2019-12-15
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Here are a few quotes from:
The Oligopoly of Academic
Publishers in the Digital Era
by
Vincent Larivière
Stefanie Haustein,
Philippe Mongeo
Published: June 10, 2015
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502
I have tried to not change the content, although I did
pick the most interesting parts. Please check out the
original paper for full content.
I may write some commentary on this, but for now, here
are the quotes which I hope you will find interesting.
I think the subject is extremely important.
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This year (2015) marks the 350^th anniversary of the
creation of scientific journals. Indeed, it was in
1665 that the Journal des Sc,avans and the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London were first published, in France and in England
respectively. They were founded with the intent to
advance scientific knowledge by building on
colleagues' results and avoid duplication of results,
and established both the principles of scientific
priority and peer review. They changed the process of
scholarly communication fundamentally, from personal
correspondence through letters (which had become "too
much for one man to cope with in his daily reading and
correspondence"), society meetings, and books to a
more structured and regular distribution of scientific
advancements. This structured form, combined with a
regular and wide dissemination, enabled systematic
recording and archiving of scientific knowledge.
Although the digital format improved access,
searchability and navigation within and between
journal articles, the form of the scholarly journal
was not changed by the digital revolution. The PDF
became the established format of electronic journal
articles, mimicking the print format. What was affected
by the digital revolution is the economic aspect of
academic publishing and the journal market.
On the whole, 44,483,425 documents are analyzed
for the 1973-2013 period, which include all
document types published by various journals.
In terms of numbers of papers published, the five
major publishers in NMS, accounted, in 1973, for
little more than 20% of all papers published. This
share increased to 30% in 1996, and to 50% in 2006,
the level at which it remained until 2013 when it
increased again to 53%. In this domain, three
publishers account for more than 47% of all papers in
2013: Reed-Elsevier (24.1%; 1.5 fold increase since
1990), Springer (11.9%; 2.9 fold increase), and
Wiley-Blackwell (11.3%; 2.2 fold increase). The
American Chemical Society (3.4%; 5% decrease) and
Taylor & Francis (2.9%; 4.9 fold increase) only
account for a small proportion of papers. In the SSH,
the concentration increased even more dramatically.
Between 1973 and 1990, the five most prolific
publishers combined accounted for less than 10% of the
published output of the domain, with their share
slightly increasing over the period. By the mid-1990s,
their share grew to collectively account for 15% of
papers. However, since then, this share has increased
to more than 51%, meaning that, in 2013, the majority
of SSH papers are published by journals that belong to
five commercial publishers. Specifically, in 2013,
Elsevier accounts for 16.4% of all SSH papers (4.4
fold increase since 1990), Taylor & Francis for 12.4%
(16 fold increase), Wiley-Blackwell for 12.1% (3.8
fold increase), Springer for 7.1% (21.3 fold
increase), and Sage Publications for 6.4% (4 fold
increase). On the whole, for these two broad domains
of scholarly knowledge, five publishers account for
more than half of today's published journal output.
Since the creation of scientific journals 350 years
ago, large commercial publishing houses have increased
their control of the science system. The proportion of
the scientific output published in journals under
their ownership has risen steadily over the past 40
years, and even more so since the advent of the
digital era. The value added, however, has not
followed a similar trend. While one could argue that
their role of typesetting, printing, and diffusion
were central in the print world, the ease with
which these function can be fulfilled--or are no
longer necessary--in the electronic world makes one
wonder: what do we need publishers for? What is it
that they provide that is so essential to the
scientific community that we collectively agree to
devote an increasingly large proportion of our
universities budgets to them? Of course, most journals
rely on publishers' systems to handle and review the
manuscripts; however, while these systems facilitate
the process, it is the researchers as part of the
scientific community who perform peer review. Hence,
this essential step of quality control is not a value
added by the publishers but by the scientific
community itself.
Thus, it is up to the scientific community to change
the system in a similar fashion and in parallel to the
open access and open science movements.
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