[Open-access] [open-science] Data expedition idea - scholarly publishing income

Fri Nov 22 01:27:53 UTC 2013

hi all,

Study of the dysfunction marketplace that is scholarly communication has been around for a while. In brief, the scholarly journal system has arguably been in a state of crisis for decades. Before the second world war, almost all scholarly journals were published by the non-profit sector (scholarly and learned publishers, university presses). After the second world war, the commercial sector became involved, and are now involved in publishing about half of scholarly journals (sometimes owned outright, other times published on behalf of scholarly societies). The commercial sector itself has been characterized by market consolidation, so that today a very small number of publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer and Informa.plc under the scholar-friendly-sounding brand Taylor & Francis) own a disproprotionate share of the market. This market has been the subject of anti-trust investigation. Open access advocates should note that these large companies are moving into open access. For example, Springer owns BioMedCentral. Wolters Kluwer bought Medknow, a large Indian open access publisher. Meanwhile, Edgar & Willinsky have observed what they call a renaissance in scholar-led publishing. A survey they did of over 900 journals using the free, open source software found that these were the largest group involved in publishing. 

My two next research projects are focused on economics of transition to open access: one on OA article processing fees, and the other on resource requirements to sustain scholar-led scholarly publishing. I would be interested in hearing from others working in this area. 

Some references:

Morrison, H. (2013). Economics of scholarly communication in transition. First Monday, June 2013. http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4370

I cover a bit more of the history in chapter 2 and chapter 6 of my dissertation - the full final version is available here:
http://summit.sfu.ca/item/12537

The ARL has been tracking the serials crisis for decades - see for example:

Association of Research Libraries (ARL). (1989). Report of the ARL serials prices project: A compilation of reports examining the serials prices problem. Washington, DC: The Association of Research Libraries. Retrieved August 27, 2011 from http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001527850

The UK's Office of Fair Trade conducted an investigation of the industry in 2002 (results inconclusive):
U.K. Office of Fair Trading. (2002). The market for scientific, medical and technical journals No. OFT 396 U.K. Office of Fair Trade. Retrieved September 13, 2011 from http://www.oft.gov.uk/advice_and_resources/publications/reports/media/

Edgar, B. D., & Willinsky, J. (2010) (In press). A survey of the scholarly journals using open journal systems. Scholarly and Research Communication, Retrieved August 27, 2011 from http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/2773

best,

Heather Morrison

On 2013-11-21, at 5:42 PM, Jenny Molloy wrote:

> Hi Carl and all
> 
> [Cc'ing the open-economics and data-driven-journalism lists in the spirit of fostering some cross working group collaboration. Please let me know if this is too off-topic for your lists!]
> 
> Thanks for your responses, I agree these are all interesting questions and we definitely seem short of expertise in economics so I have copied in the open-economics list where hopefully some economists reside who might be able to help us in responding to your comments.
> 
> Does anybody know of someone doing academic work on this already? The data expedition format lends itself more to an investigative journalism type approach, finding what data one can and building a narrative, so my initial suggestion was not really around an academic study but I think both approaches would be worthwhile. 
> 
> If anyone on the ddj list would be interested (or has a contact who would), please do come and join the discussion on the open-science list - we would love to hear from you.
> 
> Jenny
> 
> 
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 9:07 PM, Carl Boettiger <cboettig at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Jenny,
> 
> I'm not an economist, but I would definitely be curious to understand how an economist interprets these observations (along with a bit more digging of the type you suggest).  
> 
> My understanding is that an efficient marketplace is supposed to erode profit margins (not revenues). A single company can make large profits as the result of innovations that put them well ahead of the competition, at least for a period of time.  But it seems particularly unusual to see sectors in which every major player is making a large profit margin. It seems this would suggest to the economist that the marketplace was not efficient, and thus not spurring innovation. 
> 
> I'd be curious to hear from a more expert opinion if economists view this as evidence of an inefficient market?  If so, how it has come about (nondisclosure of prices? bundled subscriptions? something else?) What would restore an efficient, competitive, innovative marketplace?  
> 
> Beyond an academic study, I've also wondered if this issue would interest investigative journalists such as the NPR Planet Money Team?  
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Carl
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 7:46 AM, Jenny Molloy <jenny.molloy at okfn.org> wrote:
> Hi All
> 
> I wondered about a potential collaboration between School of Data and the Open Science/Open Access working groups on a Data Expedition around scholarly publishers and their income.
> 
> The bottom line is some make a lot of profit, much of it from public funding of higher education and research and possibly pay very little tax, but there's not been much exploration of this beyond some figures on profits which appear in blogs and a few articles and mostly in text and tables. 
> 
> It would be great to try and draw a more comprehensive dataset together, visualise it and tell some stories. 
> 
> Some figures:
> THE Summary: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/421672.article
> Full article: https://lra.le.ac.uk/handle/2381/9689
> From Mike Taylor http://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers/ :
> 
> "Here they are again: profits as a percentage of revenue for commercial STM publishers in 2010 or early 2011:
> 	• Elsevier: £724m on revenue of £2b — 36%
> 	• Springer‘s Science+Business Media: £294m on revenue of £866m — 33.9%
> 	• John Wiley & Sons: $106m on revenue of $253m — 42%
> 	• Academic division of Informa plc: £47m on revenue of £145m — 32.4%"
> Similar figures are also in Heather Morrison's thesis:
> http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/chapter-two-scholarly-communication-in-crisis/
> 
> A few questions:
> 	• Do you think this is a suitable topic for exploration?
> 	• What are the thoughts of those who have run data expeditions or spending stories type projects before? 
> 	• Does anyone feel strongly about this and would like to coordinate the project?
> 	• Would anyone like to help out? (could you host a workshop, are you organising an event or conference where this could run as a session, are you a data wrangler, visualisation expert, journalist, coder, accountant, researcher or anybody just interested in digging in?)
> Reply to the list and sign up on the pad if so!
> http://pad.okfn.org/p/scholarly-publishers-data-expedition
> 
> Thanks very much :)
> 
> Jenny
> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Carl Boettiger
> UC Santa Cruz
> http://carlboettiger.info/
> 
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-- 
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa

http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca