Product-Line and Brand Extensions of a Scientific Journal Mahdi Khelfaoui
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Expanding Nature: 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 research cycle, from writing grants to popularizing research results, to scientists 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 science 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 London 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 Springer Nature 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