Activism, Legitimation, or Record: Towards a New Tripartite Typology of Academic Journals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Though it is widely accepted that academic publishing has both communication and credentialing functions, there have been no systematic attempts to categorize journals according to their various socio-political aims since Toby Miller's intervention in the early 2000s. Yet one-third of all peer-reviewed academic journals currently in print did not even exist at the time of his writing. This article takes these new journals into account in order to develop a systematic typology of academic journals based on their intended social purpose, both within and beyond the academy. After an overview of similar typologies and their strengths and limitations, the author proposes a tripartite typology for academic journals: journals of (1) record, (2) transformational activism, and (3) professional legitimation. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the symbiotic relationship between the academy and scholarly publishing and argues that, in the digital age, this relationship is as important as ever.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.024 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".