Abstract
While the business models used in most segments of the media industry have been profoundly changed by the Internet, surprisingly little has changed in the publishing of scholarly peer reviewed journals. Electronic delivery has become the norm, but the same publishers as before are still dominating the market, selling content to subscribers. This article asks the question why Open Access (OA) to the output of mainly publicly funded research hasn’t yet become the mainstream business model. OA implies a reversal of the revenue logic from readers paying for content to authors paying for dissemination in form of universal free access. The current situation is analyzed using Porter’s five forces model. The analysis demonstrates a lack of competitive pressure in this industry, leading to so high profit levels of the leading publishers that they have not yet felt a strong need to change the way they operate. OA funded by article publishing charges (APCs) might nevertheless start rapidly becoming more common. The driving forces of change currently consist of the public research funders and administrations in Europe, which are pushing for OA by starting dedicated funds for paying the APCs of authors from the respective countries. This has in turn lead to a situation in which publishers have introduced “big deals” involving the bundling of (a) subscription to all their journals, (b) APCs for their hybrid journals and (c) in the future also APCs to their full OA journals. This appears to be a relatively risk free strategy for the leading publishers to retain both their dominance of the market and high profit levels.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Albandes, A. (2009). University of California libraries, Springer strike open access deal. Library Journal, January 22nd 2009. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6631517.html.
Auclair, D. (2015). Open access 2015: Market size, Forecast, and Trends. Conference presentation, Fiesole Collection Development Retreats, Berlin May 2015. http://www.casalini.it/retreat/2015_docs/auclair.pdf.
Austrian Science Fund. (2014). Open Access Policy for FWF-funded projects, FWF web pages. https://www.fwf.ac.at/en/research-funding/open-access-policy/.
Bird, C. (2010). Continued adventures in open access: 2009 perspective. Learned Publishing, 23(2), 107–116.
Björk, B.-C. (2012). The hybrid model for open access publication of scholarly articles – A failed experiment? Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology, 63(8), 1496–1504.
Björk, B.-C. (2015). Have the “megajournals” reached the limits to growth? PeerJ, 3(e981). doi:10.7717/peerj.981.
Björk, B.-C., & Solomon, D. (2014). Developing an effective market for open access article processing charges. Wellcome Trust, London, United Kingdom: Report http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtp055910.pdf.
Björk, B.-C., & Solomon, D. (2015). Article processing charges in OA journals – Relationship between price and quality. Scientometrics, 103(2), 373–385.
Björk, B.-C., Laakso, M., Welling, P., & Paetau, P. (2014). Anatomy of green open access. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(2), 237–250.
Björk, B.-C., Shen, C., & Laakso, M. (2016). A longitudinal study of independent scholar-published open access journals. PeerJ, 4(e1990). doi:10.7717/peerj.1990.
Bohannon, J. (2013). Who’s afraid of peer review. Science. 342:60–5. Vol., 342(6154), 60–65.
Crotty, D. (2016). What should We make of secret open access deals? Blog item, Scholarly Kitchen blog, 16(2), 2016 .http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/02/16/what-should-we-make-of-secret-open-access-deals/
Economist. (2013). Academic publishing: Free-for-all, Open-access scientific publishing is gaining ground, The Economist, May 14th 2013. http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21577035-open-access-scientific-publishing-gaining-ground-free-all
Edlin, A. and Rubinfeld, D. (2004). Exclusion or efficient pricing: The "big deal" bundling of Academic Journals. Antitrust Law Journal, 72(1). http://works.bepress.com/aaron_edlin/37/.
Eisen, M. (2015). The inevitable failure of parasitic green open access. Blog post, 25(5), 2015 .http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1710
Estelle, L. (2014). Unravelling the true cost of publishing in open access. JISC, Blog site, 15(12), 2014 .http://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/unravelling-the-true-cost-of-publishing-in-open-access-15-dec-2014
Finch, J. (2012). Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: How to expand access to research publications. UK: Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/.
Frantsvåg, J. (2014). The new gold OA funding scheme from the Norwegian Research Council (NRC). NRC webpages, 10(7), 2014 .https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140710062232-54791659-the-new-gold-oa-funding-scheme-from-the-norwegian-research-council-nrc
Frazier, K. (2001). The Librarians' dilemma - contemplating the costs of the "big deal". D-Lib Magazine, 7(3), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier.html.
Geisenheimer, S. (2014). Open Access Publishing and the role of the Royal Society of Chemistry. http://lib.consortium.ch/external_files/Infoveranstaltung/InfoOA_2014_PPresentation_RSC_Geisenheyner.pdf
Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y., Oppenheim, C., et al. (2004). The access/impact problem and the green and gold roads to open access. Serials Review, 30(4), 310–314.
Houghton, J., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M., & Gourlay, A. (2009). Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefits. Jisc: Project Report http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/278/.
Kiley, R. (2015). The reckoning: An analysis of Wellcome Trust open access spend 2013-2014. Blog item, Wellcome Trust, 3(3), 2015. http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2015/03/03/the-reckoning-an-analysis-of-wellcome-trust-open-access-spend-2013-14/5
Kingsley, D. (2014). Addressing the “double dipping “ charge. Australian Open Access Support Group Newsletter, 8.5.2014. http://aoasg.org.au/addressing-the-double-dipping-charge/.
