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DEMARCATING LEGITIMATE AND PREDATORY SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING: THE INFLUENCE OF STATUS ON INSTITUTIONAL LOGIC CONFLICTS1

Kyle Siler Innovation Studies Group, Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development Utrecht University

k.s.siler [at] uu.nl

October 1, 2018

Preliminary Draft: Comments Welcome!

1 Thanks to Koen Frenken, Vincent Larivière, Antony Puddephatt, Cassidy Sugimoto and the VICI group on Breakthrough Innovations at Utrecht University for helpful feedback on previous versions of this manuscript. 2

ABSTRACT: The emergence of online academic publishing has altered incentives and opportunities for scientific stakeholders and publishers. These changes have yielded a variety of new economic and scientific niches, including journals with questionable systems and business models. ‘Blacklists’ of ‘predatory’ publishers have emerged to identify and stigmatize illegitimate scientific publishers and journals. Demarcating boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate is subjective and contested. In institutionally complex environments, status influences relationships between different institutional logics. High institutional status benefits publishers by reducing conflicts between – if not aligning – scientific and economic logics, which are more likely to conflict and create illegitimacy concerns in downmarket niches. Status and legitimacy underpin the social acceptability of profit-seeking in scientific publishing, rendering low-status publishers vulnerable to being perceived and stigmatized as ‘predatory.’

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Introduction

Science is comprised of complex inter-professional relationships involving universities, industry, business, politics and other public institutions (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000).

Stakeholders compete for professional turfs and jurisdictional control over scientific institutions

(Abbott, 1988). Diverse stakeholders and their professions possess different interests, priorities and institutional logics. Consequently, science and its institutions possess significant institutional complexity. Greenwood et al. (2011) defined institutional complexity as when organizations confront incompatible prescriptions from multiple institutional logics. Scientists and their institutions must balance scientific and economic logics, which often prescribe different – sometimes conflicting – values and behaviors. In particular, scientific institutions balance values of the pursuit of knowledge for public good, versus the exploitation of proprietary knowledge for economic rewards (Thornton and Ocasio, 1999; Popp Berman, 2012). Differing institutional logics can interact in a variety of manners, along the continuum between conflict and complementarity.

Individuals and institutions strategically frame and combine institutional logics from various domains to create value, pursue goals and establish viable niches in competitive fields (Douglas,

1986; Binder, 2007).

Publication in scientific journals institutionalizes and disseminates new research and knowledge, underpinning the professional and intellectual reward structures of science. As the

Internet has supplanted the printed page as the primary means of disseminating knowledge, scientific publishing incentives have changed for researchers and gatekeepers. Online publishing reduces barriers to entry in publishing by largely obviating the need for printing presses or complex 4

logistical resources for distributing print journals. Digitization renders information as a non- rivalrous good, as opposed to a rivalrous possession in a printed book or journal. Consequently, paywalls are becoming anachronistic and increasingly difficult to enforce. As a result, even large ‘legacy’ publishers who built their empires on subscription-based print journals are pursuing (OA) business models. This shift is partly out of necessity in an increasingly digital world2, and also because OA articles published via Article Processing Charges

(APCs) have potential to be even more profitable than via traditional subscription-based business models (Shulenberger, 2016; Matthews, 2017).

In online scientific publishing, the combination of low barriers to entry and general newness of the OA scientific publishing market has created opportunities and niches for disreputable ‘predatory’ publishers. Since APC-based OA publishing involves remunerating publishers based on how many articles they publish, this can create perverse incentives to accept as many articles as possible to maximize revenue. In turn, some unscrupulous scientific publishers and journals – often labeled as ‘predatory’ – operate in such a manner, eschewing legitimate peer review or other types of quality control. – a now-retired University of Colorado-

Denver librarian who maintained a prominent and controversial list of ‘predatory’ publishers – defined as “... [publishers] that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit” (Beall, 2012). Similarly, Clark

2 The controversial website Sci-Hub provides access – mostly pirated – to almost the entire corpus of published science. Sci-Hub is widely used; 28 million article download requests were served between September 2015 and February 2016 (Bohannon, 2016). Publishers acknowledge that Sci-Hub significantly erodes their negotiating leverage with traditional subscription-based business models, as scientists and scientific institutions are less afraid of losing access to journal subscriptions (Pollock, 2018a; Schonfeld, 2018). Open Access scientific publishing is also burgeoning beyond extralegal sources. Piwowar et al. (2018) estimated that 28% of the entire published corpus of scholarly literature is legally available in some Open Access format, including 45% of articles published in the most recently analyzed year (2015). 5 and Smith (2015) characterized predatory journals as “taking large fees without providing robust editorial or publishing services.” Implicit in these definitions is the notion that in some markets, non-economic ideals and norms should temper – if not supersede – profit-seeking behaviors

(Zelizer, 1995; Fourcade and Healy, 2007). This is especially true in science, where norms of communalism (common ownership of intellectual property) and disinterestedness (scientists should act for the collective good of science, as opposed to personal gain) are prevailing social norms (Merton, 1973). Assigning monetary values to goods with special societal significance – such as science and knowledge – is difficult, subjective and contested (Fourcade, 2011). Yet, scientific publishing is a multi-billion dollar industry involving intense competition for scientific eminence and economic rents. In turn, there are often tensions between economic and scientific logics in academia. The APC-based model of scientific publishing makes these tensions especially apparent.

The recent proliferation of online journals has created new challenges with identifying legitimate science in the age of digital knowledge. This a contemporary incarnation of familiar professional and intellectual challenges in science. Demarcating science from non-science

(Gieryn, 1983) and professional knowledge turfs (Abbott, 1988) have long been contested by scientific stakeholders. Evaluating scientific quality and legitimacy is also contentious. Scientific publishing is comprised of a vast array of upmarket and downmarket niches, evaluated through a heterarchy of criteria and priorities from different stakeholders (Stark, 2009; Lamont, 2009). As large for-profit scientific publishers consolidate market power (Larivière et al., 2015), generating anomalously high industry profit margins, this raises questions of how profit-seeking motives of publishers can co-exist with the communal, public good ethos of science. 6

This article examines the problem of ‘predatory’ publishing to reveal how professional and economic legitimacy are established in science. The digitization of knowledge has altered business models and publishing incentives, creating new conflicting and complementary relationships between economic and scientific institutional logics. When online journals derive revenue from publishing fees, as opposed to annual subscriptions, this renders journal rejection rates and price levels as strategic choices with economic, scientific and moral implications. This article analyzes how scientific legitimacy – and profitability – are defined and established in markets with conflicting scientific and economic institutional logics. A corollary of the establishment of legitimacy in scientific publishing is how rent and profit-seeking behaviors are perceived in a quasi-sacred field like science. Scientists, institutional entrepreneurs and publishers strategically establish and publicly frame professional niches, attempting to justify legitimate claims to scientific knowledge and rewards, whether intellectual and/or economic. Status is proffered as a central factor that influences perceptions of the legitimacy of both science and publishing business models in academic journals. By reducing conflicts between – if not aligning – ordinarily conflicting economic and scientific institutional logics, this inures profit-seeking behaviors of upmarket journals and publishers from charges of predation. More broadly, scientific publishing offers a context to analyze valuations of professional and economic quality in uncertain, contentious, highly-competitive markets.

