphere, to preserve their own prestige. These factors increase the number of high-quality micro-monopolies (published articles/books) held by such publishers and through this cycle the prices of top venues can go up. Although it could be possible for such publishing entities to use this privileged position (when they hold much quality material) to lower costs across the subscriber and/or purchaser base (simply by dint of a larger number of subscriptions and purchases), and although some publishers would probably say that they do so, this is against the market logics of proﬁt, scarcity and perceived-value pricing. At the same time, as these disciplinary measures make it harder for new venues to gain prestige, the market logic that competition could force prices down is not particularly efﬁcacious.