Pyramid economies of academic publishing, cultural capital, and discourses of predation

In August 2017, L.L. Wynn—an anthropology professor—received an e-mail from “Jessica Smith” writing on behalf of the Scientific Journal of Robotics, headquartered in Carson City, Nevada. The e-mail, featuring three different fonts, gently berated Wynn for not responding to their previous e-mail and “hereby took the privilege to make a follow up,” inviting Wynn to contribute an article. Smith promised “free, immediate and unlimited access to highest quality via open access platform.”

Wynn had received many similar invitations. She had been asked to contribute articles to journals on electrical engineering, nursing, gerontology, pregnancy, obstetrics, creative education, organ transplantation, business management, bioethics, infectious disease, addiction, biomass, and geology. Many academics have expressed frustration with the way their e-mail addresses are harvested online and used to spam academics with publishing invites outside of their field (McCoy 2019), but Wynn found humor in the invitation. She responded with a joke, proposing “a speculative article about robotic feet as a kind of sex aid for people with foot fetishes who do not wish to interact with people who have smelly feet” and confessed, “This isn’t something I’ve personally done research on, but I feel I am highly qualified to write speculatively about the topic of feet including robotic feet.”

Smith promptly replied, “the topic is within the scope of the journal,” and invited Wynn to submit.

Taking the joke further, Wynn asked whether poems about sucking robot toes might fit within the journal’s scope, and proposed genres including acrostic, haiku, limerick, and sonnet. Then, she shared the joke on Facebook, inviting friends to write poems about robot toes for foot fetishists. A former research assistant, now doing a PhD at a university in Sydney, posted a limerick. An economist in Boston e-mailed a haiku about robotic digits and toenail fungus. A political economist in London offered to “write an econometric model, taking into account a number of key variables, such as expected vs observed friction, odor, movement.” Two colleagues in Sydney debated the effect of publishing in that journal on the government’s regular audit of Australian universities: one observed it would boost the department’s overall number of publications, while the other argued that it would tank their quality rating. An anthropologist in Prague posted an original poem:

Hallux 9000^{Footnote 1}

by Paul G. Keil

I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Just what do you think you are doing, Dave?

Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop Dave? Stop, Dave

As toe haikus and limericks flooded Wynn’s Facebook page, Smith replied, “Yes, you can send poems as you mentioned.”

Wynn did a Google search for the “Scientific Journal of Robotics” and found no online presence.

This anecdote tells a story about the changing terrain of academic publishing, but also how academic gatekeeping relies on social and cultural capital to police belonging and exclusion. The context for this exchange is the proliferation of open-access journals, beginning in the early 2000s. New publishing technologies allowed entrepreneurs to leverage open access to disrupt the monopolies of the establishment, for-profit academic publishers that required readers to pay subscriptions to access academic articles (Moosa 2018). These entrepreneurs, however, weren’t conversant with the cultural norms of their target authors. Wynn’s joke responded to an inappropriate publishing invite with an equally inappropriate article suggestion. When the journal representative failed to perceive that she was the butt of a humorous critique, it revealed both the publisher’s pecuniary interests and their lack of discrimination.

Discrimination is, of course, essential to the operations of academia, pointing to another layer of this joke. The journal representative’s obsequious language signaled the journal’s illegitimacy; academics are used to the role of supplicant vis-à-vis publishers. Being petitioned to submit inverts the pyramid of an exclusionary system.

But the academics’ humor also exploited the journal representative’s lack of cultural capital. Wynn’s Facebook friends were all English-fluent academics, while Jessica Smith’s syntax suggested that she was fluent in neither English nor academese. The jokes relied on her either not recognizing their mockery or being unable to retaliate because she lacked status within those insular academic networks.

Jeffrey Beall coined the term “predatory publishers” to refer to open-access journals that didn’t subject submissions to genuine academic peer review (Spears 2017). In practice, the term described new publishers who lacked the social and cultural capital to effectively compete with establishment publishers. Beall’s List of over a thousand journals circulated widely within academia as a kind of journal blocklist until January 2017, when Beall took the list down, allegedly in response to legal threats from publishers on Beall’s List (Basken 2017).