The Emerging Problem of Illegitimate Science

‘Predatory’ publishing is a recent and burgeoning phenomenon in science. Shen and Björk

(2015) identified 1,800 predatory journals publishing 53,000 articles in 2010, increasing to 8,000 7 predatory journals publishing 420,000 articles in 2014 (also see Perlin et al., 2018). This expansion is of a similar magnitude to that of ‘legitimate’ journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access

Journals (DOAJ) (Frandsen, 2017). Given this expansion, there appears to be ample demand for new - albeit sometimes dubious - academic journals. This market expansion suggests that the previous print/subscription journal-dominated market left many scientists in the world with an interest in publishing unserved. Recent research has shown that authors who publish in or cite predatory journals are more likely to be younger and affiliated with institutions located in developing countries (Xia et al., 2015; Shen and Björk, 2015; Nwagwu and Ojemeni, 2015;

Frandsen, 2017). This supports narratives suggesting that such authors were ‘preyed’ upon, publishing in such journals either out of naivety or a lack of other options.

However, illegitimate journals are also gaining traction in highly-developed countries and reputable scientific institutions. For example, 5% of a sample of 46,000 Italian professors were found to have published in journals included in Beall’s blacklist (Bagues, Sylos-Labini and

Zinovyeva, 2018). In Germany, over 5,000 scientists were identified as having published in journals run by “quasi-scientific” publishers (Eckert and Hornung, 2018). Another study estimated that 6% of scientific articles written by researchers in the United States are published in questionable journals (The Economist, 2018). Shamseer et al. (2017) observed considerable variation in institutional affiliations in the biomedical science literature, finding that even scientists affiliated with elite Western research universities published in dubious journals (also see Amrein,

2018). At one low-status Canadian business school, Pyne (2017) chronicled that 62% of research- oriented faculty had published at least once in a ‘predatory’ journal. Publishing in such journals was also significantly positively correlated with receiving internal university research awards. This 8 may be reflective of a tendency of less-accomplished evaluators to enact lower academic standards

(Bagues, Sylos-Labini and Zinovyeva, 2018). In turn, narratives of predation and naivety might not fit all ‘predatory’ journals. In some cases, scientists may be quite aware of the business models and gatekeeping structures of dubious scientific journals. ‘Predatory’ publishing is emerging as a broad societal problem. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit in 2018 seeking $50,130,811 in consumer damages against OMICS Group – a publisher often labelled as

‘predatory’ – for deceptive business practices (ftc.gov, 2018). In July 2018, the Indian minister of

Human Resources vowed in Parliament that the current government will “end the menace of predatory journals” (Mathew, 2018).

Defining Legitimacy in Science

Legitimacy is a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values and definitions (Suchman, 1995: 574). Conformity to widely-accepted categories and standards of behavior legitimates institutions (Zuckerman, 1999). Institutional value systems are often contained within fields or sectors (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). In particular, science is comprised of complex and idiosyncratic professional norms (Merton, 1973). Legitimacy is also an attribute or resource that organizations deploy strategically and competitively in pursuit of desired goals

(Suchman, 1995). Organizations have volition to change perceptions of their legitimacy but are also embedded in broader fields with cultural beliefs about legitimacy that transcend any single institution’s control (Suchman, 1995: 572). Legitimacy entails cultural support for an organization or institution (Meyer and Scott, 1983); achieving this trust and deference from key stakeholders is 9 especially important for fledgling organizations. New scientific journals engage in sector building

(Suchman, 1995: 586) to establish legitimacy and carve a symbiotic and/or competitive niche vis- a-vis established print journals in their fields.

In an inertial, conservative field like academia (Bourdieu, 1988), new contributors and innovations tend to face liabilities of newness (Stinchcombe, 1965). Liabilities of newness are especially acute for entrants in new industries, given their unfamiliarity and lack of sociopolitical legitimacy (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994). Despite these challenges, some OA journals (e.g., eLife, PLOS

ONE) have emerged as prominent, legitimate scientific institutions, occupying complementary and/or competitive niches vis-à-vis established journals and publishers (Björk, 2015). Owing in part to reduced barriers of entry, the number of scientific journals has increased markedly since

2000 (Larivière, 2017). Brand equity helps legitimate new journals and mitigates liabilities of newness for established publishers. A significant competitive asset with launching a new journal is using an established publisher’s brand to create a legitimate – if not high-quality – image.

Publishers are well aware of the value of brand-names in an uncertain, status-conscious environment like science. For example, a 2018 Springer IPO sold potential investors on the value of leveraging the Nature brand: “We believe that launching new journals under our Nature brand is an attractive opportunity, as these new titles can be instantly monetized[.]” (p. 99). High-status actors and institutions tend to have the potential to confer legitimacy on new or initially illegitimate innovations (Leblebici et al., 1991). The new OA scientific publishing market has also created new publishing fields and opportunities for institutional entrepreneurs from varying backgrounds with varying motivations and institutional logics.

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Evaluating the legitimacy and meritoriousness of science is a pervasive challenge which has been further complicated by the emergence of online publishing. Demarcating legitimacy and gradations of quality are central to the scientific profession, as well as the development of new research and knowledge. Even if peer review and other forms of academic evaluation are generally able to identify meritorious work, scientific innovation is often highly subjective and uncertain

(Cole, 1983; Lamont, 2009). Uncertainty compels decision-makers to focus on social attributes and other heuristic short-cuts to inform decisions (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974; Dornbusch and

Scott, 1975). Rankings and lists are often used as a means of identifying legitimate and/or meritorious products in complex, uncertain markets. Status-based perceptions of others can be quite influential. People often form appraisals of quality based on what they believe others prefer, as opposed to actual perceived quality (Keynes, 1936; Correll et al., 2017). Prominent rankings are often performative and institutionalize conventional wisdom, influencing behaviors, opinions and preferences of individuals. In science, journal rankings or ‘blacklists’ enable formalization of research evaluations (Mingers and Willmott, 2013). When these rankings and rankers are viewed as influential or legitimate, evaluators can either consecrate or stigmatize institutions.

