The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era

Abstract

The consolidation of the scientific publishing industry has been the topic of much debate within and outside the scientific community, especially in relation to major publishers’ high profit margins. However, the share of scientific output published in the journals of these major publishers, as well as its evolution over time and across various disciplines, has not yet been analyzed. This paper provides such analysis, based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973-2013. It shows that in both natural and medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis increased their share of the published output, especially since the advent of the digital era (mid-1990s). Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. Disciplines of the social sciences have the highest level of concentration (70% of papers from the top five publishers), while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% from top five publishers). NMS disciplines are in between, mainly because of the strength of their scientific societies, such as the ACS in chemistry or APS in physics. The paper also examines the migration of journals between small and big publishing houses and explores the effect of publisher change on citation impact. It concludes with a discussion on the economics of scholarly publishing.

A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

“…The increasing professionalism of academies enabled commercial publishers to use peer review as a way of legitimizing their journals ( Baldwin, 2015; Fyfe et al , 2017), and capitalized on the traditional perception of peer review as voluntary duty by academics to provide these services. A consequence of this was that peer review became a more homogenized process that enabled private publishing companies to thrive, and eventually establish a dominant, oligopolistic marketplace position ( Larivière et al , 2015). This represented a shift from peer review as a more synergistic activity among scholars, to commercial entities selling it as an added value service back to the same academic community who was performing it freely for them.…”

Preprint for the Humanities - Fiction or a real possibility?

“…In an extensive article that was published in 2015 called 'The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era 'Larivière et al (2015), it is convincingly shown how a few large publishers over the past decades, have managed to secure excessive profit margins . This is made possible because of the widespread conviction that publishing houses play a central role in the organisation and dissemination of scientific knowledge.…”

Library Consortia and Article Processing Charges: An International Survey

“…Furthermore it is widely known that large profit margins are built into the business models of large commercial publishers who control a large segment of the journal marketplace (Larivière, 2015;Goodman, 2004) and as long as commercial publishers are in the mix, the true cost of publishing an article cannot be known, as the APC is certainly factoring in the profit margin associated with the publisher"s business model. According to Bjork and Solomon (2012), the data on APCs demonstrates that ".…”