The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era

“Scholarly publications themselves can be considered information goods with high fixed and low variable costs [35,36].”

“Moreover, these disciplines make a much more important use of books [9] and generally rely on local journals [29], all of which are factors that make it much less interesting for big publishers to buy journals or found new ones in the arts and humanities.”

“4 billion US dollars in 2011 [31], the majority of which were generated by a few publishing houses, the scientific journal publishing market faces oligopolistic conditions, where big players such as Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell and Wolters Kluwer determine annually increasing subscription rate…”

“Indeed, many authors have discussed the various transformations of the scholarly communication landscape brought by the digital era (see, among others, Borgman [14–15]; Kling and Callahan [16]; Tenopir & King [17]; Odlyzko [18]).”

“During the 20 century they consolidated their position as the main media for diffusing research [6], especially in the natural and medical sciences [9].”

“Also, the transition from print to electronic—a strong argument for journals to convert to commercial publishers—has happened at a much slower pace in those disciplines as the use for recent scientific information is less pressing [28].”

“Moreover, the oligopolistic power of commercial publishers is much stronger than before the digital age (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“Mongeon published a research paper where they analysed almost 45 million documents of various types, which were indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973–2013 [24].”

“In the social sciences, the top five publishers account for 70% of published articles (Larivière et al. 2015).”

“…the, ‘ongoing consolidation of commercial publishers’ in the humanities and social sciences with its worrying consequences for library budgets – see Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon (2015) on journal ownership consolidation – as one underlying reason for the new entrants to the field, together…”

“, Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley) that have grown to their current size largely by neutralizing their competition through mergers and acquisitions of individual journals as well as smaller publishers [1,2].”

“The highly concentrated character of the academic publishing sector (in journals if much less so in books) means that the major journal publishers enjoy ‘super profits’ regularly between 25% and 35% on operations (Larivière et al., 2015), far beyond what Amazon, Google or Facebook manage in percentage terms.”

“These guidelines are intended to appeal not only to individual scientists, but also institutions.”

“Similar results were observed by other studies which described a high concentration of a few publishers (Jahn & Tullney, 2016; Lariviere et al., 2015).”

“Publishers, especially the oligopoly of large for-profit organisations (Larivière et al., 2015), have been the first to co-opt OA and re-shape its purpose.”

“This includes structural, herme-neutic, and linguistic power asymmetries (Berger, 2021; Collyer, 2018; Cummings et al., 2021; Haque, 2022; Larivière et al., 2015; Mertkan et al., 2017; Mills, 2022; Noda, 2020; Rowley & Sbaffi, 2021; Taylor et al., 2020).”

“High impact academic journal publishers such as Elsevier and Springer provide large scale of bibliometric electronic databases across various disciplines [28].”

“The dominance of commercial publishers was also evident in natural and medical sciences, with the exception that one of the top five publishers was a learned society (American Chemical Society; Larivière et al., 2015).”

“The survival of OA publishing, especially of for-profit publishers, hinges increasingly on journal APCs (Budzinski, Grebel, Wolling, & Zhang, 2020; Morrison, 2018; Piwowar et al., 2018). In his analysis, Wilson (2020) drew readers’ attention to the issue of predatory OA publishing but seemed to be oblivious to the fac…”

“This paper investigates to what extent publisher-provided data can increase the transparency around hybrid OA by taking Elsevier, the largest scholarly journal publisher (Larivière et al., 2015), as the starting point for an empirical analysis of hybrid OA uptake and invoicing.”

“(McGuigan & Russel 2008; Larivière et al. 2015; 488 Beverungen et al. 2012; Harvie et al. 2012), there re489 mains a sizeable gap of about US$2,200 in non-publi490 cation costs, or 55% of the price of a scholarly sub491 scription article (Fig.”

“Once supported by membership fees, society journals now often earn royalties from commercial publishers for publishing their journals, but some learned societies and universities are restarting their presses and bringing new, cutting-edge journals online—physics and chemistry are leaders on this front, as the social s…”

“Larivière et al. (2015) demonstrated that from 2000 onwards, journal acquisitions increased, and five commercial houses—Reed-Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, SAGE Publications, and Taylor & Francis— became an oligopoly (Larivière et al. 2015).”

“Both SCOPUS and Science Direct are services of Elsevier, whose journals in a 2015 estimate publish roughly 20% of all articles in the natural and medical sciences (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“This is an encouraging move that hopefully will be adopted by all open access journals as for OA to be truly open maintaining reviewer anonymity would be an oxy-moron.”

“Although WoS includes many high-impact journals, it may underrepresent humanities-focused research, where publishing in edited books or other means remains common [59].”

