02/17/2022

Revisiting — Additive, Substitutive, Subtractive

Strategic scenarios for publishers in an OA world

Author’s Note: I wrote this post 8 years ago, but have been thinking about it lately, as more and more of the publishers I work with seem overwhelmed by events. What is the future of my organization, they ask, or indeed of any publisher of scholarly materials in the face of animosity from the library community and the overweening demands of funding agencies? It’s important to bear in mind that there is nothing new about an adverse trading environment; you win or lose a game depending on how you play it. I note that many of the figures cited in the post would have to be adjusted to make them align with today’s realities (e.g., the percentage of OA articles has risen sharply), but I stand by my argument. There is only one option for a publisher, and that is to pursue a strategy of growth.

Open Access Millennialism is the belief that the world of scholarly publishing has a purpose and is moving toward the fulfillment of that purpose: at some point (but when? when?) all scholarly material will be open access (OA), and it is only the foot-dragging of self-interested publishers and the innate conservatism of academics that is holding it back. The signs are everywhere (“‘We would see a sign!’”): in the growing number of OA services, the mandates for OA from funders, and the general utility of locating content with no more than a Web browser and a mouse-click. I would have thought that the idea that history has a purpose was tossed out the window in 1859, but you can have OA without a sense of historical destiny. Just bide your time and let the utopians party. When you wake up the next morning, as I’ve said before, it’s just business.

We do have a number of divergent figures, however, that are likely to be reconciled in some way in the years ahead; these are in fact the two metrics that I personally keep an eye on. The first is that the average income to the publisher per article is about $5,000. You derive this number with great mathematical sophistication, by dividing the number of articles published each year (about 2 million) into the size of the journals market (about $10 billion). Voila! We now have a benchmark against we can measure OA pricing and services.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.