Laakso, M. (2014). Green open access policies of scholarly journal publishers: A study of what, when, and where self-archiving is allowed. Scientometrics, 99(2), 475–494.
Laakso, M., & Björk, B.-C. (2012). Anatomy of open access publishing - a study of longitudinal development and internal structure. BMC Medicine, 10(124). doi:10.1186/1741-7015-10-124.
Laakso, M., & Björk, B.-C. (2013). Delayed open access – An overlooked high-impact type of openly available scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(7), 1323–1329.
Larivière, V., Haustein, S. and Mongeon, P. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLOS ONE,10(e0127502). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.
McGuigan, G. and Russell, R. (2008). The business of academic publishing: A strategic analysis of the academic journal publishing industry and its impact on the future of scholarly publishing. Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, 9(3). http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/mcguigan_g01.html.
Morrison, H. (2012). Freedom for scholarship in the internet age. Ph.D. dissertation: Department of Communication, Art & Technology, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Canada http://summit.sfu.ca/item/12537.
Packer, A. (2009). The SciELO open access: A gold way from the south. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 39(3), 111–126 https://www.editlib.org/p/108727/.
Peters, P. (2007). Going all the way: How Hindawi became an open access publisher. Learned Publishing, 20(3), 191–195.
Pinfield, S., Salter, J., & Bath, P. A. (2015). The ‘total cost of publication’ in a hybrid open-access environment: Institutional approaches to funding journal article-processing charges in combination with subscriptions. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology., 67(7), 1751–1766.
Porter, M. (1980). Competitive strategy. New York: The Free Press.
Porter, M. (2008). The five competitive forces that shape strategy. Harvard Business Review, 86(1), 78–93.
Poynder, R. (2014). The open access interviews: Richard savory, JISC licensing manager. Open and shut blog, 10(12), 2014. http://poynder.blogspot.fi/2014/12/the-open-access-interviews-richard.html
Prosser, D. (2003). From here to there: A proposed mechanism for transforming journals from closed to open access. Learned Publishing, 16(3), 163–166.
Redhead, C. (2015). Growth of OA-only Journals Using a CC-BY License, blog post, 19.5.2015, Open Access Scholarly Publisher Association. http://oaspa.org/growth-of-oa-only-journals-using-a-cc-by-license/.
RIN (2015). Monitoring the transition to open access, research information network, August 2015. http://www.researchinfonet.org/oamonitoring/.
Ritt, J. (2015a). Springer Compact: Make Researchers Comply with their Funders’ Open Access Policies, conference presentation, LIBER 2015 Sponsor Strategy, 13.7.2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jxVcaCkpNM.
Ritt, J. (2015b) Springer Compact: Make Researchers Comply with their Funders’ Open Access Policies, conference presentation, LIBER 2015 Sponsor Strategy, 13.7.2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jxVcaCkpNM.
Robinson, S. (2014). Elsevier issues academics thousands of takedown notices, doesn’t want any friends anyway. Blog post, 13(1), 2014. http://www.mhpbooks.com/elsevier-issues-academics-thousands-of-takedown-notices-doesnt-want-any-friends-anyway/
Royal Society (Great Britain), Knowledge, Networks and Nations Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century. London: The Royal Society, 2011. https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/knowledge-networks-nations/report/.
Schimmer, R., Geschuhn, K., & Vogler, A. (2015). Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access. A Max Planck Digital Library Open Access Policy White Paper, 28(4), 2015 .http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:2148961:7/component/escidoc:2149096/MPDL_OA-Transition_White_Paper.pdf
Shieber, S. (2014). A true transitional open-access business model. The occasional pamphlet blog, 28(3), 2014 .http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2014/03/28/a-true-transitional-open-access-business-model/
Solomon, D., Laakso, M., & Björk, B.-C. (2016). Converting Scholarly Journals to open access – A review of approaches and experiences. Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication: Report http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:27803834.
Suber, P. (2008). Gratis and libre open access. Web resource: Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) http://sparcopen.org/our-work/gratis-and-libre-open-access/.
Suber, P. (2012). Open access (230p). MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/open-access
Tenopir, C., & King, D. (2000). Towards electronic journals: Realities for scientists, librarians, and publishers. Washington, D. C: Special Libraries association.
Walters, W. (2007). Institutional journal costs in an open access environment. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(1), 108–120.
Ware, M., & Mabe, M. (2015). The STM report, an overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing. International Association of Scientific: Technical and Medical Publishers, The Hague, Netherlands http://www.stm-assoc.org/2015_02_20_STM_Report_2015.pdf.
Acknowledgements
Michael Jubb provided very useful comments to a draft version of this manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Responsible Editors: Diego Ponte and Stefan Klein
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Björk, BC. Scholarly journal publishing in transition- from restricted to open access. Electron Markets 27, 101–109 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12525-017-0249-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12525-017-0249-2