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Expanding : Product-Line and Brand Extensions of a Scientific Journal

Mahdi Khelfaoui ([email protected]) and Yves Gingras ([email protected])

Paper accepted for publication in Learned Publishing

Abstract

Academic publishers now market their most prestigious journals as commercial brands. This paper investigates this trend in the scholarly publishing market, by analyzing how the successive owners of the journal Nature have capitalized on its reputation to generate additional profits to those already accumulated through university library subscriptions. Two branding strategies of the journal Nature are analyzed: the first one, product-line extension, consists in extending the Nature brand in the same product category, by creating an ever-increasing number of derived Nature journals; the second one, brand extension, consists in extending the Nature brand to other categories of products and services, such as academic rankings, sponsored supplements, feature advertisements, or webinars and trainings. The Nature brand leveraging strategy has been imitated by many other journal publishers. These branded products and services are well suited to the particular dynamics of the scientific field, which is based on the continuous quest for recognition. They are thus sold at all stages of the cycle, from writing grants to popularizing research results, to and academic institutions competing to accumulate symbolic capital. In this respect, academic publishers that engage in scholarly journal branding contribute to the transformation of the scientific “community” into a scientific market.

Introduction

After the Second World War, the production of scientific articles and the creation of scholarly journals grew exponentially (Price, 1963). Private companies became significantly involved, along learned scientific societies, in scholarly journal publishing (Fyfe, 2021). Over the last decades, while it could be expected that the widespread use of digital technologies and the Internet would democratize access to scientific knowledge and diminish publication costs, private companies, on the contrary, reinforced their dominant positions on the academic publishing market, to the point where it is now shaped by an oligopoly of a handful of giant firms (Larivière et al., 2015). Hence, in addition to being vehicles of knowledge, scholarly journals have become important assets from which large conglomerates try to extract as much economic value as possible. While the adverse effects of the increasingly market-driven orientation of the academic publishing industry on the accessibility of scientific knowledge have been largely documented (Harnad et al., 2008; Shu et al., 2018; Larivière, 2020), little has been said on the consequences of this particular form of control on the transformation and multiplication of journals.

One of them is that, in order to increase the already large profits they generate from university library subscriptions and licensing fees (Hagve, 2020), some academic publishers now tend to operate their most important titles as commercial brands. In other words, private publishers use different branding strategies to convert the symbolic capital of their most prestigious journals, often accumulated throughout a very long publication history, into additional economic capital. In a previous paper, we

1 discussed one particular form of branding devised by academic publishers, that of creating derived or spin-off journals from the most prestigious titles in their portfolio (Khelfaoui & Gingras, 2020). This commercial strategy differs from the practice of journal splits, as exemplified, for example, by the American Physical Society’s Physical Review which, given the increasing fragmentation of the discipline was split into Physical Review A, B, C, and D in 1970, each journal being devoted to a particular speciality. By capturing part of the prestige of the original journals, the derived journals become rapidly attractive to researchers and contribute to generating more revenues to the publishers. In marketing terms, this strategy corresponds to a product line extension whereby “a current brand name is leveraged to enter a new market within the same product class” (Royo-Vela & Voss, 2015, p. 145). We explained the tremendous success of spin-off journal branding by using Pierre Bourdieu’s model of capital conversions (Bourdieu, 1986), which helps understand the conversion process of a specific form of capital, the symbolic capital accumulated by prestigious scientific journals, into another form of capital, an economic capital accumulated by academic publishers.

