The Oligopoly's Shift to Open Access Publishing: How For-Profit Publishers Benefit from Gold and Hybrid Article Processing Charges

The oligopoly’s revenues from gold and hybrid APCs continue to increase, demonstrating a strong source of profits at the cost of authors, and like previous studies demonstrate, their control of the scholarly publishing market. Instead of making scholarly publishing sustainable and accessible for all, exorbitant APCs (and more recently transformative agreements) preserve the status quo of the academic publishing market. The author-pays model excludes large parts of the academic community from publishing, giving preference to well-funded authors, disciplines and countries. Instead of removing barriers from academic publishing, OA APCs have shifted inequities from readers to authors, often affecting those same individuals.