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].”

“Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon (2015) showed that a small number of publishers control the majority of scholarly output, a concentration of power that shapes the system’s operative definition of quality.”

“…independent scholars, and even resource-constrained academic institutions in developed nations are often left at a significant disadvantage since they lack the financial capacity to purchase access to these essential resources (Willinsky, 2006; Suber, 2012; Larivière, Haustein & Mongeon, 2015).”

“Since the publication of the Journal des Scavans, the importance of producing and communicating scholarly findings have increased and have contributed to promoting awareness of research findings, in turn enabling the development of disciplinal specializations (Larivière et al. 2015).”

“At the same time, ownership of scholarly journals has become increasingly concentrated among a small number of multi-national publishing corporations whose revenues and profit margins rival or exceed those of many other knowledge-based industries (Larivière et al. 2015; Grossmann and Brembs 2021).”

“Academic publishing has become an oligopoly that increasingly prioritises profit over scientific integrity and quality [ 4].”

“This pattern is concerning, given that Elsevier accounts for 16% of all social sciences and humanities papers globally and operates within an academic publishing oligopoly with substantial market power (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“Furthermore, the oligopolistic nature of the publishing (Larivière et al. 2015) market and the rising costs of publishing and accessing international literature pose additional barriers for many researchers.”

“Publication and evaluation are controlled by an oligopoly of publishers and entrenched journal hierarchies that dictate circulation and prestige (Fanelli, 2012; Larivière et al., 2015).”

“Large commercial publishers, which dominate the market (Larivière, Haustein, & Mongeon, 2015), have disproportionately benefited from hybrid OA funding compared to full OA publishers (Butler et al., 2023; Jahn & Tullney, 2016; Shu & Larivière, 2024).”

“More than half of academic papers are published by an “oligopoly” of a few huge academic publishers (Larivière et al. 2015).”

“It is in line with studies such as those of Munroe (2007) and Larivière et al. (2015), by starting from the premise that both the acquisition of entire publishing portfolios and PSA agreements between publishing companies and learned societies should continue to be the subject of research.”

“Sin embargo, su dependencia exclusiva de Scopus introduce sesgos documentados: so-brerrepresentación de ciencias STEM, litera-tura anglófona e instituciones del Global North (Larivière et al., 2015; Mongeon y Paul-Hus, 2016).”

“An archive with no accept/reject bit removes that signal, and the reform will not be adopted until something replaces it [Larivière et al., 2015].”

“Publishers, as commercial entities operating within a highly concentrated and oligopolistic market (Larivière et al., 2015), benefit directly from the additional revenue generated by fast-track services, which supplements their already substantial income from article processing charges and…”

“Frente a la concentración del mercado editorial global en unos pocos grandes conglomerados (Larivière et al., 2015), este modelo regional preserva el control académico de la publicación.”

“Larivière et al. (2015) described these academic publishers as an “oligopoly.””

“Oligopolistic market structure is evident, with a small set of firms publishing a large share of global articles (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“Larivière demonstrated that the oligopolistic consolidation of database ownership has economic as well as epistemic consequences because algorithms filter what counts as discoverable science (Larivière et al. 2015).”

“…the increasing concentration of control over scientific publications and citation databases in a small number of private, for-profit actors (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015), raising concerns about how commercial incentives shape research evaluation and dissemination and prompting…”

“(Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015; Miller et al. 2021; Rubagumya et al. 2022; Schimmer, Geschuhn, and Vogler 2015; Solomon and Björk 2016; Björk and Solomon 2015; Jahn and Tullney 2016; Demeter and Istratii 2020) This economic landscape is tightly connected to the clinical research ecosystem.”

“The growth of the Big Five has been pro-digious: 20% of the world journal market in 1973, 30% in 1996, 50% in 2006, 53% in 2013 and 60% in 2023 (Crotty, 2023; Hagve, 2020; Larivière et al., 2015).”

“Most of the research covered in these databases originates from a small number of publishing houses located in Western centers (Krawczyk & Kulczycki, 2021; Larivière et al., 2015).”

“For example, the five largest FP pub-lishers accounted for 20% of publications in the 1970s, a figure that rose to 53% in 2013 (Larivière et al. 2015 ).”

“These limitations are partly driven by the concentration of publishing power among a small number of commercial publishers (Larivière et al. 2015) and are especially problematic in low-and middle-income countries, where institutional subscriptions are limited (Chan et al. 2011).”

“The publication process is embedded in the research enterprise, serving as a key mechanism for constructing, evaluating, and disseminating knowledge (Hyland, 2016; Larivière et al., 2015; Lee, 2014).”