The present paper further develops our investigation of the strategies used by academic publishers to capitalize on their brand names, by offering a detailed analysis of the pioneering and thus paradigmatic case of Nature. Considered one of the most prestigious scientific journals of the last century, Nature has been subjected to different commodification strategies by its successive owners over the past thirty years. After briefly recalling our analysis of the Nature product line extension strategy through the creation of a “family” of Nature derived journals, we identify other means implemented to capitalize on the Nature brand. As opposed to product line extension, which limits branding to the creation of new products of the same category, in this case Nature derived journals, the recent multiplication of products and services around the Nature brand shows that its owners also use brand extension strategies, which consist in extending the established brand of a given product to other categories of products (Aaker & Keller, 1990). In the case of Nature, these products and services consist in offering academic rankings, sponsored supplements, feature advertisements, popular magazines, workshops and webinars on scientific writing, publishing and data management, or even sponsored research awards. The Nature brand extension do not only target scientists, but also universities, non-profit organizations as well as private industries. Its success is based on the principle of “prestige by association”, whereby an organization pays to have its name, or its brand, associated with that of Nature in order to benefit from the journal’s prestige through a kind of halo effect.

In conclusion, we reflect on how these marketing strategies of selling products and services to scientists and their institutions at all stages of the research cycle – rapidly imitated, as we will see, by other publishers – contribute to transforming the so-called scientific “community” into a scientific market. Given that sociological analysis is often taken as “criticism”, it is worth noting here that our main objective is not to argue whether scholarly journal branding is “detrimental” or “beneficial” to science in general – which would simply be offering an arbitrary value judgment – but rather to provide an explanation of how this form of branding has only recently been used and why it has now become a commercial strategy adopted by many scholarly publishers.

2 The (ever-expanding) “family” of Nature journals

Nature was established in 1869 as a weekly scientific magazine by British astronomer Norman Lockyer and has been published by the publishing house Macmillan for more than a century. Initially, the journal did not solely target scientific audiences but was more broadly intended for the British educated public. From the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, the journal became a central forum for scientists debating cutting-edge scientific issues, as well as a venue where they could quickly publish their most important works in a short format (Baldwin, 2015). Famous scientific discoveries published in the journal have contributed to building its international reputation, such as the discovery of the neutron in 1932, nuclear fission in 1939, the DNA structure in 1953, pulsars in 1968, or the sequencing of the human genome in 2001. In 1995, German media giant Holtzbrinck bought 71% of Nature’s historical publisher MacMillan and completed its purchase in 1999. That same year, The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) was created from a merger between Stockton Press, also a scholarly journal publisher, and MacMillan Magazines, which still published Nature. In 2015, Holtzbrinck and NPG, then known as Nature Research, merged with another giant publisher, Springer, leading to the creation of the group, the world’s second largest academic publisher. The Springer Nature group is 53% owned by Holtzbrink and the remaining 47% is held by the BC Partners private equity group, an international firm specializing in leveraged buyouts. Since 2018, Springer Nature has been considering a stock-market listing in the Frankfurt stock exchange, an entry valued at more than 3 billion euros (Syed & Henning, 2019).

The successive passage of Nature in the hands of MacMillan, Holtzbrinck, and Springer had important consequences on the commodification of the journal. As shown in detail elsewhere (Khelfaoui & Gingras, 2020), the first manifestation of this process consisted in the launch of a “family” of Nature journals which started in the beginning of the 1990s. At that time, McMillan understood the symbolic hierarchy of journals and found a way to extract more economic value from its flagship journal by transferring its symbolic capital to derivative journals that extend the original product. The transfer of symbolic capital from the original title to its derivatives happens through a naming strategy whereby the prestigious brand Nature is included in the names of the new journals. Thus, in addition to the well- known Nature, there are now Nature , Nature Immunology, Nature , Nature , , Nature and , and so on. Unlike Nature, which aims to be a multidisciplinary journal accepting contributions from a large spectrum of scientific disciplines, the Nature derived journals have a disciplinary focus. Between 1992 and 2020, 34 such Nature branded research titles were created. The high impact factors and rankings obtained by these new journals in the Journal of Citation Report confirm that the transfer of symbolic capital from Nature to its derivatives takes place in a relatively rapid period of time. In 2019, all Nature branded journals ranked among the top-10 of their subject categories, most of them ranking in the top-5. The fact that these journals, without a publication history on which they could build their reputation, attract a large number of paper submissions and readers also confirms that scientists believe that the sole presence of the name Nature in the new titles is a sign of quality. Nature derived journals thus provide a striking example of brand

3 equity (Aaker, 1991), since their symbolic value to researchers, and their added economic value to their publisher, rest exclusively on the perceived prestige of the original Nature brand.