Yet, even after Beall’s List shut down, the concept of predatory publisher continues to thrive. Such publishers are widely portrayed as scams, preying upon clueless academics. For example, Boukacem-Zeghmouri (2023) has called these journals a “known scourge of science” that waste resources, “entrap” researchers, and undermine public trust in science.

With Beall’s critique came the humorists who used jokes to discredit these journals. Perhaps most famously, Peter Vamplew responded to spam from the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology by submitting an “article” consisting of nothing but the phrase, “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List,” repeated in the title, the text, and a flowchart diagram. The journal asked him to add more recent references, but “otherwise they said its suitability for the journal was excellent” (McCoy 2019).

Humor is a serious matter for social scientists. It reveals social structures and tensions, power relations, moral categories and taboos, cultural norms, and their subversion (Swinkels and de Koning 2016; Kuipers 2016). Jokes are effective tools for critiquing social hierarchies and hegemonic cultural norms (Douglas 1968, 364). Conversely, jokes can be a tool of the powerful turned “against the vulnerable, weak and less privileged” (Sakai 2022).

We analyze these jokes for what they tell us about academia and academic publishing, from intellectual hierarchies to the international political economy of academic labor. The fact that the label “predatory” is not applied to more powerful publishers, ranging from large for-profit conglomerates like Elsevier (Buranyi 2017) to smaller open-access journals accused of exploitative labor practices (The Former HAU Staff 7 2018), is revealing. Academic publishing is infused with (arguably) exploitative hierarchies and pyramid schemes; compared with powerful establishment publishers, upstart journals that seek to charge Vamplew, Zimmerman, or Wynn (2018a, b) small sums to publish prank articles scarcely deserve the label “predatory.”

So how does it happen that these publishers, striving awkwardly at the margins—a strange mix of eager and helpful and pushy and absurd with their obsequious language and bad syntax (Markowitz et al. 2014), willing to endure mockery by academics for the promise of a publishing fee, and also willing to professionally typeset articles and make them available online without paywalls and without seizing copyright from the authors—get called “predators”?

We argue that these publishers receive the label because they lack the social and cultural capital necessary for truly effective predation. Calling them “predatory” gives academics a scapegoat to complain about academic publishing. Examining these jokes and pranks, and then juxtaposing them with debates about academia’s pyramid schemes, gatekeeping, and distribution of academic labor and privilege along with the critiques leveled against the prestigious establishment journals, thus not only unsettles the label “predator,” it also reveals how the privileges of Western knowledge are embedded in the structures of knowledge transmission and internalized in academic discourse (Dussel 1985; Grosfoguel 2012).

In 1996, Alan Sokal, a physics professor, decided to prove that the prestigious cultural studies journal Social Text would publish nonsense as long as it was full of postmodern jargon. He submitted an article claiming that physical reality was a “social and linguistic construct.” Social Text accepted it. The day it was published, Sokal simultaneously published an article in Lingua Franca revealing the article was a hoax. This hoax set the standard for neopositivist spoofing of social science and humanities journals, such as the 2018 “Grievance Studies” hoaxes (Lindsay et al. 2018).

Jokes targeting the so-called predatory publishers bear some relation to the Sokal and Grievance Studies hoaxes. All elicit collegial laughter by publishing outlandish articles that don’t meet the scholarly standards of their discipline. But so-called predatory journals are additionally singled out for lacking the social and cultural capital to understand the jokes or reject their publication. For example, a 2017 submission about “midi-chlorians” that referred to “a galaxy far, far away,” submitted under the names “Dr. Lucas McGeorge and Dr Annette Kin,” was accepted by four journals whose editors presumably failed to recognize the Star Wars references (McCook 2017).

While the Sokal and Grievance Studies hoaxes were authored by positivists mocking the reflexive and postmodern turn, their efforts register as jokes precisely because of their success in adopting the language and jargon of the journals they target—high ranking, prestigious journals, none of which has ever been described as predatory in media coverage of these pranks. In contrast, a critical element uniting pranks played on “predatory” journals is the deployment of (Western) inside jokes of language or popular culture that go undetected by journal editors. These pranking strategies reflect the international distribution of journal prestige, which explains why the history of these pranks tracks with the emergence of new international publishers in China, India, and Africa, all seeking entrance into the Western-dominated field of academic journal publishing.

