Técnicas e instrumentos de recolección de los datos:

Academia has been described as a prestige economy, in which certain markers of esteem fulfil an economic function as symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1977: 171–83;

Eve 2014: 43–55; Eve 2017a: 64). Publishing research, as Eve (2014: 44) asserts, is a pivotal aspect of this prestige economy. In Bourdieu’s terms, since symbolic capital and material (economic) capital are interchangeable and interconvertible (Bourdieu 1977: 177–81), prestige as accrued by researchers through academic

publication – and especially through publishing in particular venues (see Eve 2014:

44–47; Thompson 2005: 83) – acts as a form of symbolic capital that is convertible to economic capital through its role in securing academic jobs.³⁰ As such, publishing academic research is fundamental for building a career in academia. For this reason, although contemporary researchers regard the role of publishers in disseminating works as important (Wolff-Eisenberg, Rod, and Schonfeld 2016, 2016a), it is the accreditation function of publishing that to a large extent determines how and where researchers publish their work.

The uses of media, whether they are print or electronic, are bound up with social practices (Thompson 2005: 326). Trends in publishing tend to follow, or co-develop with, trends in the wider research community – for example, the

internationalisation of science is what led to international journals, rather than the other way round (see Baldwin 2015: 198).³¹ Therefore any technological

developments cannot be understood separately from the social context in which they exist. For academic publishing, this means that the accreditation function of

publishing for academic careers remains a key determinant of the ways in which new technologies are used. In other words, the ‘gatekeeping’ function of publishing, whereby under conditions of scarcity the brand of a journal title or publishing house confers prestige on authors to use as symbolic capital in their career development, is by no means automatically reduced by the shift to online publishing. The political sociologist Horowitz (1990: 22, 162–68) recognised this fact even in the pre-web digital era of the late 1980s, and the need to publish in particular venues remains strong today (Nicholas et al. 2017, 2017a).

Academic publishing in its current form is therefore intrinsically linked with academic labour. Not only is published content the product of academics’ labour, but the system of accreditation conferred through the proxy of publisher brands is widely suspected of being used to outsource hiring decisions within the higher education workplace, rather than assessment of quality being undertaken by those doing the hiring. By delegating the evaluation of the ‘quality’ of research to

30 The idea of higher education as an investment in personal ‘human capital’ – expending economic capital to procure symbolic capital (a qualification) which in turn produces greater economic capital (well-paid jobs) – is returned to later in the thesis in discussions on neoliberal views of the function of higher education.

31 Although it could be argued that journals, in turn, have entrenched existing disciplinary structures through defining what is or is not acceptable for publication.

(usually) unknown peer reviewers at a journal, ‘universities have effectively outsourced to journals and publishers the function of assessing academic quality’

(Smith 2013). As with other areas where digital technology has been changing scholarly practice (see Weller 2011, 2018), the move to digital – and open – academic publishing does not disentangle researchers from the prestige economy.

The implications of all this are felt by researchers across the world. For instance, in India, ‘the Academic Performance Indicator (API) is a metric used in universities to evaluate the teaching and research performance of faculty members, but credit is heavily weighted towards publishing in journals – particularly those with high impact factors’ (Murugesan 2017). And in China, under a ‘cash-per-publication’ system, researchers are rewarded with hefty bonuses for getting a paper published in journals ranked highly in the Web of Science citation index, with even higher rates for Nature or Science papers in particular (Quan, Chen, and Shu 2017).

The reward systems of academia that maintain the prestige economy thus impact decisions that researchers make about how to focus their time and labour.

As mentioned above, the symbolic logic of prestige within academia is in tension with the dominant commercial practices of publishers (Fyfe et al. 2017).³² In the humanities, academics continue to rely on publishing monographs in order to secure tenure and promotion (Maxwell, Bordini, and Shamash 2017), but these are not profitable enough for many commercial publishers so they have shifted their focus away from monographs and towards other kinds of books such as textbooks (Thompson 2005: 166). This ‘monograph crisis’ (Mongeau 2018), in which a growing number of humanities researchers are chasing what appears to be a shrinking capacity of publishers to produce new monographs, exacerbates the anxiety felt by early-career researchers who tend to have highly precarious working conditions (Bothwell 2018). Indeed, the casualisation of the academic workforce may well be forcing researchers to prioritise publication strategies that are more likely to lead to securing employment rather than more potentially progressive goals such as openness, which, as discussed in Chapter 8, is not yet a common

requirement of hiring and promotion (Alperin et al. 2018; Odell, Coates, and Palmer 2016; Schol Comm Lab 2018; Morais and Borrell-Damian 2018: 7). As Fecher et al.

32 The tension between these logics has occurred despite the fact that both sectors became increasingly marketised throughout the later twentieth century (see Chapter 6 on the marketisation of higher education).

(2017) frame it, the reward systems of academia’s reputation economy are

precluding a greater uptake of open practices. The rest of this chapter will explore other ways in which the economic practices of publishing and the social practices of academia are not aligning to produce an optimal level of access to research.