Prestige of scholarly book publishers: an investigation into criteria, processes, and practices across countries

Numerous national research assessment policies set the goal of promoting "excellence" and incentivise scholars to publish their research in the most prestigious journals or with the most prestigious book publishers. We investigate the practicalities of the assessment of book outputs based on the prestige of book publishers (Denmark, Finland, Flanders, Lithuania, Norway). Additionally, we test whether such judgments are transparent and yield consistent results. We show inconsistencies in the levelling of publishers, such as the same publisher being ranked as prestigious and not-so-prestigious in different states or in consequent years within the same country. Likewise, we find that verification of compliance with the mandatory prerequisites is not always possible because of the lack of transparency. Our findings support doubts about whether the assessment of books based on a judgement about their publisher yields acceptable outcomes. Currently used rankings of publishers focus on evaluating the gatekeeping role of publishers but do not assess other essential stages in scholarly book publishing. Our suggestion for future research is to develop approaches to evaluate books by accounting for the value added to every book at every publishing stage, which is vital for the quality of book outputs from research assessment and scholarly communication perspectives.