The late-1990s open-access movement emerged out of academics’ frustration over their scholarly work being exploited by for-profit publishers (Huang et al. 2019). The traditional academic publishing model requires authors to sign over copyright to journals yet pays authors and peer reviewers nothing, while journal editors may receive small annual honorariums for their work (or nothing at all), but are rarely paid salaries.^{Footnote 2} The publishers then put these articles behind paywalls, preventing the public from freely accessing research, and charge university libraries for it. This “triple-pay system”—where researchers (and the governments, granting agencies, and universities who support them) pay to do research, review research, and read research—is incredibly profitable; in 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing division had a higher profit margin (36%) than Apple, Google, or Amazon (Buranyi 2017).

In response, new open-access journals like PLOS (Public Library of Science) emerged with a novel funding model: the author (or their funder) would pay to have their work published, and readers would access it for free. PLOS One proved that open access meant more readers; their journal citation index, and thus their reputation, quickly soared. Yet the PLOS open-access model excluded many; as of June 2024, PLOS One charged US$2290 to publish an article and PLOS Medicine charged US$6300 (plos.org/publish/fees), putting this publishing model out of reach of most academics, particularly in low- to middle-income countries. Thus, although these new and prestigious open-access journals promise to expand universal access to knowledge, they continued to favor the privileged (Istratii and Porter 2018, 188). Further, PLOS “academic editors,” who do much of the work at the PLOS stable of journals, including both peer reviewing themselves and recruiting peer reviewers, receive no remuneration, despite the tens of millions in annual revenue generated by author charges.

Seeing a clear market gap, new open-access publishers emerged, mostly from low- and middle-income countries, including Creative Education, MDPI, OMICS International, and Proskolar Publications. They often recruited authors by downloading conference programs and then e-mailing presenters. These invites were often indiscriminate, paying no attention to the invited scholar’s disciplinary background, and thus resembled spam. Their fees were a fraction of PLOS’s.

This is a rough sketch of a complex history of the open-access movement and academic publishing trends (see, e.g., Kaiser 2013). We have not even touched on other trajectories such as Latin America’s, particularly Brazil’s successful free-to-publish and free-to-read, community-supported open-access journals (Ahmed et al. 2023). The key point is that, while the language of “predatory publisher” and Beall’s List promulgated the widespread belief that there were two categories of journals—reputable, peer-reviewed journals and non-reputable journals that would publish anything for a price—a continuum of quality, legitimacy, and prestige exists (Xia et al. 2015).

Wynn has received several invitations to join the editorial boards of the journals that Xia et al. (2015) classify as “predatory.” One of these invites explained the journal’s pyramidal funding model: editors were responsible for soliciting contributors, and would then receive a percentage of the fee from each author they recruited (see also Sorokowski et al. 2017). These are, literally, pyramid schemes. And yet, upon closer examination, pyramidal prestige economies underpin all academic publishing.

“Pyramid scheme” typically refers to a system of recruiting an ever-increasing cohort of investors whose funds are funneled upstream to the earlier investors; the pyramid never generates returns for the last-recruited cohort on the bottom of the metaphorical pyramid (New York State Attorney General n.d.). Calling any enterprise a “pyramid” is stigmatizing, which is precisely what gives it comedic value when applied to academia:

My friend got a degree in Egyptology, but can’t get a job, So he’s paying more money to get a Phd, so he can work teaching other people Egyptology. In his case college is literally a pyramid scheme. (@katiehannigan on Twitter, 30 August 2019)

The pyramidal structures of the new open-access journals, many of which act like multi-level marketing schemes, are part of what makes these journals suspect. And yet, anthropological debates around the journal HAU in 2018 raised new questions about even the most prestigious academic publishing endeavors and the pyramid schemes sustaining them.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory was founded in 2011 as a rigorously peer-reviewed, open-access anthropology journal. Not only did its publishing model promise to not charge readers, it also promised to not charge people to publish in it. The journal’s editorial board was full of luminaries of the discipline.

The journal’s name came from Marcel Mauss’s classic The Gift, where “hau” is described as a Māori term meaning “the spirit of the gift,” a kind of supernatural-cum-social force that binds giver and receiver in powerful relationships of obligation. The term signaled the ways academic publishing works through noncommercial relationships of reciprocity. The freely given labor of the peer reviewer carries an expectation that the community will reciprocate. In giving your expertise and time, you also assert others’ obligations toward you.

