The political economy of academic publishing: On the commodification of a public good (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Cambridge Law Journal, 2019
The development of Open Access (OA) publishing in the past three decades has profound implications on how academics produce, process and share an idea. Understanding of this phenomenon in turn requires an understanding of the OA publishing market, and, perhaps more importantly, the relevant regulations on the OA market. It is crucial to appreciate the structure of relevant markets, demand and supply, and (behind the market) the potential of price and quantity to drive behaviour. The topic of a writer's research, the dynamic of different disciplines and the size of target audiences can all have sizeable impacts on the structure of the market. A good understanding of the market provides the rationale of who, among the key individual players and institutionsauthors, publishers, subscribers and readerswould benefit from the OA publishing and who would pay the cost. A further question is whether, given the market structure and its efficiency analysis, policy-makers ought to provide subsidies or levy taxation to accommodate the externalities and whether legislators ought to revise intellectual property laws, particularly copyright. The Economics of Open Access contributes to debate of these questions by providing a detailed description and comparison of the traditional academic publishing market and the OA publishing market. Apart from the authors' comprehensive accounting exerciselinking quantity, subscription fees, impact index and various characteristics from different academic fields and countries-Eger and Scheufen also explore a unique data set on subjective scores collected from more than 10,000 questionnaires from 25 countries. This data provides an excellent opportunity to get a snapshot of the heterogeneity of the academic publishing market, objectively and subjectively. The authors' empirical analysis provides evidence on the correlation between the usage of OA publishing and subjects. However, the results are limited by the sample size and representativeness of the responses. The authors discuss the policy implications and put forward some fundamental policy requirements to facilitate the transition from traditional publishing to OA publishing. These discussions, however, are less driven by the empirical results but more from their theoretical point of view. Eger and Scheufen start the discussion by analysing commercial academic publishing. They highlight the unique feature of the academic publishing as the reward structure, whereby researchers are "predominately motivated by curiosity, priority and the expected gain in reputation, and much less so by any monetary rewards". Hence, non-monetary rewards and punishments would have a long-run effect on researchers. Owing to the asymmetry of information in this two-sided market, the reputation of peer-review journals becomes a key signal. The direct result is that "the big five [commercial] publishers not only host almost half of all academic journals but two of them own a large share of important journals with above-average impact factors". This concentration of journals with publishers enhances the bargaining power of the publisher against the libraries. It contributes to the high subscription prices and the "Serials Crisis", in which libraries are "regularly forced to cancel serials subscriptions and to cut back on new monographs". Inevitably, it affects different disciplines differently. Apart from the detailed data across disciplines and publishers, the authors also investigate (but find no evidence on) the correlation between the price per article and impact factor. Their dataset could be extended to explore the underlining determinants of the differences between disciplines and to consider the compositional differences among publishers.
Open Access – the better access? Academic publishing and its politics
Input statement, 2016
Open Access to scholarly literature seems to dominate current discussions in the academic publishing, research funding and science policy arenas. Several international initiatives have been recently started calling for a large-scale transformation of the majority of scholarly journals from subscription model to Open Access. Such a massive transition would indeed affect not only business models and related cash flows but might be also expected to generate new inequalities in distributing resources among different regions or research fields. Thus, the paper at hand aims to serve as an input statement for the upcoming discussion and to provide some background information on Open Access debates.
Of hopes, villains and Trojan horses – Open Access academic publishing and its battlefields
Doctoral research proposal, 2016
In this doctoral research proposal the author deals with "Open Access" , a vision of a free online availability of scholarly journal literature that has been put forward in the early 2000s. More than a decade later, Open Access has gathered momentum and became a widespread phenomenon with several (international l strategies currently being pursued towards a radical transformation of the academic publishing world. Should the extreme scenario as proposed by some actors succeed, budgets of academic libraries would be fully shifted from conventional journal subscriptions model ("pay-to-read") towards publishing all research articles in Open Access journals ("pay-to-say"). However, the effects and dynamics that such a transition would unleash in the global knowledge regime remain largely unexplored. In order to answer the research questions, ongoing negotiations on Open Access publishing between the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and the academic publisher Elsevier as well as Dutch researchers' perceptions on the implications of these negotiations for their own publication practices will serve as empirical basis. Situational analysis developed by Adele E. Clarke (2005) will be used as an overall frame for data collection and analysis.
