Strategic legitimacy signals and journal indexing: Declarative ethical visibility in a semi-peripheral publishing system
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22452/mjlis.vol31no1.3Keywords:
Publication ethics, Strategic legitimacy, Institutional isomorphism, Journal indexing, Gatekeeping mechanisms, Research integrityAbstract
This study examines how ethical policy adoption functions as a strategic legitimacy mechanism in semi-peripheral publishing environments, focusing on 2,592 open-access journals hosted on Türkiye's DergiPark platform. Drawing on institutional isomorphism theory and the framework of strategic legitimacy, the research investigates whether declarative ethical visibility, the publicly accessible presence of ethics policy statements, predicts international indexing outcomes after controlling for institutional maturity and platform prominence. Using nested logistic regression models with extensive robustness checks across four classification algorithms and five resampling strategies, the analysis reports three principal findings. First, ethical signalling operates through "threshold logic": journals that reference international governance bodies have 31% higher odds of indexing (OR = 1.31, p < 0.001), yet cumulative policy intensity contributes negligibly, revealing an "Intensity Paradox." Second, a decoupling of declarative signals from operational practice is evident, as observable ethics manifestations (erratum publication) show no association with indexing (OR = 1.04, p > 0.05). Third, while ethical signalling confers a modest advantage (a 6–10 percentage-point increase), it remains structurally subordinate to the maturity (OR = 3.02) and visibility (OR = 4.05) determinants. These patterns are consistent with the view that ethics policies primarily function as symbolic compliance mechanisms that reduce exclusion risk without guaranteeing selection. The findings highlight critical vulnerabilities in gatekeeping regimes that rely on easily mimicked declarative signals, underscoring the need for process-oriented evaluation frameworks that assess operational practice alongside policy presence.
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