Critics argued that the journal’s name also signaled a fixation on canonical texts and the prestige of European centers of academic power (Dunn 2018). Māori, Pasifika, and Pacific scholars critiqued the appropriation of a Māori term to signal reciprocity, arguing that this reflected the long history of anthropologists appropriating Indigenous knowledge while (falsely) presenting the anthropological encounter as an equal and reciprocal exchange (Mahi Tahi Collective 2018).

These cracks in the shiny façade of a utopian publishing dream widened in June 2018, when a group of former HAU staffers anonymously published an open letter claiming that the journal’s founding editor, Giovanni da Col, had engaged in “systematic bullying, harassment and intimidation” to “coerce staff into taking extra work.” They also claimed the journal, originally conceptualized as completely open access and funded by grants from institutions, had secretly transformed its economic model and was (like PLOS) charging authors to be published.

Like the new open-access journals’ model of using editors as mid-level marketers who extract payments from submitters and then take a cut before funneling those funds up the pyramid, the critique leveled at da Col’s HAU was that it generated value for certain participants—the editor and editorial board—out of the unremunerated and largely unseen labor of students. Many observers saw the HAU-7 letter as revealing deep structural flaws in not just that journal, but in academia more generally: an exploitative system that extracts labor from a precariat seeking entry into the halls of academe, whose labor ultimately maintains the prestige economies of those on top of the pyramid (Neveling 2018; Dunn 2018).

Cherifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri argues that “predatory journals entrap unsuspecting scientists” by “hook[ing]” them with the promise of “fast and obstacle-free publishing” (2023: 469). Yet several scholars have offered evidence that the authors publishing in these journals described as “predatory” are not tricked; they are making rational decisions to publish in them (Moosa 2018; Xia et al. 2015). Williams Ezinwa Nwagwu and Obinna Ojemeni (2015) note that most of these journals have DOIs (digital object identifiers), charge smaller fees than establishment journals, are indexed on Google Scholar, and achieved on average 2.25 citations per article. They are career advancing, yet far cheaper and easier to publish in than prestigious journals. Another research group interviewed 80 authors published in journals found on Beall’s List and found authors valued these journals’ fast publication times and reported receiving good quality peer review (Salehi et al. 2019). Yet these journals are persistently called “predatory” (e.g., Sorokowski et al. 2017), while more prestigious journals do not receive the label, despite their extractive funding models.

What about the argument that science is being polluted by a lack of peer review, or that these journals predate on science itself? This allegation is at the core of most attempts to define “predatory publishers” (Boukacem-Zeghmouri 2023: 469). Yet there is an extensive body of experimental research and statistical analysis that has systematically demonstrated that peer review is inconsistent and biased, sexist, shaped by nepotism, reproduces establishment hierarchies, and doesn’t necessarily improve articles (Ahmed et al. 2023; Docot 2022; Golubovic et al. 2022; Jefferson et al. 2002; Smith 2006; Wenneras and Wold 1997).^{Footnote 3} Further, there is no guarantee that journals published by the establishment publishers are legitimate, scientific enterprises; for example, Frank Houghton (2022: 234) reports that Elsevier Australia took money from a pharmaceutical company to publish six “fake” journals promoting the company’s pharmaceutical products.

So why does the English-speaking academic world refer to certain journals as “predatory”? Why are they not, for example, described as scavengers, rather than predators?

The answer lies in the prestige economies and boundary work of academia. The label “predatory publisher” attaches to publishers that lack cultural and social capital. Those defining “predatory” make frequent reference to the publishers’ geographic locations outside of the North Atlantic and comment on lack of aesthetic taste (Beall 2015; Bowman 2014). Chrissy Prater (2014) argues that one can identify a predatory journal based on the recognizability of its editorial board members. These rules for identifying the “predator” penalize those outside of establishment networks. Such definitions thus constitute boundary work that reproduces academic power hierarchies.

In reviewing the claims that academics make about these publishers, a remarkable fact emerges: other than geographic location and the recognizability of editorial boards, most of the features that are said to define “predatory” publishers also apply to the establishment publishers. For example, Prater (2014) argues, “These ‘predatory’ journals don’t just take your money, they also take away your control over your scholarship. Once they have ‘published’ your paper, it may be impossible to submit it to a true journal.” Yet conventional publishers take away authors’ control over their scholarship, while open-access publishers allow authors to retain copyright and therefore control over their scholarship.

