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The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era
Open accessAbstract
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.
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“Global influence and market dominance show that these publishers represent a significant proportion of global scholarly output (Larivière et al., 2015).”
From Use of artificial intelligence tools in the publishing process: expectations from publishers through author guidelines (2026) · cites this paper as Larivière et al., 2015
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“Furthermore, as the academic publishing landscape continues to evolve, with increasing research output and new journals (Larivière et al., 2015), peer review processes potentially may have to consider harnessing AI efficiency to meet the increased demand.”
van Bellen, S., Alperin, J., & Larivière, V. (2024) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0327015 · Cited by 33
“Since the Larivière et al . paper published a decade ago [1], the oligopolistic structure of the scholarly journal ecosystem has been used as a reference framework in many studies [4–8].”
InfluentialSelf-citationThe future of academic publishing
Ahmed, A., Al-Khatib, A., Boum, Y., Debat, H., Gurmendi-Dunkelberg, A., Hinchliffe, L., Jarrad, F., Mastroianni, A. M., Mineault, P., Pennington, C., et al. (2023) · Nature Human Behaviour · doi:10.1038/s41562-023-01637-2 · Cited by 33
The Impact of the German 'DEAL' on Competition in the Academic Publishing Market
Haucap, J., Moshgbar, N., & Schmal, W. (2021) · Social Science Research Network · doi:10.2139/ssrn.3815451 · Cited by 32
Free editors and peers: squeezing the lemon dry
da Silva, J. A. T., & Katavić, V. (2016) · Ethics & bioethics · doi:10.1515/ebce-2016-0011 · Cited by 32
“How then did science reach this state where professionals are exploited by the publishing industry using almost 100% pro bono work, leading to record profits year upon year , sometimes in billions of US$ (Larivière, Haustein & Mongeon, 2015)?”
BackgroundThe Role of Publons in the Context of Open Peer Review
da Silva, J. A. T., & Nazarovets, S. (2022) · Publishing research quarterly · doi:10.1007/s12109-022-09914-0 · Cited by 31
“However, there may be an element of exploitation, especially by for-profit publishers, some of which reap massive economic returns from peer-reviewed papers [15].”
BackgroundMills, D. (2022) · Oxford Review of Education · doi:10.1080/03054985.2022.2072285 · Cited by 44
“At every stage of research, academics have become increasingly reliant on the tools of what Larivière et al. (2015) call a ‘publishing oligopoly’.”
MethodMills, D., Branford, A., Inouye, K., Robinson, N., & Kingori, P. (2021) · Journal of African Cultural Studies · doi:10.1080/13696815.2020.1864304 · Cited by 36
“Elsevier is one of the most profitable of the five major international academic publishers, with its science division regularly recording annual profit margins of between 30% and 40% (Larivière et al. 2015).”
BackgroundAre publications on zoological taxonomy under attack?
Pinto, Â., Mejdalani, G., Mounce, R., Silveira, L. F., Marinoni, L., & Rafael, J. (2020) · Royal Society Open Science · doi:10.1098/rsos.201617 · Cited by 31
“In a system full of anachronisms, in which traditional journals supported by museums or scientific societies are struggling to survive and the commercialized scientific publishing industry is led by giant publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Springer Nature, among others, with profit margins higher than…”
BackgroundOpen access to journal articles in oncology: current situation and citation impact
Hua, F., Sun, H., Walsh, T., Glenny, A., & Worthington, H. V. (2017) · Annals of Oncology · doi:10.1093/annonc/mdx398 · Cited by 36
“As in previous similar research [12, 21], publishers were divided into three categories: (i) non-commercial (e.”
Cortés-Sánchez, J. D. (2020) · European Research on Management and Business Economics · doi:10.1016/j.iedeen.2019.12.003 · Cited by 31
Policies on artificial intelligence chatbots among academic publishers: a cross-sectional audit
Bhavsar, D., Duffy, L., Jo, H., Lokker, C., Haynes, R. B., Iorio, A., Marušić, A., & Ng, J. Y. (2025) · Research Integrity and Peer Review · doi:10.1186/s41073-025-00158-y · Cited by 42
“While policies surrounding topics such as copyright and plagia-rism have long existed in academic publication, the creation of new policies to parallel societal and technological advances is an ongoing process essential to maintaining publication integrity [1].”
de Oliveira, G. S., & Baggs, E. (2023) · Cambridge University Press eBooks · doi:10.1017/9781009303538 · Cited by 57
“This makes academic publishing one of the most profitable businesses in the world (see, e.g., Larivière et al., 2015).”