Evaluation and Reactivity in Scientific Publishing

Commensuration involves the transformation of qualitative information into quantitative metrics (Espeland and Stevens, 1998). Whether through citation metrics (e.g., Journal Impact

Factors, h-indices, Eigenfactor Metrics) or blacklists, commensuration is pervasive in research evaluation and plays an important role in demarcating legitimate from illegitimate science. Even 11 though such metrics may oversimplify the complexities of a scientist’s or journal’s output, this simplicity is what makes commensurated information so influential. Beall (2017) remarked,

“[b]oth blacklists and whitelists make academic evaluation easier for deans and provosts. When such lists are used, a researcher doesn’t get credit for publishing in a blacklisted journal but does receive credit for publishing in a whitelisted one. The evaluation becomes simple and binary, devoid of thoughtful evaluation.”

Rankings provide external audiences with easily understood measures via which they can hold professionals and organizations accountable (Sauder, 2008). Simplified metrics make information more easily accessed and processed, appearing more robust and definitive than if presented in complicated - but more accurate - forms (March and Simon, 1958; Espeland and Sauder, 2007:

17). In science, rankings can demarcate legitimacy (e.g., journal blacklists) and/or quality. For example, in the United Kingdom, the Research Excellence Framework assigns value to journal publications from ‘4 stars’ (for a journal evaluated as “Quality that is world-leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour [sic]”) to ‘Unclassified’ (REF, 2014). People and institutions tend to rely on associations with high-status individuals and institutions as signals of quality

(Correll et al., 2017), since status and quality tend to be coupled to some extent (Azoulay, Stuart

& Wang, 2014). In science, journal prestige is often used as a proxy for scientific quality. As per

McLuhan (1964), often the medium is the message in science.

Whether curated by professionals from government, media or academia, third-party rankings offer the advantage of a neutral adjudicator providing clear, commensurated values to evaluate others. However, deferring to such third-party rankings also entails ceding professional authority, since control over hiring and promotion criteria underpins professional power and autonomy (Abbott, 1988). Like with rankings in other social contexts, scientists often realize that even if they view certain metrics or rankings as unfair or poor measures, they remain important 12 because others take them seriously (Sauder and Espeland, 2009). In some cases, merely being measured is a sign of legitimacy in science. For example, a journal receiving its first Journal Impact

Factor from Clarivate Analytics can bring legitimacy and an influx of new submissions (Davis,

2017a). Receiving a Journal requires continued legitimacy and conformity.

Clarivate annually – sometimes controversially – removes impact factors of journals deemed to be engaging excessive self-citation or showing signs of intellectual balkanization (Davis, 2018).

In response to a perceived proliferation of questionable publishers in the developing OA scientific publishing market, Jeffrey Beall started a de facto blacklist of “potential, possible, or probable predatory journals and publishers.” From the inception of the list in 2008 until its eventual removal in 2017, Beall’s blacklist had accumulated over 1,000 allegedly predatory publishers. As

Beall’s blacklist gained traction in academia, Beall himself developed into a controversial figure.

For example, Beall personally expressed enmity towards Open Access publishing (Beall, 2012) and made controversial – if not also offensive – remarks, including referring to Latin American

OA publisher SciELO as a “publication favela” (Beall, 2015). These public statements threatened perceptions of the neutrality and fairness of Beall’s blacklist, and exposed Beall as a target for litigation and criticisms, which eventually contributed to the removal of the blacklist in early 2017

(Basken, 2017). Soon after the end of Beall’s list, Cabells International – a private publishing company – released its own blacklist of scientific journals, containing over 8,300 listed journals as of April 2018 (Bisaccio, 2018). Moving to an independent third-party evaluator has further advantages over Beall’s list; namely the bureaucratization of evaluation with clear measures of journal illegitimacy. Plus, it reduces potential conflicts with aggrieved publishers by removing the public censure and stigma (Becker, 1963; Goffman, 1963) of Beall’s list, instead making such 13 judgments behind a paywall, where only a few experts will read such evaluations. By creating sixty indices of journal legitimacy, Cabells’ blacklist is not as susceptible to charges of subjectivity, arbitrariness and bias that Beall faced with his blacklist. As per Weber’s (1947) theory of bureaucracy, intentional, abstract rules govern decisions, rendering evaluation processes impersonal and diffusing responsibility from individuals. Notably, there is substantial overlap between Cabells’ and Beall’s listings; 94% of a sample of 1,192 journals on Beall’s list were blacklisted by Cabells’ rubric (Bisaccio, 2018), suggesting a consensus on what entails illegitimacy in scientific publishing.

Evaluation affects the behavior of organizations and people, which can undermine evaluation processes. Espeland and Stevens (2007) coined the term reactivity to describe the process of people or organizations altering behavior in reaction to being observed, evaluated or measured. Espeland and Stevens (2007: 29) also raised the specter of evaluation subjects ‘gaming’ rankings, where rules and numbers are manipulated to distort or undermine the true motivation behind them (also see Osterloh and Frey, 2015). Goodhart’s law posits that once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a fair or reliable measure (Elton, 2004). Campbell’s law argues further that the higher the social consequences associated with a quantitative indicator (such as test scores), the more likely it is that the indicator itself will become corrupted and undermine the social processes it was intended to monitor (Nichols and Berliner, 2007). In scientific publishing, publishers and editors use numerous different ‘tricks’ or strategies – of varying levels of legitimacy and deviance – to inflate journal impact factors (Martin, 2016; Harzing and Adler,

2016). Strategic citation manipulation is common in scientific publishing, although the degree to which such practices are acceptable is unclear, subjective and context-dependent (Davis, 2017b). 14

This raises questions of which publishers have the savvy, interest and resources to be reactive to institutionalized rating criteria.

Reactivity in Action: Scientific Publishers Fighting for Legitimacy

Classification systems can play a pivotal role in influencing market outcomes for individuals, organizations and institutions (Fourcade and Healy, 2013). For example, Regier

(2018) chronicled how inclusion on Beall’s blacklist negatively impacted the finances – and by extension, scientific quality – of African publisher Academic Journals. The stigmatization of the blacklist forestalled upward mobility potential, leaving the publisher in a ‘poverty trap’ where it lacked the resources or credibility to be anything other than an inexpensive, downmarket imprint.

