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].”

“There have also been corporate mergers (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015).”

“The SPJ can be treated, amongst other things, as a projection of competitive relations within the triad ‘‘transnational publishers—professional physics societies—regional publishers’’ (cf. Larivière et al. 2015; Greshake 2017): • In cluster 1 professional physics societies are dominant.”

“…están asociadas de forma continua a un debate mundial sobre la concentración de la oferta de productos académicos en un reducido número de editoriales, fenómeno denomina-do desde los modelos económicos y de la sociología de la ciencia oligopolios dominantes (Berger, 2021; Larivière et al., 2015).”

“For example, the aggregation of for-pro fi t publishing houses into monopolies (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015) and the related serials crisis as journal subscriptions became bundled and exorbitantly expensive had their genesis in the 1990s and early 2000s (McGuigan 2004).”

“Academic publishers continue to aggressively defend their market dominance while open alternatives continue to perpetuate [22, 23].”

“Doctoral candidates, for example, may be required by institutional policies to produce a minimum number of publications before being permitted to defend their dissertations (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“Similarly, Larivi è re et al. (2015) analyzed data from the Web of Science and found an average growth rate of approximately 3–4% per year in indexed publications between 1980 and 2012.”

“10 Open access and the consolidation of for-profit publishers 11 carry incentives for journals to publish as many articles as possible.”

“Since the mid-1990s, the largest commercial publishers have bought smaller commercial publishers and taken over association journals, particularly in the social sciences (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015; Sharp et al. 2023).”

“At the largest global publishers (Larivière, Haustein and Mongeon 2015), the editorial process itself is subject to business logics, with long procedural chains, highly specialized division of labor, and standardized practices (Horbach and Halffman 2020).”

“This pattern of publishers is supported by previous studies (Kim and Atteraya, 2023; Kim and Jeong, 2023; Larivière et al., 2015).”

“This rise in dominance can be attributed primarily to two factors: a trend of a greater concentration of companies in the journal publishing market (Larivière et al., 2015), and the widespread digitization of academic works (Borghi & Karapapa, 2013), followed by the emergence of e-services based on…”

“creation of new journals as necessary to meet (or indeed, create) academic demand which underlies the expansion in scientific output [2,3].”

“These changes occur in an atypical market where publishers have high profit margins [4], do not pay for purchased goods (authors are not paid), do not pay for quality control (peer review), and have a monopoly on the content of published articles (Ingelfinger law) [5].”

“Larivière et al. (2015) report that over 50% of all journal articles published in 2013 and indexed by the Web of Science database were published by only five companies: Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE.”

“In its earliest days, research dissemination was carried out through personal correspondence (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“Larivière et al. (2015) have asserted that the growth of large publishers’ is attributable to the launch of new journals, and to their acquisitions of small and medium-sized publishers.”

“The large profit margins that the top five commercial publishers make on their so-called big deal subscriptions, under which they bundle their journals and sell them as a package to university libraries, are often blamed for this inflationary pace (Larivière et al., 2015; Anderson, 2017).”

“, publishers)—they have focused on the (nonexistent) decreased viability of the publishing enterprise [12,16] or imagined decreased quality of peer review [17].”

“On the one hand, it highlights that the large publishing groups that have the oligopoly of scientific publications [9] are present in 31 of the Dutch journals (83.”

“These vendors, along with the American Chemical Society (ACS), represent the most prolific publishers/providers and combined publish more than 50% of all articles in both the natural and medical sciences and in the social sciences and humanities.(22) Because the institution has full access to all ACS journals and thei…”

“As scientific communications transitioned from print to electronic publishing, the portable document format (PDF) became the established file format for the electronic distribution of journal articles (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“In contrast to the natural and medical sciences, which are dominated by a handful of large publishing houses (Lariviere, Haustein, & Mongeon, 2015), humanities and social sciences (HSS) publishing is characterized by a lack of commercial concentration among pub-lishers (Outsell, 2015) and the key…”

“Así de las cinco editoriales comerciales que controlan la producción mundial (Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Black-well, Springer and Taylor and Francis and Sage Publications) (Larivière et al., 2015), dos, Routledge Taylor & Francis Onlines (30,4”

“From experience, most plant science journals published by Springer Nature follow this pattern of copyright transfer.”

“This pattern may reflect the predominance of English in scientific communication and the strong presence of major international publishers in these countries, including Elsevier and Springer Nature, which serve as major platforms for disseminating research in neurosurgery and spinal surgery [ 41 ].”

“The growth of the Big Five has been prodigious: 20% of the world market in 1973, 30% in 1996, 50% in 2006 and 53% in 2013 (Larivière et al. 2015; see also McGuigan and Russell 2008; Monbiot 2011).”

“[59] Finally, two more studies shed light on the wider ramifications of the evolving academic publishing sector and the tactical solutions required to traverse this terrain, emphasizing the part libraries and institutions play in adjusting to these developments.”

“Across all subjects, Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis have a higher number of retractions in part because they publish a large proportion of journals in biomedical research (Larivière et al. 2015), making a greater number of retractions inevitable compared to other publishers.”

“The oligopoly theory explains the dominance of power among major publishers (Larivi è re et al., 2015), whereas the evolution of digital publishing enables large publishers to expand rapidly, reshaping the academic landscape (Hyland, 2021).”

“It is worth remembering that the concept of an OA journal is relatively recent compared with subscription-based journals, which include prestigious journals that are organized in an increasingly oligopolistic market structure (Larivière, Haustein, & Mongeon, 2015; Sunye, Shima, & Setenareski, 2019).”

“Finally, there is excessive centralization of authority, 10,11 and funding is often concentrated on limited numbers of scientists and publishers.”

“Currently, five major commercial publishing companies dominate the scholarly publishing industry, enjoy an oligopoly over the market, and their market power drives the subscription price of academic journals (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“(9) University of Westminster TripleC Y 0.”

“Meanwhile, nation states and science and technology agencies determine access policies for scientific literature, which involves negotiation with a small number of large publishers that reap extraordinary profits (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015).”

“The largest commercial publishers and their comprehensive journal collections (“big deals”) have been singled out for special censure (e.g., Bergstrom, 2001; Larivière et al., 2015; Mongeon et al., 2021; Wenzler, 2017).”

“Next, such publishers subject the writing to some form of lesser or greater peer review, for which the reviewer is usually also not paid (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015, 11).”

“The existing system, which is run by a few for-profit publishers, has grown prohibitively expensive for our universities [11].”

“As commercial companies, their economic approach is limiting costs and increasing profits (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015).”

“In 1973, the share was slightly more than 20% [5].”

“En 2013, y refiriendo apenas las publicaciones en la categoría de ciencias sociales, Emerald publicó el 16,4 % y Springer el 7,1 % del total, un porcentaje 4,4 y 21,3 veces superior respectivamente al que poseían en 1990 (Larivière et ál., 2015).”

“Five companies publish over half of all scientific articles (1).”