While several publishers have adopted journal brand extension in the last two decades, we focus our analysis on Nature as an exemplary and paradigmatic case. Nature has indeed pioneered this practice, which was later imitated by other commercial publishers. As historian Melinda Baldwin recalls, as early as 1971, Nature’s then editor John Maddox tried to divide the journal into three different publications (Nature, Nature New Biology, and Nature Physical Science), which would be run under the same editorial office. However, the experiment failed and Nature resumed publication as a single journal in 1974 (Baldwin, 2015). MacMillan repeated, this time successfully, Maddox’s experiment in 1992 by launching a first branded and editorially independent journal, . This journal was followed by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology in 1994, Nature in 1995, Nature in 1996 and Nature in 1998. It was not until 1998 that Elsevier launched its first Cell branded journal, Molecular Cell, followed a year later by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which started its Science branded journals with Science Signaling. Publishers of other prestigious journals followed the trend in the 2000s: Elsevier launched Lancet Oncology, the first of many Lancet branded journals, in 2000; the American Chemical Society started the ACS brand around its flagship Journal of the American Chemical Society with ACS Chemical Biology in 2006; the British Medical Association followed with its first British Medical Journal (BMJ) branded journal, BMJ Case Reports, in 2008; the American Medical Association renamed its suite of Archive of journals into JAMA journals in 2013 for spectacular results in terms of scientific impact and visibility (see Khelfaoui & Gingras, 2020, p. 11).

Other publishers of less prestigious, often , journals have also adopted the product-line branding strategy. It is for instance the case of Frontiers Media, whose majority shareholder is the Nature Group since 2013. After successfully launching Frontiers in Neuroscience in 2007, it has created 80 other open access Frontiers in branded journals. Another example is BioMed Central, owned by Springer Nature since 2008, which publishes the BMC journals series. Even non-profit publishers can adopt product-line extension as part of their business model, as the case of the Public Library of Science (PLOS) demonstrates. After running ten PLOS branded journals for the past 14 years, including the best known mega-journal PLOS One, PLOS launched simultaneously five new open access journals in 2021 (Else, 2021), in an effort to balance poor financial results in recent years (Davis, 2019).

In addition to expanding Springer Nature’s lucrative portfolio of highly ranked journals, Nature derivative journals are also used to generate additional revenues through manuscript transfers. Indeed, only roughly 8% of the 200 papers submitted each week to Nature are actually published. The 92% remaining don’t pass the peer review barrier or are desk rejected. Thanks to a manuscript transfer mechanism, also called “cascade” by other publishers, set by Nature Research, these papers are not lost to other publishers but rather redirected to its derivative journals following authors approval. The efficiency of this transfer rests on the symbolic hierarchy of Nature derived journals, which allows submitted articles to be transferred from more prestigious and more selective to less prestigious and less

4 selective Nature branded journals. Springer Nature’s marketing team has conceptualized this hierarchy as a pyramidal structure (Üzüm & Gonzalez, 2016, p. 4). Nature, with the highest symbolic capital of its family of journals, is at the top of the pyramid. Manuscripts that are rejected by Nature can be transferred to the second level of the pyramid, represented by the Nature derived research journals which, although less prestigious than the original, are still very attractive with high impact factors and low acceptance rates, sometimes below 10%. At the third level of the pyramid, the multidisciplinary open access journal , with a 5,380$ article processing charge (APC), is another alternative for manuscript transfers. With a 20% acceptance rate (Butcher, 2013), it is less selective than Nature and the other Nature research journals and has its own brand of Communication derived journals (Communications Biology, Communication Physics, Communication Chemistry, etc.). This family of six open access journals was started in 2017 “to provide a home for all the great research that doesn’t quite make it into Nature Communications” (Gerstner, 2018). The Communication branded journals are thus also part of the manuscript transfer mechanism and constitute the fourth level of the pyramid, with a 3,290$ APC. At the bottom level, , Nature Research’s open access mega-journal, one finds the last transfer option with an 1,870 $ APC and 60% acceptance rate (Figure 1).

