Fennia: positioning a peripheral but an international journal under the condition of ‘academic capitalism’

Abstract

Universities and academic publishing cultures are transforming in developed societies around the world. This is related to the changing relations between the state and universities and to the increasingly common approval of neoliberal new public management doctrines. This has led to the adoption of diverse evaluation and ranking systems in science policies that in the last resort have an impact on how resources are delivered to universities, faculties and individualdepartments. New imperatives that researchers have faced seem to emphasize articles written in the English language that are published in so-called international quality journals. This paper scrutinizes at first the changing institutional basis and pressures that characterize current international academic publishing cultures; secondly, how such tendencies reflect the rise of academic capitalism;and thirdly, the shifting position of the well-established Finnish geographical journal Fennia in the international publishing space. A major dividing line between contemporary journals seems to exist between those that are included in the Web of Science/ISI-system of Thomson Reuters and those that are not. This paper shows by using the ISI data that Fennia has been, despite the fact that it is not an ISI-listed journal, a widely used and circulated forum for a long time. A major challenge for the future reputation of the journal will be attracting more high-quality international submissions and articles, regardless of whether the journal will be included in the ISI system.

Keywords

• geography
• academic publishing cultures
• Web of Science
• academic capitalism