Beall (2015) claims that predatory publishers demonstrate “a lack of transparency in publishing operations”—yet elite journals’ publishing operations and peer review processes are opaque to most people not involved in those journals, and particularly to scholars in the Global South (Ahmed et al. 2023; Downey 2023).

Another way, Beall (2015) asserts, that predatory journals are problematic is that “Scholarly journals pay substantial costs for editor and staff time for manuscript evaluation, peer review, editing, and quality assurance. Predatory journals reduce or eliminate these services.” In fact, scholarly journals do not pay for peer review, and most journal editors receive no remuneration or small sums that do not constitute salaries, so the claim that journals and their publishers pay “substantial” amounts for the services Beall listed simply is not true.

In short, many of the markers described as identifying predatory publishers equally describe establishment, for-profit publisher. Further, the vitriol aimed at the so-called predatory publishers is incommensurate with their effects on the careers of scholars. For scholars who lack seniority, social networks, or cultural capital, such journals may provide a mechanism for climbing the academic prestige pyramid to make careers for themselves.

Ultimately, the dualisms that schematize the world into binary categories of predatory vs. legitimate publishers or fake vs. genuine journals are not sustainable. Academic publishing is a nonbinary continuum that can be measured across a range of scales that may include the value of the peer review process, the cost of publishing or reading work, and the prestige and legitimacy of each journal. The jokes that have been played on a range of journals have contributed to breaking down these easy binaries. Respected, establishment journals have been successfully pranked (Lippman 2020), and not all journals on Beall’s List are willing to publish poems about toes. Some journals formerly on Beall’s List engage in genuine peer review practices (Salehi et al. 2019), and some have become viable competitors to journals in the more establishment publishers’ stables. For example, MDPI and Frontiers ranked fourth and tenth globally in 2024 in terms of overall number of articles published; MDPI came out ahead of Taylor & Francis and Sage, two publishers often described as amongst the top five for-profit publishing companies.^{Footnote 4}

But despite clear evidence of these complex continuums, the simplistic label “predatory” persists in the way academics talk about publishing (e.g., Boukacem-Zeghmouri 2023; Bowman 2014), even in projects that are critical of the overall publishing ecology and the label itself (e.g., Salehi et al. 2019; Xia et al. 2015). We want to suggest that this is so because that binary sustains an international political economy of academic prestige underpinning the publishing system. Not only does the label “predatory” disguise the inequalities and racism at the core of this system, it also acts as a scapegoat for academics’ own dissatisfaction with academic publishing.

Kirsten Bell argues that we should regard “predatory” journals as parodies of conventional publishing and the “relations of authority that traditional forms of scholarly publishing depend on” (2017: 660). She suggests we might read the pranks academics play on these journals as offering a kind of Dorian Gray–like portrait of the exclusion and racism that underpin academia’s global inequalities.

Examining those publishers who operate on the margins, or our own failed publishing cargo cults (build the runway/journal and the planes/careers will come), reveals a nexus of aspiration and inequalities, social value, and cultural capital. Our academic careers are built on a hidden entrepreneurial culture—after all, publishing is necessary to advance one’s academic career and earn an income—that rubs up against academic cultural values that are skeptical of entrepreneurialism and that see the business of publishing as the filthy lucre of for-profit capitalism that contaminates a more valorous gift economy of service to peers and the discipline.

Another way of analyzing these journals is as part of an overall academic publishing ecology where mainstream and upstart journals exist in a symbiotic relationship with each other. As Houghton (2022) argues, the new journals fill a market gap not satisfied by the mainstream journals; mainstream journals then justify their value with reference to the upstart journals’ quality. Or, as Bell et al. (2022) have pointed out, the constant work of marking a bright line between “fake” and “genuine” (in, for example, peer review) is critical boundary work that helps to shore up the reputation of a field or of science itself vis-à-vis funders and the public.