“…(or regular scientist) had submitted the same false papers with false names, false emails and false institutional addresses to a journal published by a mainstream oligopolic publisher like Elsevier Ltd., Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor and Francis / Informa, or SpringerNature (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“The inclusion of journals from high-impact, mid-tier, and lower-tier categories further captures variations in editorial decision-making and the influence of institutional prestige on submission outcomes (King & Bergstrom, 2021; Larivi � ere et al., 2015).”

“However, while large commercial publishers have incomes that include high-profit margins (Larivière et al., 2015), which may allow them to hire qualified staff to screen potential images fabrication, for instance, local journals or university-based journals, which editors commonly have to divide…”

“…about predatory publishing, in which authors mostly criticize peripheral OA publishers while remaining silent on exploitative practices of big central publishers like Elsevier (e.g. raising prices of journals to achieve extremely high profit margins [Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015]).”

“The five large publishers (RELX Group including Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Sage) published an extraordinary 70% of social science articles and 20% in the humanities in 2015, using Web of Science data (Larivière et al. 2015).”

“A significant portion of the research is funded by the public (i.e., taxpayers’ money), but five commercial companies have published more than half of the publications since 2006: Reed-Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell, and Sage (4).”

“Moreover, large commercial publishers, which already dominated the publishing market (Larivière et al., 2015), disproportionately benefited from hybrid open access funding in comparison to full open access publishers (Butler et al., 2023; Jahn & Tullney, 2016; Shu & Larivière, 2023).”

“Operating profits were noted to have a strong upward trend between 1991 and 2013 (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“This worldwide extended practice, however, tends to be more important for STM disciplines (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“The situation of Social Sciences is particularly striking: “combined, the top three commercial publishers alone -- Reed-Elsevier, Taylor & Francis and Wiley-Blackwell -- represent almost 50% of all papers in 2013” (Larivière et al 2015).”

“A study published in June this year provided convincing evidence that five for-profit academic publishers control more than half of the science research published throughout the world [1].”

“In the digital era, top commercial publishers have achieved a significant rise in the share of scientific literature they published (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“Loose attacks on predatory publishers may indirectly threaten OA journals generally, and it is important to remember the vested interests of the established academic publishing oligopoly in fostering such concerns [9].”

“The latter include the abovementioned scientific publishers producing monographs and journals (Reed-Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, Sage), generating huge profits, preying on the ‘unpaid’ work of scientists and researchers.”

“Although scientific scholarly publishing began as an activity of scientific societies to provide visibility and credibility for their discipline (2), the share of papers published in non-scientific-society journals has steadily increased over time and has accelerated in recent years (3).”

“Despite these improvements, the overall academic-publishing industry has experienced only a marginal shift, with publishers/ journals taking individual action rather than collaborating on a shared solution [1].”

“Whilst multinational publishers consolidate their control over publishing infrastructures (Larivière et al., 2015) new ‘peripheral’ actors, fields and publishing spaces continue to emerge.”

“Coordination difficulties may be mitigated by the concentration of journal ownership among relatively few publishers (Larivière et al. 2015), but norm-violating scientists can still usually evade conditions by shopping for a lenient journal.”

“Scholarly publishing industry’s general state can be defined as an oligopoly, with a few major actors dominating the scene (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“…of journal ownership in the hands of a few major publishing companies: more than 50% of all articles in the natural sciences and the social sciences are currently published by the largest five conglomerates, which effectively function as an oligopoly (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015).”

“…that at the macro level, evolutionary processes are evidenced by the global oligopoly of publishers; research has established that the fi ve most proli fi c publishers accounted for more than half of published papers in 2013, with evidence of further market concentration (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“Through mergers and acquisitions, the leading publishers have, in fact, increased their market share so that, in 2013, the five biggest publishers accounted for more than 50% of all scholarly journal articles, effectively creating an oligopoly (Larivière et al., 2015). In addition to the five original forces of Porter…”

“Moreover, the role of prestige is becoming increasingly important in maintaining and increasing the oligopoly of academic publishers (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015), but also in the growing importance of data providers for global, national and institutional benchmarking.”

“Consolidation of the academic publishing industry resulted in a market with limited competition and with ever increasing profits for a few large players [26–28].”

“Post-1990s, in which the Internet came to be much more widespread, this did not disrupt the scholarly publishing perhaps as much as expected, as we still have the same large players as we did in the pre-digital age dominating the landscape [13].”

“While in the Science, Technology and Medical disciplines (STM), the publishing system is strongly concentrated around the top five commercial publishers (Elsevier, Sage Publications, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell) [12], as is shown by their share of papers published by discipline, the situation of…”

“By November, 2016, COPE boasted 11,337 members, rising from 11,218 members in September, 2016, almost exclusively journals and publishers (COPE 2016c), including the most profitable (Larivière et al. 2015).”