Splitting status and substance: The diverging fates of breakaway and zombie journals

Mass editorial board resignations from journals are an increasingly widespread phenomenon in academic publishing. Breakaway journals are new journals founded by resigning editorial boards to compete with the journal they abandoned. Publishers often respond to these mutinies by re-staffing journal editorships and editorial boards to preserve the journal brand. Zombie journals are established journals that persist following mass resignations. Breakaway and Zombie journals provide an opportunity to empirically examine how removing part of a journal's community from its brand affects subsequent publishing behaviors and niches. This article analyzes early case studies of editorial board mutinies in linguistics, bibliometrics, and mathematics. Difference-in- differences analyses of pre- and post-mutiny journals reveal that the Breakaway journals quickly established market share at the expense of their Zombie counterparts. Post-mutiny Zombie journals exhibited declines in citations received and authorial status, as well as shifts in publishing volume. In both linguistics and bibliometrics, Breakaway journals were largely led and patronized by North American and European authors. This created vacancy chains at the Zombie journals, filled by an influx of China-affiliated authors, revealing unique institutional and cultural scientific reward structures in Chinese science vis-à-vis traditionally leading Western counterparts. Results suggest that academic capital associated with journal brands is mutable and appropriable, providing opportunities for institutional entrepreneurs to reshape academic publishing, as well as their broader intellectual fields. • Editorial mass resignations create rival “Breakaway” and “Zombie” journal pairs. • Breakaway/Zombie splits decouple journal status markers from author communities. • Post-mutiny Zombie journals saw declines in citations, status and Western authors. • China-based author shares rose post-mutiny in the studied Zombie journals. • Findings suggest journal capital can be mutable across brand and community.