Thus, success in science often requires reactive responses to reward structures and institutionalized measures (Merton, 1968; Espeland and Stevens, 2007). In science, reactivity can also involve

‘gaming’ rankings (see Martin, 2016), strategic political mobilization, or what Fligstein (2001) dubbed ‘social skill.’ Political, marketing and lobbying tactics employed by publishers to promote perceptions of legitimacy vary in strategy and effectiveness. For example, in 2013, OMICS

Publishing Inc. threatened Jeffrey Beall with a $1 billion (USD) lawsuit over their inclusion on

Beall’s blacklist. As hyperbolic and frivolous such a lawsuit may appear, other aggrieved publishers effectively undermined Beall’s blacklist with persistent and savvy political maneuvering. Swiss publisher MDPI inundated Beall’s colleagues at the University of Colorado-

Denver with emails and other missives in an apparent effort to pressure them to silence Beall

(Beall, 2015). At the very least, MDPI’s efforts contributed to the removal of the publisher from

Beall’s blacklist. 15

However, Frontiers Media was the most influential publisher in precipitating the demise of

Beall’s list. Frontiers is a controversial Switzerland-based OA publisher that appears to straddle the line between perceived legitimacy and illegitimacy in scientific publishing (see Schneider,

2015). Beall included Frontiers on his blacklist, arguing the journal had engaged in suspicious – if not illegitimate – scientific gatekeeping practices. For example, in 2015, Frontiers fired 31 academic editors for raising concerns about editorial interference from journal staff (Enserink,

2015). More recently, an editor in the Microbial Biotechnology, Ecotoxicology and

Bioremediation section was fired for an excessively high rejection rate – roughly 60% – deemed

“not in line with Frontiers core principles” (Wittich, 2018). Frontiers journals have also garnered a reputation for sometimes publishing dubious and/or controversial articles (Bloudoff-Indelicato,

2015). Rejection rates at Frontiers journals have been pegged at 5-10% (Van Noorden, 2013b),

19% (Poynder, 2016) and 27% (Frontiers Blog, 2016). Schneider (2016a) reported allegedly leaked internal Frontiers documents, directing employees to not disclose rejection rates unless asked, and to inform prospective authors that rejection rates were “around 20%”, although the actual rate was roughly 10%.

Low rejection rates in online journals are notable in light of the economic incentives posed by the APC-based publishing business model, which remunerates publishers based on the number of publications and imposes opportunity costs on rejections.3 At best, the lack of page constraints in online publishing reduces errors of omission, enabling new peer review filters focusing solely

3 Another detail divulged by Wittch (2018): Frontiers economically incentivizes editors as well; Wittich received a €7500 honorarium for previous editorial service. Similarly, honoraria for Frontiers field chief editors are contingent on meeting volume benchmarks for published articles (Schneider, 2016b). 16 on scientific soundness, as opposed to subjective appraisals of ‘importance’ and theoretical framing.4 At worst, publishers will publish articles indiscriminately to maximize revenue, flooding the scientific corpus with inferior work. Acceptance rates at Frontiers – somewhere between 73-

95% – are also notably higher than prominent online Open Access megajournals, such as PLOS

ONE and Scientific Reports, which have acceptance rates between 40-70% (Spezi et al., 2017).

This raises questions of what a ‘legitimate’ rejection rate is – or should be – for online journals.

Are there thresholds where rising journal acceptance rates become questionable or illegitimate?

Frontiers’ business model has established a viable niche in contemporary scientific publishing, but also risks the appearance of illegitimacy based on prevailing scientific norms.

Despite facing legitimacy concerns, Frontiers has grown since its founding in 2007 to be comprised of 52 Open Access journals, with 80,000 scientists registered on their online platform (Van

Noorden, 2013b). Frontiers is already the 13th largest source of OA expenditures in the United

Kingdom and is one of two OA-only publishers in the Top 20 (Shamash, 2016). In 2018, Frontiers entered in an agreement with the National Library of Sweden, extending deals and benefits to 20 participating Swedish universities, as part of a national commitment to transitioning to OA publishing (Frontiers Blog, 2018). Frontiers garners further legitimacy as a publisher via membership with COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)5, OASPA (Open Access Scholarly

Publishers Association) and other third-party institutions. Further indicative of its success,

Frontiers increased APCs of its journals in 2018 to ranging between $950-2950(USD) (Morrison,

4 For more on the innovative consequences of peer review disproportionately focusing on theory and framing in high- rejection journals, see Strang and Siler (2015) and Siler and Strang (2017). 5 Frontiers’ membership in – and legitimation via – COPE is contentious, also indicative of a borderline niche. After the admission of Frontiers in 2015, the COPE website posted a statement acknowledging, “there have been vigorous discussions about, and some editors are uncomfortable with, the editorial processes at Frontiers.” (COPE, 2015) 17

2018). After Beall faced backlash for listing Frontiers as a ‘predatory’ journal in 2015 (Bloudoff-

Indelicato, 2015), he suddenly shut down his website one year later, citing threats and political pressures, and now lists himself as ‘Retired’ (Beall, 2018). Later, it was revealed that Frontiers leadership travelled from Switzerland to UC-Denver, met with university leadership and triggered a research misconduct investigation against Beall (Basken, 2017). The reactivity of Frontiers is notable in that the publisher clearly had interest in demarcating a ‘legitimate’ niche in academia, and that they were a company with the resources, interest and savvy to fight to be perceived as legitimate. Straddling legitimate and illegitimate categories can be a valuable strategy and niche for institutions, and even a means for achieving upward mobility (Alexy and George, 2013).

The Importance of Third-Party Evaluators for Scientific Legitimacy

Publishers and journals often engage in strategic action to maintain legitimacy and status with third-party rankers. For example, Journal Impact Factors are calculated in an opaque, non- reproducible manner, and are sometimes a matter of negotiation between the journal/publisher and the ranker, Clarivate Analytics (Brembs, 2016; Larivière and Sugimoto, 2018). Such negotiations favor large publishers with legitimacy, networks, experience and resources. In contrast, some predatory publishers - such as OMICS - openly market their ability to manipulate quantitative impact measures (Eriksson and Helgesson, 2017). However, various techniques to inflate journal impact factors are widespread (Martin, 2016), although some publishers and journals engage in less legitimate tactics than others.