Figure 1 – Nature’s manuscript transfer pyramid structure

Until recently, the Nature journal product line extension has been limited to the natural, medical and engineering disciplines, but the Springer Nature group is now trying to expand its scope to include the social and the humanities (SSH) as well. Interestingly, it has not decided to use the Nature brand for this purpose, but instead combined it with the Springer brand which is an already well- established publisher of scholarly journals in SSH disciplines. This combination led to the creation of the SN brand (for Springer Nature) and the launch of two new journals in 2020: SN Social Sciences and SN Business & Economics. The same year, Springer Nature also relaunched the journal Palgrave Communications as a new open access journal called Humanities & Social Sciences Communications.

5 Aiming to publish research “from across all areas of the humanities, behavioural and social sciences”, this journal is reminiscent of the derived and similarly open access journal Nature Communications, which covers a wide range of natural sciences disciplines. Interestingly, Humanities & Social Sciences Communications is listed under the of journals and its website address reads as “nature.com/palcomms”, which gives it the visual impression of being part of the “family” of Nature journals.

Extending the Nature brand to other products and services

Another way in which Nature branded journals can serve Springer Nature’s commercial strategy is through the Nature Index, in which we have a first example of brand extension. Also published in the form of a supplement to Nature several times a year, the Nature Index is a monthly updated ranking of countries and institutions. This ranking is constructed on the basis of the number of research articles countries and institutions publish in “an independently selected group of 82 high-quality science journals”, which includes 21 (25%) Nature derived journals. According to its creators, Nature Index is of value to scientific research institutions in three different ways: firstly, by allowing them to track how much “high-quality scientific research” they publish; secondly, by knowing which institutions make “the biggest absolute contribution to high-quality scientific research”; thirdly, by knowing which institutions and countries collaborate with each other to produce such “high-quality research”. It seems obvious that university managers, who happen to believe in the validity of such a ranking and want to improve their positions in it, may incite their researchers to publish in the Nature Index list of 82 self-proclaimed “elite” journals (Gingras, 2016). Though the Index does include non-Nature journals to make it less obviously self-serving, it remains that the whole enterprise consists in promoting journals of the Nature family. Thus, one can expect that taking the Nature Index seriously may lead universities and their researchers to seeking to publish more articles in Nature branded journals, which would only generate more commercial revenues for the Springer Nature group according to the pyramid structure described above. Since the publication of the first Nature Index supplement in 2014, Nature has published 4 to 7 of them each year, for a total of 35 between January 2014 and May 2021. These supplements can either have a national, regional or disciplinary outlook. They are sponsored by universities, which are promoted inside the supplements through articles labelled as “advertisement features”, thus adding to the economic value generated by the Nature Index.

The proliferation of sponsored contents in Nature

Another way of converting Nature’s prestige into revenues consists in selling its symbolic capital directly to academic institutions or private companies, by allowing them to associate their names with the Nature trademark, a strategy which we might call “prestige by association”. One form taken by this strategy consists in massively increasing the number of advertised and sponsored contents inside the pages of Nature. More broadly, academic institutions, non-profit organizations and private companies can pay to advertise their research activities, products or services in Nature, its derived journals or one of the other Springer Nature related web platforms, through different kinds of editorial contents. This

6 Nature brand extended service is offered by the Nature Partnerships division of Springer Nature. On its website, the group offers two main categories of advertising services: supported contents and advertisement contents. In the first category, supported contents are described as “editorially independent”. As specified on the Nature Research Partnerships website, “in this arrangement, a marketing partner pays to align its brand with content already deemed worthy of coverage by our editorial departments” (Nature, 2017a). The second category, advertisement contents or advertisement features, is not editorially independent. The advertiser and Nature’s custom media team are both involved in producing “an immersive article, prominently featuring [the] organization as a trusted partner” (Nature, 2017b). In this case, the advertiser bears ultimately the sole responsibility of the content. Both categories of services are not mutually exclusive, since it is possible for a customer to sponsor a Nature supplement which also contains advertisement features.

