The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Age
(Republish with translation from: PLOS, "The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era”, Research Article, Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, Philippe Mongeon, Published: June 10, 2015, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502)
Introduction
For 350 years, since the publication of academic and scientific works, studies, research, etc. in "reputable" scientific journals, an oligopoly has been created by a handful (private and purely for-profit & commercial) publishing houses that have their hands all the magazines. This oligopoly no longer has a reason to exist, it is an obsolete and outdated regime imposed due to habit and due to the timidity of academics throughout the academic and scientific community and destroys almost 100% of scientific publications by winning over the efforts of others.
It is a kind of monopoly more or less similar to what exploits the creators and culture with the copyright (the so-called entertainment industry).
In oldest article we had given some information about this situation (see “Almost all scientific publications are controlled by only six companies", Wed, 22 / 07 / 2015, and "Open access to scientific knowledge in Greece", Thurs, 17 / 01 / 2013).
A recent survey of almost all published papers in all well-known scientific journals shows the truth, the possible causes that created the oligopoly and why it is maintained as well as the economic side of all this industry.
We translated the study into Greek and present it, good reading:
Download in pdf format, 15 pages in English
Download in pdf format, 15 pages in Greek
(Translation, Performance, Editing Simos Dalkyriadis, Member of the Pirates Party of Greece)
Summary
Consolidation of the scientific publications sector has been the subject of many debates within and outside the scientific community, particularly in relation to the high profit margins of the major publishers. However, the share of scientific production published in major publishers' journals, as well as its evolution over time in various disciplines, has not yet been analyzed.
This paper provides such an analysis, based on 45 million documents registered on the Web of Science for the period from 1973 to 2013.
The analysis shows that, in both the natural and medical sciences (NMS) and the social sciences and humanities (SSH), the publishers Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer and Taylor & Francis, increased their share in the production of publications, especially after the advent of the digital age (mid-1990).
In combination, the five most productive publishers represent more than 50% of all 2013 published work. Social sciences have the highest level of concentration (70% of the top 5 publishers) while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% of the top five publishers).
NMS branches are somewhere in the middle, mainly due to the strength of their scientific companies, such as ACS in chemistry or APS in physics.
The paper also examines the migration of magazines between small and large publishing houses and investigates the effect of publisher change on the impact of reference / citation on works. Concludes with a discussion on the economics of Academic Publications…
(the continuity of research)