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Demarcating boundaries of scientific legitimacy can be difficult because there are many different conceptions of scientific merit, which vary between diverse stakeholders and communities with different values and priorities. Lamont (2012: 7) dubbed these pluralistic systems of evaluation heterarchies. Hence, inclusion in third-party rankings and lists, including formal scholarly indices, is especially important for academic publishers and journals.6 Legitimacy

– or lack thereof – is more conspicuous when absent than present (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978:

194). Hansoti et al. (2016) chronicled twenty-nine different journals in the field of emergency medicine which were indexed by six major services. According to Hansoti et al., presence in at least one major scientific index is a sufficient sign of journal legitimacy. This also reveals a challenge for fledgling journals, which need to somehow amass credibility and a reasonable publication record to be indexed, which in turn can secure nascent legitimacy. Legitimacy affects market access (Deephouse and Suchman, 2008: 64). In the case of scientific publishing, the market provides access to the intellectual and professional reward structures of science.

Despite its flaws, peer review is widely perceived as the gold standard for legitimacy for a scientific publication (Lamont, 2009). This explains in part how journal status can become a proxy for quality in science, since journals possess reputations and signals they impart. However, even elite journals sometimes publish mediocre or even badly flawed science (Brembs, Button and

Munafò, 2013; Berger and Cirasella, 2015). Peer review – and most forms of scientific gatekeeping

– is difficult to directly observe, since it is almost always not publicly observable. If all scientific journals openly published peer review reports, predatory journals could easily be exposed

6 Monegon and Paul-Hus (2016) chronicled that major journal databases – such as the and – over-represent English-language journals. This has implications for the ethics of the publication system, as well as incentives for scientists, as legitimacy-granting institutions are disproportionately linked to the English language. 19

(McCook, 2017). In turn, there may be costs to opaque double-blind peer review in the age of OA publishing. Regardless, since conventional – and non-public – peer review remains the standard quality control mechanism in most journals, evaluators must gauge the legitimacy of the gatekeeping and gestational functions of a journal indirectly. Cabells representatives stated that their blacklist is more focused on identifying deceptive journals than low-quality journals (Berger and Cirasella, 2015). While many deceptive journals are low-quality, a journal being low-quality does not necessarily entail deception or illegitimacy.

New Economic and Scientific Incentives in Publishing

The APC (Article Processing Charge)-based business model alters the economic and scientific incentives of scientific publishing. In the traditional publishing model, subscriptions to print or paywalled online journals generate a predictable source of revenue. In contrast, APC-based

OA publishing links journal revenues to the number of articles published. APC-based OA renders rejecting articles costly, as rejected articles consume editorial resources, but yield no revenue (Jeon and Rochet, 2010; Gans, 2017: 56). More selective journals incur higher costs, and by extension, must charge higher APCs (Armstrong, 2015). Rejection rates are institutionalized sources and signals of prestige and exclusivity in science (Hargens, 1988; Sugimoto et al., 2013). However, high rejection rates also entail marginal and opportunity costs in OA publishing. In APC-based

OA publishing, rejections include costs of processing and rejecting articles, in addition to opportunity costs of foregone revenue from APCs for successfully published articles. In online publishing, page and article limits by journals are now more a matter of social exclusivity than real scarcity. Rejection rates become at least in part strategic, as opposed to circumscribed by space 20 shortages or limitations of the printing press. Likewise, setting APCs is a similarly strategic choice, yielding a wide variety of types of journals and niches in contemporary scientific publishing.

Trade-offs exist between prestige and selectivity, Type I and Type II errors, as well as optimal revenue points in publishing. Increased journal revenues – often through higher APCs – are necessary to support the ‘luxury’ of selectivity; not all journals and publishers are capable of occupying high-status niches in science.

Rejection Rates and APCs as Publishing Strategy

While high rejection rates tend to be associated with prestige and legitimacy in science

(Hargens, 1988), there are also incentives – for better or worse – in OA publishing to raise acceptance rates. In the nascent OA scientific publishing market, there are numerous new niches for publishers and journals to fill. For example, OA journal eLife is distinguished by a relatively low acceptance rate of 15% (Kaiser, 2015). There may be quality control benefits – even at the cost of errors of omission from excessive rejections – of such a low acceptance rate, in addition to signaling resources and wherewithal to be an ‘exclusive’ journal with a high rejection rate.

Particularly with the economic incentives of APC-based OA, high journal rejection rates are a signal of adherence to scientific – over economic – logics in publishing. In contrast, high acceptance rates and/or anomalously low prices can be perceived as signs of prioritizing economic over scientific logics, if not also journal illegitimacy (Shamseer et al., 2017). OA publishing has turned setting APC price points and journal rejection rates into a matter of strategic optimization for publishers. At best, gatekeepers can make publishing decisions without article length or 21 acceptance rate constraints. At worst, incentives to raise revenue via APCs induces the publication of too many articles, potentially of low quality.

Conflicts and Complementarity Between Economic and Scientific Logics in Publishing

Given the intricate social and professional norms of science, science and money have a complex relationship (Pinch and Swedberg, 2008). Economic and scientific logics can be complementary and/or antithetical. Disinterestedness - the notion that scientists should work solely for the good of science, instead of driven by personal or financial considerations - was dubbed by

Merton (1973) as a foundational norm of scientific behavior. Trade-offs between the pursuit of profit and knowledge for its own sake is a common tension in scientific publishing. Thornton and

Ocasio (1999) chronicled the shift in scientific publishing from an editorial logic to a market logic as larger publishing companies accumulated control of the industry starting in the 1970s. Editorial and market logics are not necessarily diametrically opposed, although scientific publishing often renders the logics in conflict. At best, scientific and economic logics are complementary; in practice, the logics often either conflict or remain in a fragile détente.

In science, publishers can function as intermediary institutions to facilitate - if not also obfuscate - the exchange of funds and other rewards for scientific output. Rossman (2014) described a variety of obfuscating social structures that enable economic transactions between the

‘sacred’ and the ‘profane.’ Particularly when individual scientists receive professional and/or monetary rewards for such publications (e.g., Pyne, 2017), predatory journals can serve as an obfuscating institution which facilitates the transfer of illegitimate rewards to scientists, who 22 produced and published illegitimate science. Depending on how brazen or disingenuous the scheme is, this could be understood somewhere along the continuum between criminal and merely deviant. Umlauf and Mochizuki (2018) provocatively dubbed predatory publishing as

‘cybercrime.’ Similarly, Watson (2017) argued, “predatory publishers are frauds and criminals. To knowingly use them is to engage in fraudulent and criminal activity.” Given that much science is publicly funded, publishing in ‘predatory’ journals with low legitimacy generally yields poor economic value, in addition to potentially facilitating further rewards and investment in dubious – if not fraudulent – ideas and researchers.

