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Published October 7, 2022 | Version v2
Preprint Open

The Oligopoly's Shift to Open Access. How For-Profit Publishers Benefit from Article Processing Charges

  • 1. University of Ottawa
  • 2. Freie Universität Berlin
  • 3. Université de Montréal
  • 4. Dalhousie University

Description

This study aims to estimate the total amount of article processing charges (APCs) paid to publish open access (OA) in journals controlled by the large commercial publishers Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley, the so-called oligopoly of academic publishing. While traditionally their business model focused on subscriptions, they now increasingly charge fees for publishing. This study computes an estimate of the total amounts of APCs paid to oligopoly publishers between 2015 and 2018, using publication data from WoS, OA status from Unpaywall and annual APC prices from open datasets and historical fees retrieved via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. We estimate that globally authors paid the oligopoly of academic publishers 1.06billioninpublicationfees20152018.RevenuefromgoldOAamountedto612.5 million, while 448.3millionwasobtainedforpublishingOAinhybridjournals,forwhichpublishersalreadychargesubscriptionfees.Amongthefivepublishers,SpringerNaturemadethelargestrevenuefromOA(589.7 million), followed by Elsevier (221.4million),Wiley(114.3 million), Taylor & Francis (76.8million)andSage(31.6 million). With Elsevier and Wiley making the majority of APC revenue from hybrid fees and others focusing on gold, different OA strategies could be observed between publishers.

Notes

Version 2 of the preprint has been submitted to the journal Quantitative Science Studies.

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Additional details

Related works

Is reviewed by
10.5281/zenodo.7226232 (DOI)
Is supplemented by
Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.7086420 (DOI)