“Lariviére et al. (2015) miden concentración con datos de Web of Science hasta 2013, una base que cubre de forma desigual las ciencias sociales, las humanidades y las revistas regionales; Haustein et al. (2024) estiman gasto en seis editoriales y cinco años; y Gallardo et al. (2024) describen una…”

“To analyse the distribution of scientific output in HRI research in more depth, the Gini coefficient [12] was selected as it remains the gold standard for quantifying concentration inequalities in sciento-metric studies [19].”

“…of pub - lic research funding, because concentrating resources in a few large research groups may deepen knowledge in specific areas but can limit the diversity of topics inves - tigated and reduce the overall epistemic breadth of the discipline (Fortin & Currie, 2013; Larivière et al., 2015 ).”

“Globally, decades of consolidation have concentrated approximately two-thirds of all journal titles among just 100 publishers (Luchilo 2019), forming what is often decribed as an “oligopoly” (Larivière et al. 2015).”

“…phenomenon, aggressive authoritarian political measures with fascist tendencies in major Western countries threaten, among many other things, the very fabric of the global scienti fi c infrastructure due to their hegemonial status (Chomsky, 2003; Grimm and Hornidge, 2025; Larivière et al., 2015).”

“Larivière et al. (2015) present this data from the early 1990s to 2014.”

“RELX, the parent company of Elsevier, saw its market value increase from approximately £ 20 billion in 2010 to £ 50 billion in 2020, with the academic publishing division (main assets being high IF journals) contributing significantly to this growth (Aspesi and Brand, 2019).”

“Additional effects—Open Science literacy (H4), international collaboration (H6), and disciplinary heterogeneity (H7)—are consistent with norm transfer and field cultures (Fraser et al., 2021; Larivière et al., 2015).”

“Given that the scientific information industry has turned into a highly profitable market (Larivière et al. , 2015; Shu & Larivière, 2024), a trend toward consolidating optimal systems is expected.”

“A small number of major publishers, primarily Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley, control a significant portion of the market and the most prestigious journals (Larivière et al., 2015; Saha et al., 2021).”

“Combined with widespread dissemination, this allowed for a systematic recording and preservation of scientific knowledge, ultimately laying the foundation for the modern scientific publishing system through a more structured and regular distribution of research advancements [1], [2].”

“…that captures how over-lapping inequalities affect participation-related to the national authorities to identify the micro-mechanisms that operate in the social, economic and scientific contexts, avoiding programmes that not address these diversity (Sugimoto et al., 2015; Larivière et al., 2015).”

“The larger academic system has generally been critical of the development of scientific publishing and the increasing emphasis on metrics like the h-index or a journals impact factor [6], [11].”

“The maxim “publish or perish” emphasizes how publication metrics determine tenure and financing in academia (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“Anonymity is believed to guarantee fairness and prevent reviewers’ discrimination among the authors (12).”

“…publishing companies to present a significantly larger number of journals to prospective clients, such as university and institutional libraries, without incurring additional costs, outpacing smaller scientific publishers and eventually leading to their acquisition (Larivi � ere et al., 2015).”

“[34,44] Similarly Larivière, [45] note that the quartile classification has received criticism for potentially creating unjust hierarchies among journals and restricting the diversity of published research.”

“On top of that, the increasing number of online journals and open-access initiatives reduces opportunities to collect information on the observed prices while not leading to a big shift in the market structure (Larivière et al., 2015a, 2015b).”

“STEM and medical fields dominated downloads (Figure 10), with Elsevier being a prominent publisher in these areas (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“This has been accomplished mostly through consortial purchasing of big deals from the largest publishers that have consumed a progressively greater portion of our acquisitions’ budgets 11 – often at the expense of titles from smaller, more specialized presses.”

“These entities leverage their oligopolistic control to maximise profits, often operating with profit margins exceeding 40% (Larivière, Haustein and Mongeon 2015).”

“This development is also in line with the general trend across the humanistic disciplines outside Norway (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“Larivière et al. (2015) high-light the importance of timely and relevant materials as it relates to technology and medicine, but we assert that these qualities are equally as vital in social and behavioral sciences.”

“Libraries have to make hard decisions, because academic publishers have consolidated, raised prices, and benefited from the resulting high profit margins (Larivière et al., 2015).”

“This rapid growth of the academic publishing industry has caused much controversy specifically regarding the astronomically high profits of the major publishers (Larivière et al. 2015).”

“Academic publishing reflects these inequalities through linguistic bias in the global journal system (Larivi � ere and Desrochers 2015) and a publishing oligopoly (Larivi � ere, Haustein and Mongeon 2015).”