Another form of commercial space purchasing in Nature consists in sponsoring a journal supplement or a special section, which would cover a subject of interest to the sponsor, or directly promote its research activities, products and infrastructures. These supplements include what Nature describes as “editorially independent” articles, such as papers written by freelance journalists or short review papers written by scientists, as well as advertisement features. The attractiveness of such supplements rests on the circulation of symbolic and economic capitals between the Nature journal, the sponsors, as well as the researchers invited to contribute “independent” pieces inside the supplements. Nature uses its symbolic capital to invite researchers that are recognized experts in their fields, usually affiliated to highly regarded universities, to contribute short synthetic papers in the sponsored supplements. Some of these researchers may accept this opportunity to publish in Nature and add the journal’s name on their CVs, even if it is not really a peer-reviewed article. Through their own reputation and that of their university or research institution, invited contributors also reinforce the sponsored supplement’s scientific credibility. Thus, with the mediation of the Nature brand, invited contributors indirectly transfer their symbolic capital and that of their institution to less prestigious universities, and lend scientific credibility to private company sponsors, mainly the pharmaceutical industry. In other words, in paying for a Nature supplement, the sponsor benefits from a double halo effect: one from the alignment of its brand with the Nature brand, and the other from its association with renowned researchers affiliated with prestigious institutions. The circulation of symbolic and economic capitals in supplements to Nature is illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – The circulation of symbolic and economic capitals in Nature supplements

7 Since the publication of the first sponsored Nature supplement in 1999, these so-called “editorial partnerships” have taken different names inside the journal as if they were experimenting the best way to package those essays: Insight, Outlook, Outline, Spotlight, Focal Point. (The electronic versions of these supplements can be found at: https://www.nature.com/nature/collections) Their annual numbers have increased relatively slowly until 2017 when they suddenly doubled (Figure 3). This radical increase coincided with the creation of the Nature Research Partnerships division of Springer Nature, which institutionalized and professionalized the group’s advertising services. Of the 239 sponsored supplements or special sections published in Nature between December 1999 and April 2021, 18% involved at least one academic institution and 73% involved at least one private company. More particularly, 43% involved at least one major pharmaceutical company, such as AstraZeneca, Roche, Pfizer, Merck or Gilead. Food products multinationals, such as Nestlé and Mars Inc., also sponsored several supplements tackling subjects such as nutrition science, obesity, allergies and ageing, as well as other subjects not directly related to their industrial activities.

Figure 3 - Evolution of the number of sponsored supplements in Nature

Beyond sponsored supplements and special sections published inside Nature, the journal’s website lists all advertisement features (excluding traditional advertising through ads) that appeared in the Nature branded journals printed or web platforms, for the period from May 2018 to May 2021. (These advertisement features can be found at: https://www.nature.com/nature/collections?type=advertisement- feature) This list includes 419 unique commercial partners, 52% of them being academic institutions, 35% private companies, and the rest (13%) composed of either non-profit, government or international organizations. Unsurprisingly, these different types of editorial partnerships primarily attract universities

8 from countries striving for international recognition. Indeed, of the 217 universities, hospitals or research institutes present in the list, 44% are from China, 20% from Japan, 9% from Australia and 6% from South-Korea. North American and Western European countries represent only 11% of the total. We also find these countries represented in similar proportions in the sponsors list of the above discussed Nature Index supplements. Indeed, out of the 35 Nature Index supplements published between January 2014 and May 2021, about 60% (22) include at least one Chinese university as a sponsor, 12 at least one Japanese university, 10 at least one Australian university, and 5 include at least one South Korean university. It is again striking that the scientifically most important institutions and countries of the world are nearly absent from that kind of self-promotion.

