For-profit publishing giants ‘big winners’ of open access push

The European Commission-backed Plan S project to promote open-access publishing may have “inadvertently” strengthened the dominance of big for-profit publishers despite hopes it would curb their market power, a new study claims.

In a recent Scientometrics paper charting the rise of a new “oligopoly of open access publishing”, Fei Shu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Science and Education Evaluation at Hangzhou Dianzi University, and Vincent Larivière, from Université de Montréal, explain how hundreds of new outfits have entered publishing in recent years, with the number of open-access journals increasing from 1,368 in 2008 to 8,442 in 2020.

Over this period, the number of open-access publications increased tenfold from about 194,000 to 1.9 million annually – a compound growth rate of 21 per cent, the paper adds.

However, while the arrival of new players showed the overall market had become “more competitive”, the trend in the “high-end market” of open-access journals – those indexed by the Web of Science, which also grew tenfold, from 65,434 in 2008 to 640,169 in 2020 – showed a “shift in market concentration” towards larger publishers.

That concentration towards large commercial publishing houses – including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and the emerging open access publishers of Frontiers, MDPI, Hindawi, and Plos – has been particularly noticeable since 2017, the paper notes.

One major beneficiary of the shift towards open-access publishing is MDPI, which “increased its number of OA publications from 1,514 in 2008 to 165,330 in 2020, and became the largest OA publisher of the world”, says the paper, which estimates the Swiss publisher now has a 20 per cent share of the open access revenue market ahead of Springer Nature (18 per cent), followed by Wiley and Elsevier (both 10 per cent).

The Scientometrics paper attributes much of the rise of open access to a push towards open-access publishing from governments, including the European Commission’s Plan S project, launched in 2018 and effective from 2021, which requires authors in receipt of public funding to publish their work in a free-to-read format.

“While we do not question the good intentions behind OA mandates such as Plan S, those may have inadvertently given significant leverage to large commercial publishers,” argue the authors, who add that “those publishers have started to exert their market power”.

The new oligopoly meant open-access publishers are well placed to demand higher article processing charges (APCs), Dr Shu told Times Higher Education.

“The purpose of Plan S is to promote open access, but it did not consider the possible side effects of the OA mandate,” he said. “As scholars are required to publish in OA journals, [this leads] to a price-inelastic demand for OA publishing and results in a seller’s market in OA publishing in which publishers obtain the power to overprice the article processing charges [APCs],” he added.

Dr Shu backed recently announced moves by Plan S that would empower authors, not publishers, to decide when and what to publish – on the understanding that outputs should be shared immediately and openly, at no cost to researchers.

“Plan S should promote diamond open access and green OA to [enable the] publishing of the academia, by the academia, for the academia,” he said.

“At the moment, scholars from developing countries cannot afford the high APCs; they have to publish on those low-impact OA journals that don’t charge or charge minimum APCs. In the long term, developing countries will lose their research impact and academic discourse in global science and research topics will be dominated by such rich countries.”

Responding to the paper, Johan Rooryck, executive director of cOAlition S, told THE that the “OA movement aimed to provide equitable access to research outputs by incorporating the publication costs into research budgets”.

“However, the dominance of APCs as the primary OA business model has indeed created barriers to participation for those with limited funds. Admittedly, we didn’t foresee how commercial publishers would exploit this space, and how inequitable APCs would become,” he said.

“In response, cOAlition S seeks to encourage the development of business models which allow everyone to participate in scholarly publishing. For this we support initiatives like diamond OA, the purchasing price parity model, and a multi-stakeholder working group with Plos and Jisc to identify equitable business models not based on per-unit payments like APCs.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com