Branding Scholarly Journals: Transmuting Symbolic Capital into Economic Capital

The authors analyse a relatively recent commercial strategy adopted by the major scientific publishers, which consists in exploiting the brand image of their most prestigious journals. By transferring the symbolic capital of a prestigious journal to spin-off journals, publishers capture part of this prestige by carrying the brand of the original journal in their titles, thus transforming it into new economic capital. Through manuscript transfer mechanisms, publishers also use some of the articles rejected by their highly selective flagship journals to recycle and monetize them in the lower-impact or open access spin-off journals on their list. Download the article.