Fennia: positioning a 'peripheral' but international journal under the condition of academic capitalism

Abstract

Academic publishing cultures are rapidly changing around the world. This is related above all to the adoption of diverse evaluation and ranking systems in the science policies that in the last resort have an impact on how public resources are delivered to universities and departments. New claims that researchers face seem to emphasize articles written in 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 new tendencies can be interpreted as expressions of academic capitalism; and thirdly, the shifting position of the by tradition well-established Finnish geographical journal Fennia in this wider, internationalizing publishing space. This space increasingly ‘crosses’ national borders but perpetually displays uneven power relations and has certain cores and peripheries. A major dividing line between journals seems to be between those included in the ISI-lists of Thomson Reuters and those that are not included. This paper shows that Fennia has been a widely circulating journal for a long time, in spite of the fact that it is not an ISI-listed journal. A major challenge for the future reputation of the journal will be to attract more high quality international submissions and articles, whether the journal is included in the ISI system or not.