The Prices of Open Access Publishing: The Composition of APC across Different Fields of Sciences
Zur Ökonomik von Sport, Entertainment und Medien
Modern media technologies paved the way to the open access movement. Instead of the traditional academic subscription and publishing model, which allowed few big publishers to charge excessive publishing fees, the open access model raises the hope for a fair system, where scientific content is freely accessible and thus the dissemination of research work becomes possible at little cost. However, previous literature pointed out that big publishers seem to be able to preserve their market power when going from the subscription-based model to the open access model. In this paper, we take a closer look at the differences across disciplines. The publication routines in Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, Life Sciences and Health Sciences differ to a substantial extent. On these grounds, we test whether there are also differences in the explanations for the article processing charges (APC) across these disciplines. For doing so, we combined various data sources such as the dataset of the "Directory of Open Access", the "OpenAPC Initiative" and the "CiteScore Metrics". Our regression results show that the differences across the four fields in terms of publication habits and endowment levels allow publishers to exploit their market power to different extents.
The Political Economy of Social Scientific Publishing
In this paper, prepared as a keynote for the 'Selling (critical) finance: Getting your work published' Early Career Researcher Workshop,(Warwick University 3rd – 4th September 2018), I revist and reflect on the issue of open access academic publishing, picking up issues that I have raised in earlier publications. The paper sets (albeit breifly) the 'standard' model of academic publishing, analyses its costs & benefits, and then asks why there is not more open access publication in (International or Global) Poltical Economy. It concludes by inviting the reader/listener to re-exmaine their own practice(s) [also includes a short discusison of this site - Academia.edu].
Academic publishing and open access: Costs, benefits and options for publishing research
PSA-Politics, 2019
For International Open Access week - an article on OA publishing in Politics This article briefly sets out a political economy of academic publishing, exploring what the costs and benefits of this model are/were for the academic community. It then moves to explore forms of open access publication available to the social science (politics and international relations) community in the United Kingdom and beyond. The article concludes by asking why (given its likely advantages), the open access model is not ubiquitous and suggests that the future of publication lies in the hands of early career researchers.
Editors' note: On rent extraction in academic publishing and its alternatives
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society
In this editorial we introduce new members of our editorial team and the contents of this issue. In addition we discuss open access developments of the journal, namely our new license policy, which allows authors to choose a Creative Common license that best suits their needs or the requirements of their funders. This change in licenses makes our journal also compliant with the Plan S programme, which several large European research funders have signed, in order to promote open access publishing. We support such initiatives, but note that they are designed mainly to push large commercial publishers to publish publicly funded research in open access. While the Plan S is a welcome program, commercial for-profit publishers charge exorbitant charges for open access, usually paid for by the researchers' institutions. We note that these charges are a form of rent extraction, which produces little added value, as the commercial publishers rely on the free labor of researchers and publi...
Researchers’ Adoption of an Institutional Central Fund for Open-Access Article-Processing Charges
SAGE Open, 2016
This article analyzes researchers’ adoption of an institutional central fund (or faculty publication fund) for open-access (OA) article-processing charges (APCs) to contribute to a wider understanding of take-up of OA journal publishing (“Gold” OA). Quantitative data, recording central fund usage at the University of Nottingham from 2006 to 2014, are analyzed alongside qualitative data from institutional documentation. The importance of the settings of U.K. national policy developments and international OA adoption trends are considered. Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) is used as an explanatory framework. It is shown that use of the central fund grew during the period from covering less than 1% of the University’s outputs to more than 12%. Health and Life Sciences disciplines made greatest use of the fund. Although highly variable, average APC prices rose during the period, with fully OA publishers setting lower average APCs. APCs were paid largely from internal funds, but externa...
2017
Since the Second World War, academic publishing practices have had to cope with enormous changes in the scale of the research enterprise, in the culture and management of higher education, and in the ecosystem of scholarly publishers. The pace of change has been particularly rapid in the last twenty-five years, thanks to digital technologies. This has also been a time of growing divergence between the different roles of academic publishing: as a means of disseminating validated knowledge, as a form of symbolic capital for academic career progression, and as a profitable business enterprise. This briefing paper aims to provide a historical perspective that can inform the debates about what the future of academic publishing should look like. We argue that current policy regarding open access publishing, and many of the other proposals for the reform of academic publishing, have been too focused on the opportunities and financial challenges of the most recent changes in digital communi...
Economic Effects of Open Access to Scientific Publications
2016
With the development of digital technology and especially the possibilities for electronic publishing Open access publishing is becoming more and more a global phenomenon. Open access means unrestricted online access to scholarly research and research data. The paper presents the common definitions, the types and vehicles for delivering Open access to scientific publications. Because of its economic efficiency, the potential economic benefits of Open access might have an impact on many other groups besides the users and the authors themselves – publishers, scientific institutions, specific industries, etc. Economic effects of OA are analysed through the concept of its benefits which could generally be divided into two groups – individual and collective. Besides the economic benefits, one must also consider the “price” of OA, as well as its limitations. Together with the effects of Open access that support the development of science, its use could be regarded as a means to increase social welfare as well.