As far as research is concerned, the names you mentioned are not prestigious brands. Universities are organizations that provide facilities and services in exch

As far as research is concerned, the names you mentioned are not prestigious brands. Universities are organizations that provide facilities and services in exchange for their share of grant money. Publishers publish whatever people are willing to pay for. Prominent mentions of supposedly prestigious institutions are a red flag in science reporting. Very often, either the writer is trying to promote something, or they don't know what they are talking about. There are two parallel academias. There is the reputable high-trust one, where it's easy to get away with fraud, because people generally don't commit it. And there is the scammy one that exists to help people to game the metrics. While the two overlap a bit, they are mostly disjoint. If you are an academic, you get a steady stream of spam from the scammy side of the academia. You get calls to submit papers to a conference with "Proceedings by Springer" (but the scope of the conference is barely mentioned), you get invited to become an "ΕԀitоrial ΜҽmƄҽr" of a journal, and so on. Those are like Nigerian letters. They make it very explicit that they are scams, in order to avoid wasting people's time. You guessed that nobody reads the journal you mentioned, and that's trivially true. Of course nobody reads journals, because their scopes are too wide. No matter what you are working on, most articles in the journals you publish in are irrelevant to you. People read only articles that look interesting or relevant. If nobody cares about an article, it doesn't get read. While the rest of the world is based on top-down hierarchies, that's not a good model for understanding research. In general, the higher up in the hierarchy you go, the less relevant things become. The article is more relevant than the journal, and the journal is more relevant than the publisher. A rank-and-file professor is more relevant than a department chair. A department chair is more relevant than a dean. And a dean is more relevant than a chancellor/president/whatever.