The internationally renowned journal Science, although run by a non-profit learned society, the AAAS, soon followed Nature’s lead in creating its own Custom Publishing Office. It manages, among other services, sponsored supplements and feature advertisements called “advertorials”. Since 2005, 39% of its special supplements and 27% of its advertorials have been sponsored by Chinese universities. On the other hand, private companies have sponsored 50% of the Science supplements and 36% of its advertorials. As shown in Figure 4, the journal has witnessed a major increase of the number of these two types of contents since 2017. This confirms that the largest learned societies, such as the AAAS or the American Chemical Society, are no longer pursuing a break-even business model, but have rather adopted a market-driven business model to increase their profits (Fyfe, 2021).

Figure 4 - Evolution of the number of sponsored supplements and advertorials in Science

9 Nature branded magazines

Another form of brand extension developed by Springer Nature consists of creating nationally or regionally oriented Nature branded digital magazines directed towards non-specialists. This trend started in 2007 with the launch of the Nature China website, which aimed at presenting “the highlights” of Chinese research to a broad Chinese audience. The Nature Asia digital portal extended this idea to the whole Asian continent, including a special focus on two regions: Nature , launched in 2008, and Nature Middle East, launched in 2009. In addition to describing and promoting, in a journalistic style, publications of scientists from these two regions, the magazines also invite them “to submit ideas for articles that express their thoughts on research-related issues and topics”. If deemed interesting, these “thoughts” can result in fully written pieces aimed at the general public. Since 2015, has also published six special issues sponsored by different academic institutions and private companies. Nature Italy and Nature Africa are the two latest additions to the Nature branded regional magazines. Launched in 2020 and 2021 respectively, they both aim at giving “scientists and professionals worldwide an insight into the latest research” produced in Italy and in African countries. Unlike the Nature branded research and review journals, these two digital magazines are not published by the Nature Research division, but by another independent Nature Springer division, Nature Portfolio. Although it claims the sole responsibility over the editorial content of these two publications, Nature Portfolio benefits from the financial support of external organizations: a consortium of pharmaceutical companies (Farmindustria, Kedrion Biopharma, Roche) and an Italian university hospital (IRCCS Ospedale San Raffaele) in the case of Nature Italy, and a consortium of six South-African universities in the case of Nature Africa.

A difficult equilibrium: profit seeking versus scientific integrity

The proliferation of sponsored and branded contents within scientific journals challenges the limits at which profit seeking may impinge on the integrity and soundness of scientific research. This problem is well known to the medical sciences, where the practice of advertising in scientific journals, particularly from pharmaceutical companies, is more deeply rooted than in other scientific fields (Sismondo, 2018; Smith, 2015; Bero et al., 1992). In 2010, an editorial of the prestigious journal The Lancet addressed the issue of sponsored supplement publishing, by recounting its own harsh experience with such type of content. A few years after being asked by its owner, Elsevier, to “consider the publication of commercially sponsored supplements", The Lancet’s editors deemed the experiment to be “a disaster”. Indeed, all supplement papers sent to the journal failed peer-review (note that in the case of Nature supplements, invited and sponsored articles are not peer-reviewed). The editorial concluded that publishing supplements is a “perilous business” and that editors “will always need to be vigilant in making sure that their journal’s good name is not abused” (Lancet, 2010). The exact mechanism which could “make sure” that the “good name” of the journal is not abused is however not explained.

10 There are at least two documented cases where Nature had to retract sponsored publications from its website in the last two years. These examples illustrate the risk that mixing science and advertising poses to the integrity of scientific research. The first case was reported in February 2019 by Paul Knoepfler, professor in the department of and human anatomy at the Davis and recognized expert on stem cells and regenerative medicine. The researcher discovered an article on Nature’s website which was actually not peer-reviewed but rather a sponsored paper by the Translational Center for Medical Innovation in Japan. Knoepfler identified two problems with this publication, which claimed that a certain type of stem cells – called Muse cells by its Japanese authors – could improve heart regeneration after myocardial infarction. First, while a note on the article’s web page indicated that it was an “advertisement feature”, the top of the webpage also described it as a “nature > article”, which might have confused a reader on the true nature of the publication, as shown by a screenshot of the article (Figure 5) taken by Knoepfler (2019).