Strategy and Fairness in Journal Pricing

Pricing is not necessarily simply a matter of supply and demand - or cost and revenue - but is also influenced by social and political forces operating within markets and fields (Wherry, 2008;

Beckert, 2011). This is especially true with scientific publishing, where diverse publishers with different products and philosophies differentiate and compete. Prices generate necessary revenue for organizational functions and goals, but also can function as status signals which influence perceptions of worth and identity for both producers and consumers (Podolny, 1993). Higher prices of goods are capable of inducing perceptions of quality among consumers, which increases their utility (Ding et al., 2010). Consumers perceive utility in economic transactions based in part on whether they think they are getting a “good deal”, regardless of how much money they paid

(Thaler, 1983). This raises questions of to what degree prices and revenue underpin tangible quality in scientific publishing. Tangible quality can include the nuts-and-bolts of publishing in the digital age (e.g., webpages, typesetting, search engine optimization, marketing), or access to 23 the imprimatur of an exclusive academic community with rigorous peer review and a prestigious lineage. Alternatively, prices can also have no direct impact on actual quality, beyond merely inflating consumer and/or market perceptions of value.

The optimization and fairness of journal pricing is contentious from both scientific and economic standpoints. There is considerable heterogeneity in subscription costs and APC rates in scientific publishing, whether the journal generates revenue via APCs and/or subscriptions. There is also variation in opinions of what scientific publishing should cost in the Internet age. In 2016,

Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers founded Discrete Analysis, a mathematics journal hosted by the arXiv repository, with an APC of only $10. Mills et al. (2007) argue that the average OA article costs about $500 to produce. Edgar and Willinsky (2010) contended that break- even costs for OA journals could – and should – be as low as $188. Nine additional publishers have estimated that cost-neutral publishing would cost a few hundred dollars per article (Fried,

2017). The Fair Open Access Alliance (2018) – a group of scholars and librarians promoting affordable OA publishing – argued that $1000(USD) should be an “absolute maximum” for an

APC.

Other publishers and stakeholders argue that such APCs are impractically low. In response to criticisms of APC levels at PLOS, PLOS co-founder Michael Eisen (2016) acknowledged that although APCs of $1495-2250(USD) at PLOS journals are higher than he – and other PLOS leaders – would prefer, 20% profit margins are fair and necessary to maintain buffers against financial volatility. In further contrast, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and

Medical Publishers (STM) trade association (which includes Elsevier, American Chemical 24

Society, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press and Sage) has argued that APCs in the

€2000-2500 range are too inexpensive and are insufficient for current and future publishing markets (STM, 2015; 2017).

The prices and revenues of scientific publishers raise questions of what various price points accomplish for publishers and authors alike. To what degree to higher APCs underpin actual improvements in the quality of publishing services provided and/or do high prices merely underpin social exclusion and profiteering by publishers? Journals with higher impact factors and more citations received charge higher APCs (Solomon and Björk, 2012; Andrew, 2012; West et al.,

2014; Pinfield et al., 2016; Mueller-Langer and Watt, 2018). In turn, there is a “chicken or egg?” dynamic with OA journals, where quality (whether real or perceived) allows for higher APCs, but increased revenue also enables curating a quality journal (Siler et al., 2018). Legitimate costs for publishers can vary based on factors such as subsidies, economies of scale and office locations.

For example, Eisen (2016) conceded that PLOS APCs are inflated in part because the publisher was founded in the high-legitimacy/high-cost San Francisco Bay Area.7

The APC business model also raises new concerns of pricing out less-wealthy scientists, which would entail a violation of scientific norms. Scholars affiliated with wealthier institutions and/or those with large research grants can afford the status and prestige of high-APC journals.

High APCs can fund copy editing, teaching buyouts for editors, statistics editors, high-quality

7 Jeffrey Beall and the process of ‘blacklisting’ publishers and journals have been criticized as unfair to scholars and institutions in developing countries, which are often well-meaning, but lack the resources to be perceived as legitimate from afar by ‘Western’ standards (Butler, 2013). The stigma and negative market signal of affiliation with a developing country compels many ‘predatory’ publishers to present themselves as being situated in a developed English-speaking country. Ascertaining the veracity of the stated home country of journals and publishers is one of the criteria Cabells International uses to determine the status of a journal on their blacklist. 25 typesetting, and other objective publishing qualities.8 Subjectively, exclusive journals are selling a prestigious imprimatur – albeit one that publishers may have curated carefully and invested in long-term – as well as the social signal of affiliation with high-status scientists. Revenues from high APCs also enable high rejection rates, which can underpin both actual and perceived quality of journals. This raises questions of how much of an APC for a given journal reflects legitimate value, how much is a luxury good (relatively little objective marginal value, augmented by social signaling), and how much is pure profiteering.

Complicating the analysis of costs and revenues in scientific publishing is industry-wide opacity and secrecy in journal revenues and costs (Bergstrom et al., 2014; Shu et al., 2018).

However, it is known that profit margins are consistently in the 30-40% range for large for-profit scientific publishers (Van Noorden, 2013a; Larivière et al., 2015). These profit margins resemble a luxury product. In science, journal publications are symbolically a Veblen good, as scarce publications in high-status journals are a means of distinction for professional rewards (promotion, tenure and hiring). Veblen goods contradict typical microeconomic laws and entail increased demand with increased prices (Veblen, 1899); albeit sometimes only with wealthier segments of the market. Norms can develop that prices are a signal of quality. Status signals can be particularly important in situations with high uncertainty about true quality. Scientific journals often function as quality signals for evaluators who lack the ability, knowledge or interest to appraise an individual article.

8 Anderson (2018) argued that scientific publishers add value through performing (at least) 102 specific tasks. 26

Beyond the Veblen-like qualities of published articles within academia, the business niche of scientific publishing is developing into a Veblen good economically in the new OA market.

