Dresden 2026 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 9: Economic Models

SOE 9.5: Talk

Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 12:30–12:45, GÖR/0226

Overcoming the Prestige Trap: Modelling the Transition to Community-Led Academic Publishing — •Valentin Lecheval^1,2, Clémence Bergerot^1,3, Valerii Chirkov^1,2, Giuseppe Maria Ferro⁴, and Daniel Rubenstein⁴ — ¹Department of Biology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany — ²Science of Intelligence, Research Cluster of Excellence, Berlin, Germany — ³Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Einstein Center for Neurosciences Berlin, Berlin, Germany — ⁴Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

The academic publishing industry is dominated by a few for-profit companies, resulting in the corporate capture of a substantial share of public funds that could instead support academia. While alternative publishing models are not lacking--community-led publishers offering diamond open-access, or directing article processing charges towards academic services--they suffer from reduced attractivity compared to their for-profit counterparts, possibly due to first-mover advantages and path-dependent reputational dynamics. Here, we introduce a multi-scale agent-based model depicting the joint dynamics of research groups and journals. The parameters of research groups dictate their preference for journals, weighting various attributes, such as reputation or community services--attributes that can depict for-profit journals, society-based journals, open-access mega-journals or predatory journals. We simulate the model on a wide range of parameters to investigate the conditions leading community-led journals to overcome path-dependent barriers and dominate the publishing landscape.

Keywords: Scientific publishing; Agent-based modelling; Complex systems