The foundational layers of ontological persistence (DOI/Zenodo) and identity stabilisation (ORCID) exhibit minimal structural conflict, functioning as open, non-proprietary protocols that democratise access to citability and attribution without gatekeeper rents or investor extraction. These strata operate as public utilities within the knowledge commons, their conflicts limited to technical interoperability rather than power asymmetries. Yet ascent to the algorithmic-visibility tier (Google Scholar) and especially the curated-prestige tier (Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus Q1) exposes the fault lines: commercial entities dominate the infrastructure that converts raw scholarly labour into stratified legitimacy. Investment funds emerge as the primary vector of conflict. RELX (Elsevier/Scopus parent) is publicly traded with dominant institutional holders including Vanguard, BlackRock, Capital International Investors and Morgan Stanley; Clarivate (Web of Science) is controlled by private-equity heavyweights such as Leonard Green & Partners (≈18 %), Exor N.V. and Clarkston Capital. These actors demand consistent high-margin returns—RELX routinely exceeds 38 % operating margins—structurally incentivising volume expansion, metric optimisation and selective indexing that privileges profitable titles. The result is a privatised reputational bank where publicly financed research generates private shareholder value through APCs, subscriptions and data analytics.
Guild or society-owned journals occupy an ambiguous middle ground. While many Q1 outlets retain formal affiliation with professional associations, operational publishing contracts with the oligopoly (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis) transfer editorial logistics, marketing and revenue collection to commercial partners. Societies receive royalty shares yet cede control over pricing, special-issue policies and indexing negotiations; the arrangement resembles a franchised gremio whose symbolic prestige is leased to capital-intensive operators. This hybridity dilutes genuine guild autonomy while shielding commercial actors behind academic branding.
Homo academicus, in Bourdieusian terms, navigates a field whose rules are increasingly co-authored by these commercial gatekeepers. Citation velocity, h-index thresholds and quartile placement function as convertible cultural capital whose accumulation determines hiring, promotion and funding. The stratified republic thereby reproduces internal hierarchies wherein scholars compete for positions within a game whose board, scoring system and prize structure are partly owned by external investors. The habitus of the contemporary academic internalises metric discipline as professional virtue, naturalising the conflict as meritocratic necessity. Revolving doors remain subtler yet documented in editorial and advisory circuits. Former academics populate publisher boards, Clarivate/Elsevier advisory panels and CSAB-like committees; conversely, publishing executives transition into university leadership or funding bodies. While Clarivate publicly asserts in-house editorial independence, the personnel overlap between academia, commercial indexing and high-stakes grant agencies creates soft conflicts of interest in selection criteria, de-indexing decisions and policy influence. Empirical traces surface in periodic scandals involving manipulated peer review or anomalous citation patterns that benefit affiliated titles.
The metaphor of a private bank of ideas captures the apex mechanism most acutely. Scopus and Web of Science function as proprietary ledgers that securitise knowledge objects: each indexed article accrues citation interest, quartile dividends and reputational collateral. Access to these balance sheets is gated by institutional subscriptions or APCs; the metrics themselves constitute tradable assets whose manipulation (guest-editor special issues, citation cartels) has triggered mass de-indexings in 2025–2026. Cultural capital is thus sequestered—produced collectively through taxpayer-funded research and peer labour, yet privately valorised and rationed by investor-backed platforms. In final adjudication the system cannot be classified as a wholly legitimate bank. Basal infrastructures remain largely open and functional, yet the prestige and visibility apexes exhibit systemic capture: investment-driven profit motives shape gatekeeping, guild autonomy is diluted by commercial outsourcing, homo academicus habitus is metricised, revolving doors lubricate influence, and cultural capital is sequestered behind private ledgers. The conflict resides not in the existence of stratification itself but in the misalignment whereby public epistemic labour subsidises private financial extraction. Infrastructural literacy therefore demands not naïve rejection of the strata but deliberate navigation that maximises basal sovereignty while contesting apical rents—constructing parallel circuits of open prestige where feasible and exposing misalignments where necessary. Only thus does the scholar-architect reclaim epistemic sovereignty within an otherwise conflicted republic. (204 words)
Lloveras, A. (2026) 'The Stratified Republic of Letters', Socioplastics. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-stratified-republic-of-letters.html (Accessed: 20 February 2026).