BackgroundKnöchelmann, M. (2021) · Science & Technology Studies · doi:10.23987/sts.94964 · Cited by 59
“Publishers, especially the oligopoly of large forprofit institutions (Larivière et al., 2015), have been the first to co-opt OA and re-shape its purpose.”
BackgroundIntroduction: The Politics of Open Access — Decolonizing Research or Corporate Capture?
Meagher, K. (2021) · Development and Change · doi:10.1111/dech.12630 · Cited by 30
“…margins of the top corporate publishers have continued to rise even after the shift to OA, reaching between 20% and over 30% per year among some of the top publishers which makes them comparable to Walmart and Amazon (Lariviere et al. 2015; Hiltzik 2019; Posada and Chen 2018; Shu et al. 2018).”
BackgroundInfluentialBrazilian Publication Profiles: Where and How Brazilian authors publish.
McManus, C., Neves, A. A. B., & Maranhão, A. (2020) · Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências · doi:10.1590/0001-3765202020200328 · Cited by 30
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Breast Imaging: A Scientometric Umbrella Review
Tan, X. J., Cheor, W. L., Lim, L. L., Rahman, K. S. A., & Bakrin, I. H. (2022) · Diagnostics · doi:10.3390/diagnostics12123111 · Cited by 38
Scholarly Communication and the Dilemma of Collective Action: Why Academic Journals Cost Too Much
Wenzler, J. (2017) · College and Research Libraries · doi:10.5860/crl.78.2.183 · Cited by 29
Csomós, G., & Farkas, J. (2022) · Scientometrics · doi:10.1007/s11192-022-04586-1 · Cited by 28
“…Springer Nature, and other major subscription-based publishers such as Wiley and Taylor & Francis have been dominating the global academic publishing market for a long time occupying leading positions among the academic publishers in most countries worldwide (Hagve, 2022; Larivière et al., 2015).”
BackgroundThe oligopoly’s shift to open access publishing
Butler, L.-A., Matthias, L., Simard, M.-A., Mongeon, P., & Haustein, S. (2022) · Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l'ACSI · doi:10.29173/cais1262 · Cited by 28
“Since the beginning of the digital era, these companies have acquired small publishers and now control the majority of scholarly journal publishing (Larivière et al., 2015), generating profit margins as high as 37% (Aspesi et al., 2019).”
BackgroundResultSelf-citationMoore, S. A. (2020) · J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. · doi:10.1002/asi.24306 · Cited by 28
The ClarivateTM Analytics acquisition of Publons – an evolution or commodification of peer review?
da Silva, J. A. T., & Al-Khatib, A. (2019) · Research Ethics · doi:10.1177/1747016117739941 · Cited by 28
“According to Larivière et al. (2015), five publishers (Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and SAGE Publications) accounted for 50% of all publications in 2013, with annual profit margins for several of these entering the billion US dollars mark.”
BackgroundConcern noted: a descriptive study of editorial expressions of concern in PubMed and PubMed Central
Vaught, M., Jordan, D. C., & Bastian, H. (2017) · Research Integrity and Peer Review · doi:10.1186/s41073-017-0030-2 · Cited by 34
“In addition, the 6 largest publishers (by number of publications) in natural and medical sciences and social sciences and humanities were searched [19].”
Background
Metadata
- Authors
- Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P.
- Affiliations
- Université du Québec à Montréal (CA)
- Université de Montréal (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Larivière, Vincent
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2015-06-10
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- e0127502
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4465327
- OpenAlex
- W1655306493
- Cited by
- 1,240
- References
- 66
- Citations by year
- 2026: 104 · 2025: 132 · 2024: 97 · 2023: 115 · 2022: 146 · 2021: 128 · 2020: 125 · 2019: 124 · 2018: 97 · 2017: 90 · 2016: 64 · 2015: 15
- FWCI
- 80.89
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Lincoln (University of Nebraska) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Papyrus : Institutional Repository (Université de Montréal) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Canada Research Chairs
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › Publishing and Scholarly Communication
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › Academic Publishing and Open Access
- Keywords
- scholarly publishing, scientific publishing industry, oligopoly, digital era, journal migration, publisher change, citation impact, humanities and social sciences, Web of Science, Reed Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis
- MeSH terms
- Publishing, Journal Impact Factor
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