News & Views: Publishers and Market Consolidation – Part 2 of 2 - Delta Think

peter.suber's bookmarks 2022-08-16

Summary:

" Last month we examined the large degree of consolidation in journals publishing. We saw that 95% of publishers publish 10 journals or fewer, but account for barely one fifth of articles published. Meanwhile, half of total scholarly output is published by just 10 publishers, those with the largest numbers of journals. We can further analyze the market’s consolidation by comparing annual growth rates in the numbers of publishers, journals and articles.... By looking at the trends, some clear patterns emerge. The numbers of publishers (in blue) grew more quickly in the mid-teens than before or since. This is consistent with the S-shaped curve in the numbers of publishers we noted last month. So it seems the market showed signs of fragmentation in the mid-teens, followed by consolidation more recently. Growth in numbers of journals (in orange) accelerated until about 2017, then started to fall off. This happened in tandem with the slowing growth in the numbers of publishers. The rate of growth in numbers of articles (in grey) seems to run counter to the trends above. On average it was flat (at around 5%-6%) until 2018/2019, but then it accelerated. We think much this is because of the unusually high levels of submission in the wake of COVID (as we discussed in our market sizing analysis last year).... The data also suggest that growth in publisher and journal numbers has slowed, while growth in output has accelerated. Over the last few years – irrespective of Covid effects – it seems the larger publishers are producing larger journals, and the smaller publishers smaller ones. Larger organizations may be able to produce things more efficiently than smaller ones. Meanwhile, the rise of Open Access and reduction in reliance on print works removes constraints on publication sizes...."

Link:

https://deltathink.com/news-views-publishers-and-market-consolidation-part-2-of-2/

From feeds:

[IOI] Open Infrastructure Tracking Project » Items tagged with oa.openalex in Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)
[IOI] Open Infrastructure Tracking Project » Items tagged with oa.monopoly in Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.trends oa.publishers oa.openalex oa.new oa.monopoly oa.growth oa.delta_think

Date tagged:

08/16/2022, 16:35

Date published:

08/16/2022, 12:35