Publishing director Sabrina Diab-Helmer in DUZ Wissenschaft & Management 04/2026

How much does a publisher’s name determine academic reputation?

Two monographs are submitted to an appointment committee. Both address a central research question, both have been peer-reviewed, carefully edited and made permanently accessible. One was published by a large, market-dominant publishing house, the other by a young university press. Which one is perceived as carrying more weight? At many universities, the honest answer is probably still: the first. This is not necessarily because of its greater scholarly merit, but because the established publisher’s name acts as a familiar signal of quality.

Sabrina Diab-Helmer, publishing director of Bielefeld University Press, explores this question in her article “Der Verlagsname als Karrierefaktor” (“The Publisher’s Name as a Career Factor”) in the current October issue of DUZ Wissenschaft & Management.

Her analysis starts from a fundamental contradiction in the academic system. Universities invest in their own publishing infrastructures and commit to Open Science and to responsible, content-based research assessment. In career procedures, however, they often continue to reward the symbolic capital of established publishing brands. Diab-Helmer draws a parallel: what the Journal Impact Factor is for journal articles, the publisher’s name can be for monographs. It is a readily available but only limitedly meaningful substitute signal for quality. It is precisely such proxy indicators that DORA, the Leiden Manifesto and the CoARA Agreement have been criticising for years.

The article does not deny that the reputation of established publishers rests on real achievements. These include well-profiled series, experienced editorial teams, international networks and worldwide distribution. Reputation becomes problematic, however, where it is no longer put into context but used as a blanket judgement on the quality of a specific work. International research shows how unreliable such attributions can be. The same publisher may be regarded as prestigious in one country and ranked considerably lower in another, and sometimes the assessment even changes from year to year.

For Germany, Diab-Helmer analyses, as an example, publicly available appointment guidelines from ten universities. She finds an institutional gap: the guidelines state the aim of a qualitative assessment, but none of them explicitly regulates what role a publisher’s reputation may play in the evaluation of monographs.

The consequences primarily affect early-career researchers. Anyone applying for a first professorship has to anticipate how a committee will assess not only their own work, but also where it was published. This creates a perverse incentive: those whose publication decisions would be particularly important for the success of Diamond Open Access have the strongest reasons to rely on well-known brands. The demonstrably greater reach of openly accessible books does not change this. Whether reach turns into reputation is decided by the evaluation system.

The article makes clear that research assessment independent of publisher prestige is not only a question of fairness. It is a key prerequisite for the success of the Open Access transformation. In the end, it raises a question of science policy: what reforms are needed so that the academic community shapes not only access to its publications, but also the mechanisms through which reputation arises and becomes relevant to careers?

The article appeared in DUZ Wissenschaft & Management 04/2026 (pp. 76–80) and is now freely available in Open Access.