Figure 5 – Screen capture of an advertised article removed from Nature’s website

Moreover, as noted by the American researcher, the indication that the “advertiser retains sole responsibility for the content of this article” was written in pale gray and an inattentive reader might have simply skipped it. The second problem concerned the topic of the article itself, since Knoepfler described Muse cells as controversial and questioned their very existence, asserting that “Muse cells hasn’t been convincing to many of us in the stem cell field” (Knoepfler, 2019). It was thus surprising to him to see an advertised article, with the appearance of as a standard research article, tackling a controversial topic be published in Nature without passing the peer-review barrier. After discussing these issues with the journal, Nature decided to remove the article from its website a few weeks later.

11 The second case was brought to public attention by Retraction Watch, a blog that regularly reports on retracted scientific publications. The case concerns an invited contribution in a special Nature Outlook supplement on the topic of extracellular RNA, written by Kenneth Witwer, a Johns Hopkins University professor and expert in “molecular and comparative pathobiology and neurology”. The Nature Outlook supplement was published in June 2020 and was sponsored by in China. Apart from Witwer’s single-page contribution, labelled as a “perspective” paper, the supplement included several short pieces from freelance journalists, and another single-page paper from a Yale University professor in immunology, similar in form to that of Witwer’s. The supplement ended with a five-page long paper written by two researchers affiliated with Nanjing University, the supplement sponsor. One of the co- authors was described by Retraction Watch as “one of the institution’s deans and star researchers”. After submitting his paper, which criticized previous studies done by the Nanjing researchers, Witwer’s was asked by the supplement editors to “reframe it so that it reads less like a direct critique of the research from the Nanjing and other researchers”. The piece was also heavily edited from valid criticism of the Nanjing studies, while allowing the Chinese researchers to write, according to Witwer, “a lengthy, inaccurate piece” and “to give a rosy view of their own work that virtually no one shares” (Retraction Watch, 2020). A few weeks after its publication, Nature retracted Witwer’s article, at his request. As is now indicated in the retraction notice available on Nature’s website: “The sponsorship and full scope of the supplement were not made clear to [the author] during the editing process” (Witwer, 2020).

Extracting economic value at all stages of scientific research

In addition to having found a way to generate more economic capital through its line of Nature branded journals, Springer Nature has extended its strategy even more by offering other Nature branded services and products that cover all stages of scientific research (Figure 6). It has thus created the “Nature Masterclasses” division to sell different training sessions, webinars and workshops to researchers and institutions on various topics: how to build a scientific network, how to write a grant application and a scientific paper, how to collaborate with peers, how to manage and share data efficiently, or how to deal with the peer-review process. It is even possible for researchers to follow a “narrative tools” online course in order to learn how to “enhance their communication to their peers by using narrative tools to tell their research story” (Nature, 2020). According to the Nature Masterclasses website, researchers from institutions such as the Université -Saclay, the University of California, Berkeley, RMIT University and the University of Nottingham have already received such trainings. Springer Nature is not the sole publisher to provide such branded services. For instance, the British Medical Association also provides fee-based training courses through “BMJ Masterclasses” and “BMJ webinars”. It could be argued that being a non-profit organization that represents specific groups of researchers, the BMA is simply providing services to its community, in line with the traditional function of academic organizations. However, this argument does not contradict the observed tendency of learned societies to follow more and more market-driven business models (Fyfe, 2021).

