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The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to compare the lists of publishers in SPI (Spain) and the lists of VIRTA (Finland), in order to determine some of the potential uses of a merged list, such as complementing each other; and, second, to assess the effects of cross-field variability in the SPI rankings on the potential uses identified in the previous objective.

VIRTA and SPI lists were matched and compared in terms of level and number of submissions (VIRTA) and prestige (SPI).

There is a set of international publishers common to both information systems, but most publishers are nationally oriented. This type of publisher is still highly relevant for scholars. Consequently, a merge of national lists would provide useful information for all stakeholders involved in terms of grounding information for the rating of foreign, non-international publishers. Nevertheless, several issues should be considered in an eventual merging process, such as the decisions related to the use of field-specific rankings or general rankings.

If merged, ratings ought to be kept separately. Ratings of national publishers can be imputed in other systems’ evaluation process, thus making the merging process potentially useful.

This research explores obstacles and opportunities for merging scholarly publishers’ lists from an empirical perspective. It provides groundwork for future efforts toward supra-national combinations of publishers’ lists.