The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Age
(Republished with translation from: PLOS, “The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era”, Research Article, Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, Philippe Mongeon, Published: June 10, 2015, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502)
Import
For 350 years, since the publication of academic and scientific works, studies, research, etc. in “reputable” scientific journals began, an oligopoly has been created until today by a handful of (private and purely for-profit & commercial) publishing houses that have all the journals in their hands. This oligopoly no longer has a reason to exist, it is an outdated and outdated regime that is imposed due to habit and due to the audacity of academics on the entire academic and scientific community and plunders almost 100% of scientific publications, profiting from the labor of others.
It is a kind of monopoly more or less similar to the one that exploits creators and culture with copyright (the so-called entertainment industry).
In an earlier article, we had provided some information about this situation (see “Almost all scientific publications are controlled by only six companies”, Wed, 22/07/2015, see also “Open access to scientific knowledge in Greece”, Thu, 17/01/2013).
A recent survey of almost all published papers in all well-known scientific journals shows the truth of the matter, the possible causes that created the oligopoly and why it is still maintained, as well as the economic side of this entire industry.
We have translated the research study into Greek and present it, enjoy reading:
Download in pdf format, 15 pages in English
Download in pdf format, 15 pages in Greek
(Translation, Rendering, Editing by Simos Dalkyriadis, member of the Pirate Party of Greece)
Summary
The consolidation of the scientific publishing industry has been the subject of much discussion within and outside the scientific community, particularly in relation to the high profit margins of the major publishers. However, the share of scientific output published in the journals of the major publishers, as well as its evolution over time and across various disciplines, has not yet been analyzed.
The present work provides such an analysis, based on 45 million documents registered in the Web of Science for the period from 1973 to 2013.
The analysis shows that, in both natural and medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), the publishing houses Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer and Taylor & Francis increased their share of publication production, especially after the advent of the digital age (in the mid-1990s).
Combined, the five most productive publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. 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% of the top five publishers).
NMS disciplines are somewhere in between, mainly due to the strength of their scientific societies, such as ACS in chemistry or APS in physics.
The paper also examines the migration of journals between small and large publishing houses and explores the impact of changing publishers on the citation/citation impact of papers. It concludes with a discussion on the economics of academic publishing…
(the continuation of the research)