Analogously, at Louis Vuitton, the luxury brand’s pricing power yields consistent profit margins of around 40-45% (The Economist, 2009). These high profit margins are uncommon in any industry and resemble those of large for-profit scientific publishers (Larivière et al., 2015). As a

Springer Vice President mused, “In the end, the price is set by what the market wants to pay for it” (Van Noorden, 2013a). By casting consumer journal purchases as a matter of ‘want’, this glosses over the matter of producers being able to set their own prices and exert market control.9

The ability and willingness of consumers to pay underpins pricing decisions. Many journal APCs are set according to journal or sectoral prestige, as opposed to actual production costs. For example, to explain recent APC increases, Frontiers Media claimed that differential pricing within its own journals was influenced by “article type, journal maturity, and differences in the level of research funding available in different disciplines” (Frontiers Blog, 2017). Likewise, the 2018 Springer IPO promoted a similar business strategy: “[W]e intend to employ a price differentiation strategy by tailoring APCs to the discipline and impact factor of the relevant journal[.]…We also aim at increasing APCs by increasing the value we offer to authors through improving the impact factor and reputation of our existing journals” (p. 99).10 Actual fixed and marginal costs of publishing were not even mentioned as part of the calculus, suggesting that scientific publishing is often marketed as a luxury good. As an additional example of differential pricing in scientific publishing,

Elsevier founded Scientific African in 2018, with an APC of $200(USD) (Akinwotu, 2018); a

9 Ominously – if not also presciently – publishing industry leaders have recently floated the notion of APCs of $25,000 USD for outlets such as Nature and Science, assuming that scholars, institutions and scientific benefactors will willingly pay such high fees for prestigious publications (Pollock, 2018b). 10 At a 2018 conference, eLife founder and Nobel Laureate Randy Schekman confronted Springer Nature CEO Daniel Ropers about this policy. In an act of impression management, Ropers responded that it was “preposterous” that Springer Nature engaging in impact factor-inflating tactics (Matthews, 2018). 27 fraction of prices charged for journals marketed in the developed world.11 The social desirability or acceptability of profit-seeking behavior contextually varies (Kahneman et al., 1986; Zelizer,

1995; McDonnell et al., 2017). Influenced by diverse – and often conflicting – scientific stakeholders, the legitimate – and value-optimizing – mix of institutional logics in science is contentious and contextually varied.

Ethical and Moral Implications of Illegitimate Academic Publishing

Online scientific publishers with suspicious business practices have been commonly labelled as ‘predatory.’ This is based on the notion that unscrupulous publishers ‘prey’ on the naivety of scientists unfamiliar with the reputation or business practices of such publishers.

Recently, some observers and scientists have suggested that ‘deceptive’ may be a more accurate description of illegitimate publishing (Nicoll and Chinn, 2015; Berger and Cirasella, 2015;

Shamseer and Moher, 2017). The ‘deceptive’ moniker connotes the potential for both publishers and/or scientists purposely using illegitimate APC-based OA publishing for deceptive purposes.

Criticizing the term ‘predatory’ publishing, Anderson (2015) argued, “it’s not just about whether authors are being fooled; it’s also about whether predatory publishers help authors to fool others.”

Similarly, Shen and Björk (2015) suggested, “We believe that most authors are not necessarily tricked into publishing in predatory journals; they probably submit to them well aware of the circumstances and take a calculated risk that experts who evaluate their publication lists will not bother to check the journal credentials in detail.”

11 The founding of Scientific African by Elsevier could be seen as an altruistic act of corporate social responsibility and/or a profit-oriented strategy to gain a foothold in the African market, which has the potential for substantial scientific and economic growth over the coming decades. 28

Characterizing the morals and fairness of economic exchange can be contentious (Zelizer,

1979; Fourcade and Healy, 2007). Eve and Priego (2017) posed the question of “who is harmed by predatory publishing?” An implicit corollary is the question of who benefits from illegitimate scientific publishing, be it unscrupulous publishers and/or scientists. Deceptive scientific journals enable obfuscated exchange. Rossman (2014) chronicled the use of institutions to obfuscate disreputable exchange relationships. Illegitimate publishing provides a means for the fleecing – if not defrauding – of scientific stakeholders. Deceptive journals can also function to obfuscate a fraudulent claim of professional credit and legitimacy by individual scientists (see Pyne, 2017).

Table 1 presents an overview of possible combinations of scientific and economic institutional logics. Institutional logics are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but combine to create different niches in the competitive, hierarchical ecology of scientific publishing.

-- Insert Table 1 about here --

Organizations and institutions can be low-status and legitimate (Deephouse and Suchman,

2008: 64). A combination of low scholarly logic and low economic logic yields ‘Indie’ journals

(for exemplars, see Björk et al., 2016, Price and Puddephatt, 2017). Such journals tend to have foci and communities well outside the scientific mainstream, manage to subsist in small, peripheral,

“long-tail” niches through the zealotry of committed scholars. In contrast, ‘predatory’ or illegitimate journals combine low scholarly logic combined with high market logic, exploiting downmarket and quasi-scientific niches for economic gain. In contrast, journals that generate 29 substantial revenues but also occupy upmarket niches are inured from stigma due to their strong legitimacy and scientific logics. For example, Nature Communications has faced criticism for its unusually high $5200(USD) APC (Neylon, 2010). However, the journal also possesses a very high journal impact factor placing it in the top 1% of published journals and would never be labeled with the stigma of ‘predatory.’ Such a journal would be placed in the ‘Acceptable’ quadrant in

Table 1. As per Sharkey (2014), high-status actors and institutions are sanctioned less harshly for deviant behavior than downmarket counterparts.

An example of the ‘Scientific Ideal’ quadrant with strong scientific logic coupled with weak economic logic is the online journal eLife, which in 2016 operated deficits with APCs of

$2,500(USD), despite per article charges of £3,137 (eLife, 2018). These financial deficits – as well as offering free publication for the first five years of the journal – are underwritten via prominent scientific philanthropic institutions, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max

Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust. At eLife, institutional imprinting (Stinchbombe, 1965) and linkages with other high-end institutions and scientists enabled and inculcated a high-status scholarly logic. Few publishers have the economic or social resources to occupy – or even consider

– such a niche.

‘Predatory’ publishers are characterized by haphazard peer review and profit-seeking by publishers. One or both of these ‘violations’ can be present in legitimate journals. Flawed science and poor peer review can occur even in well-established, prestigious journals (Berger and

Cirasella, 2015). Similarly, unethical or immoral profit-seeking behavior can also be theoretically linked to upmarket or downmarket profit-seeking. For example, is a $750 article with mediocre 30 editing and curation more exploitative than a higher-quality $5000 article with a profit margin far exceeding $750? More broadly, deviant behavior tends to be less sanctioned and more easily forgiven when committed by high-status actors and institutions (Sharkey, 2014). In the case of scientific publishing, profit rates in the 30-40% range suggest that about $1000 of the average OA

APC is surplus for the publisher. In other words, profits are deemed much more acceptable if linked to a legitimate or high-status product. As an additional analogy, luxury goods like Chanel and Rolls Royce are quality products, but this does not necessarily mean that economic transactions with luxury goods are fair or just. Broadly, the contemporary scientific publishing market raises questions regarding distributive justice: when are high profit margins morally justified, and when are such rents grifting or usury? Put differently, can one overpay – or get

“ripped off” – for a Veblen good? If a Veblen good delivers distinction (namely, exclusivity and association with high-status alters), perhaps it offers value, even if seemingly a bad deal if judging by the raw, objective quality of the good alone? The high-end of the scientific publishing market has this potential justification for high profits, while the low-end has no such subjective or obfuscated value.