12 Figure 6 – Nature products and services offered at all stages of scientific research

At the paper submission and peer-review stages, the ever-expanding range of Nature spin-off journals. combined with a manuscript transfer mechanism service, allows the publisher to attract and conserve within its many journals a maximum number of articles. But the publication stage does not end the research cycle. Researchers are nowadays encouraged by their institutions to publicize their research results to the general public and contribute to the dialogue between “science” and “society”. Pushed by the “publish or perish” logic, they are, just as universities, more and more engaged in self-branding and self-promotional practices on various media platforms (Duffy & Pooley, 2017). The regionally and nationally oriented Nature magazines, such as Nature India or Nature Middle East, offer them a venue to popularize their work and to benefit from visibility in a Nature media. The highly competitive nature of the scientific field is also exploited by the Springer Nature group through its Nature Research Custom Media division to sell sponsored supplements and advertisement features to institutions in search of symbolic capital. These purchased spaces allow researchers from sponsored institutions to present their work in a favorable light and escape the constraint of peers’ judgement. The Nature brand has even entered the reward system of science by launching in 2019 “Nature Research Awards for Driving Global Impact”, sponsored by the Chinese information technology multinational Tencent. The “Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Women in Science” were also launched in 2018 and are sponsored by the American cosmetic products multinational Estée Lauder. Of course, Nature is not the only journal to offer such sponsored prizes and awards. For instance, the BMJ also offers privately sponsored “BMJ Awards”, while Science offers multiple awards sponsored by philanthropic foundations or private companies. Again, one may consider the BMA and AAAS cases as different for their basic objective is non-profit, since they primarily aim at representing and serving the interests of their scholarly communities.

13 Conclusion

Under the ownership of MacMillan, then Holtzbrink, and since its merger with the Springer group in 2015, the journal Nature has been branded following two strategies. The first one, product line extension, has led to the creation of a large number of Nature derived journals. The second strategy, brand extension, consists in expanding the Nature brand to products and services other than scholarly journals. This strategy has been pursued in a particularly aggressive manner during the past five years. It has led to the creation of Springer Nature divisions that are in charge of marketing new Nature branded products and services, such as sponsored supplements and advertisements, rankings, magazines, and workshops or trainings. As we have shown, other publishers of more or less prestigious journals have also adopted branding strategies along the lines traced by Nature. The success of both branding strategies rests on the publisher’s ability to attract researchers, academic institutions as well as private companies with the symbolic capital that its flagship journal has been accumulating for more than a century. But another major condition of possibility of its success is the fact that far from the purely disinterested endeavour of a “community”, contemporary scientific research is nowadays subjected to important pressures stemming from academic institutions as well as government funding agencies to aim for “excellence” (Moore et al., 2017).

The continuous extension of Springer Nature’s products and services into all the phases of scientific production – from defining a research project to writing a grant application, writing and submitting a paper to a scientific journal, learning how to “market” and “sell” the results – even including the offer of scientific recognition through the creation of prizes, amounts to a spectacular intrusion of a for-profit firm into what was until recently a series of activities essentially controlled by the scientific communities themselves through their organizations – disciplinary, like American Physical Society, or multidisciplinary like AAAS – and not subject to commodification. We are thus a far cry from the original idea of the sociologist Warren Hagstrom (1965) who analyzed the scientific community as an autonomous organization relying on gift and counter-gift as the basis of social links and recognition, by analogy with the pre-capitalist societies studied by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his classic essay The Gift (Mauss, 2006).

The dynamic of competition in the scientific field is now responding more to the logic of a market than to that of a community, as if scientists accepted to subcontract more and more elements of their activities to external sources and pay for products and services that they used to provide for free to their community in the tradition of the guilds that trained new apprentices in their trade. This transformation may have been facilitated by the fact that the majority of scientists seem to find it practical to delegate the tasks of publishing journals to private groups, the more so that the larger part of the costs involved in having to buy their own products are shouldered by university libraries and governments rather than by them directly, thus making the whole transfer of economic capital rather obscure to many of them. To their credit, private publishers, such as Springer Nature or Elsevier, have well understood that what scientists continue to give freely to the scientific community could be captured and monetized at each stage of the cycle of scientific production. That possibility is of course facilitated by the fact that

14 granting agencies and research organisations still believe in the principle of “publish or perish”, which can only generate more and more journals and papers and leave less and less time to participate in the other activities that used to contribute to making science a community rather than a profitable market like any other.

References

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