Thoughts on how scholar-led publishing can overcome the effect of the prestige economy

An increase in the development of scholar‑led diamond open access (DOA) journals might be part of the future of academic publishing. However, a successful outcome to such an endeavour would require a broad range of well‑published and early career academics to publish in them. Higher education institutions and their academics compete in a global prestige market. Therefore, the problem of the prestige economy may need to be overcome in order to encourage academics to publish in newly created scholar‑led DOA journals. Contributions to publishing in and editing scholar‑led DOA journals need to be recognized, and endorsed, by managerial staff and/or higher education institutions. Moreover, people can be affected by a status quo bias, are loss averse, often prefer to remain consistent with previous decisions and are motivated to avoid the potential for regret. The prestige economy may be reinforced by these effects when authors select a journal as an outlet for their work. Moreover, existing attitudes, habits and an author’s self‑concept can affect how they select a journal. These cognitive effects could be targeted by a professional development intervention aimed at increasing the likelihood of authors selecting a scholar‑led DOA journal as an outlet for their work.