How Status Changes Incentives and Relationships with Institutional Logics

In contexts with institutional complexity, status orderings change payoffs and incentives for adherence to different institutional logics. Figure 1 presents an idealized payoff structure for online scientific journals, which reflects tradeoffs and relationships between institutional logics.

-- Insert Figure 1 about here – 31

In online scientific publishing, status increases improve alignment between scientific and economic logics. As per sociological theories of status (Bourdieu, 1984; Podolny, 2005), selectivity – incurring opportunity costs of foregone APCs from high rates of rejected articles – imbues high-status journals with academic and economic value. Consequently, high rejection rates enhance value for high-status journals, in that they underpin prestige and quality control, and by extension, higher price points. By curating this value, high impact journals are able to charge higher APCs (Armstrong, 2015; Pinfield, Salter and Bath 2016). These higher price points cover

– and perhaps surpass – costs of forgoing APCs from a large cache of rejected articles. In high- status segments of the scientific publishing market, scientific and economic institutional logics are relatively aligned. High-status journals and publishers enjoy the privilege of having journals imbued with value based on the pursuit and successful execution of high-status scientific values.

Managing conflicts between competing institutional logics is a common problem for complex organizations (Reay and Hinings, 2009). Organizational status can change incentives and relationships between logics. Depending on the context, status increases or decreases can defuse or exacerbate ordinarily conflicting logics. In the case of scientific publishing, increased journal status is conducive to greater alignment between ordinarily conflicting scientific and economic institutional logics.

Conflicts between institutional logics in scientific publishing differ at various points of the status hierarchy. Lower-status journals tend to exist in more competitive market niches, where there are more journals of comparable reputation to compete with. In turn, lower-status journals have less leverage to charge high APCs and have fewer high-quality articles submitted by 32 prospective authors. Lower degrees of scrutiny also diminish the benefits of high selectivity. At lower status levels, selectivity does little to imbue a journal with value, which also makes opportunity costs of high rejection rates more salient. Precarious market positioning and revenue bases – coupled with weaker academic status – underpins stronger economic logics. Beyond rejecting severely fraudulent or incompetent contributions that could garner negative publicity if published, low-status journals are relatively free to publish as prolifically as possible. Even if lower-status journals had the revenue and resources to support a high rejection rate, there would be little prestige increase to compensate for the various actual and opportunity costs of high rejection rates. Cases like Frontiers Media – comprised of journals with moderate to high APCs and low rejection rates – exhibit legitimacy problems created in part by clashes between scientific and economic institutional logics.

In high-status segments of the scientific publishing market, revenue is often generated through relatively high APCs, such as the $5200(USD) APC of Nature Communications. The strong scientific logic in such cases appears to be superordinate to the co-existing strong economic logics. High-status publishers might be criticized for charging excessively high prices for a public good like science, but this does not seriously harm their scientific prestige or legitimacy. In contrast, the main revenue-generating mechanism for lower-status publishers is the moderately selective or non-selective publication of scientific manuscripts in exchange for lower-priced APCs.

Downmarket publishers generally lack the cachet to imbue this business model with status or legitimacy.

33

Market segmentation is a business strategy to establish profitable, downmarket niches while maintaining the prestige and reputation of the original publishing brand. As mentioned,

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) acquired the controversial publisher Frontiers Media in 2013

(Van Noorden, 2013b). In addition to its flagship journal Nature, as mentioned, NPG offers a high- end OA journal imbued with the status and legitimacy of the Nature imprimatur, Nature

Communications, with a high $5200(USD) APC. NPG further segmented its publishing market by status, adding three new OA journals – Communications Biology, Communications Chemistry and

Communications Physics, with less-expensive APCs ($2570(USD)), while gradually distancing the journals from the Nature imprimatur. At the downmarket end of the spectrum of NPG’s portfolio of journals, NPG strategically distances itself from Frontiers Media, making the decision for “a clean separation and never to mention again that [NPG] has some kind of involvement in

Frontiers” (Enserink, 2015). Put differently, closeness to the Nature brand is a source of value for both publishers and scientists. Market segmentation allows large publishers to simultaneously exploit upmarket and downmarket niches with varying mixes of economic and scientific institutional logics. More broadly, market segmentation is also a means for managing institutional complexity by partitioning niches for different combinations of status and institutional logics.

Conclusion

The emergence of predatory – or illegitimate – journals in new digital scientific publishing markets is an emerging professional problem in science, as well as a broader societal problem.

Additionally, the challenge of defining legitimacy in online publishing reveals new insights regarding how status affects institutionally complex contexts. In particular, status changes market 34 incentives and relationships between different institutional logics. In the case of scientific publishing, higher status increases alignment between scientific and economic logics; this complementarity is a privilege that underpins increased legitimacy for such journals and publishers. More broadly, the emergence – and continued proliferation – of APC-based models for funding scientific publishing raises questions regarding the morals of rent or profit-seeking behaviors and institutions in science. Scientific stakeholders must draw lines between legitimate and illegitimate science, as well as legitimate and illegitimate business models. Complementarity between scientific and economic logics helps ensure that the profit-seeking business models of high-status journals and publishers are perceived as legitimate. This alignment of institutional logics is another source of cumulative advantage in science (Merton, 1968), which also includes resources to be reactive to influential third-party rankings and measures, such as the journal impact factor and blacklists. In contrast, lower-status journals and publishers face different incentives and are vulnerable to the stigma of being labeled as ‘predatory’ due to conflicting economic and scientific institutional logics in downmarket niches.

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Economic Logic Low High

‘Predatory’/ Low ‘Indie’ Illegitimate

Scientific High Acceptable

Ideal Scientific Logic

Table 1 – Ideal Types of Scientific Publishers with Combinations of Institutional Logics

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Figure 1 – Tradeoffs Between Rejection Rate and Revenue in Online Scientific Publishing