Anthropologists have observed that societies in transition are fertile ground for scams and fraud (Cox and Macintyre 2014). The new technologies and emerging economies of academic publishing have certainly made the last two decades transitional, and many have analyzed these new journals as scams and fraud. Yet, following Bell (2017), we see this moment of shifting publishing technologies not only as offering perspective on academia as it is becoming, but rather as a glimpse of academia as it has always been: a pyramidal prestige economy characterized by discrimination, boundary work, and exclusion, in an awkward and strained partnership with neoliberal capitalism. The academics who engage in humorous pranks on journals are probing the social laws and insecurities of changing publishing landscapes, demonstrating how to measure authenticity and divine frauds. Alexandra Lippman argues that this humor is critical work that has taken a carnivalesque turn (2020). But not only are pranksters honing their critical faculties to read their own social world and their status within a transnational academic hierarchy, they are also, by undertaking such pranks, asserting their status in that hierarchy and within a moral economy that primarily locates deviance in the Global South (Beek et al. 2019).

The Sokal Hoax and Grievance Studies incidents appear engaged in very different enterprises than the pranksters proposing toe poems to a robotics journal. The latter lampoons an imposter; the former purport to critique postmodern scholarship. Yet they are all asserting epistemic dominance. In the Sokal case, a physicist sought to discredit a prestigious postmodern journal by demonstrating it would publish bogus science if it “flattered the editor’s ideological preconceptions” (Sokal 1996: 1). Such actions reinforce a “global epistemic hierarchy” (Grosfoguel 2012: 82) of positivism. Similarly, the pranks on non-establishment journals challenge the quality of scholarship published outside the North American and European centers of academic knowledge production, thus silencing academic outsiders.

The Latin American decolonial school has analyzed how the privileges of Western knowledge are both rooted in colonialism and pervade the contemporary structures of global (Westernized) academia while disregarding other epistemologies (Aguilar 2017; Grosfoguel 2012). The jokes played on these journals reinforce Western canons and their establishment publishers, reflecting the “cultural colonialism” ingrained in the modern academic system (Dussel 1985: 201).

Claims that open-access journals will help decolonize knowledge frequently rest on the assumption that open access means expanding access to the prestigious journals of the Western canon, but exclude from discussion the emerging journals located outside of the Western, Anglophone centers of academia (Istratii and Porter 2018). Here, decolonial insights on the politics of citation can be expanded to thinking about the global politics of journal publication. As Rivera-Cusicanqui (2012: 103) states, “through the game of who cites whom, hierarchies are structured.” The “political grammar” of citation—and, we would add, publication—is the mechanism “through which dominant stories are secured, through which their status as ‘common sense’ is reproduced” (Hemmings 2011: 20; see also Liu 2021; Romero-Briones 2023).

Academic publishing is a prestige economy founded on exploitative hierarchies and pyramidal power structures. This dynamic reinforces Eurocentric knowledge in Westernized universities. Eurocentric knowledge is published in prestigious journals, which are needed by universities to increase their rankings (Moosa 2018).

Yet academics are also deeply unsatisfied with the current landscape of academic publishing. Journal editors and editorial boards are increasingly resigning in protest against the exploitative structures of corporate publishers (e.g., Fazackerley 2023; Racy and Willinsky 2023; Sanderson 2024).

Analyzing the logic for how the label “predatory” gets applied to some journals—mainly those emerging from lower- and middle-income countries to disrupt existing centers of academic publishing—we see an irony in the fact that the journals who initially received the label predatory were the ones that lack the social and cultural capital necessary for truly effective predation, i.e., they lack the power and sociocultural capital to coerce free labor from academics. These journals, we suggest, act as scapegoats for academics’ own dissatisfaction with academic publishing.

Rene Girard (1977) analyzed scapegoating as intrinsic to human society and essential to social order. Social scientists have used the concept of the scapegoat to describe the way that social groups create social identity and order by designating subgroups or social phenomena as deviant and then ritually slaying them, thus uniting the majority against a weak minority.

“Predatory publishers” are the scapegoats of academic publishing. They express academia’s anxieties and frustration over the exploitative nature of our own social world and over the power wielded and profits extracted by the establishment publishers. We sacrifice these new and emerging publishers, calling them “predators,” as stand-ins for the publishing giants and the centers of academic power that we resent but struggle to overthrow. In slaying these scapegoats with our pranks and spoofs, we paradoxically create the conditions to maintain the status quo, by reinforcing the power of the establishment publishers.