How the academic publishing oligopoly skews debates on the cost of publishing | Samuel Moore

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Financial matters have always been an area of dispute within OA debates, particularly over how much publishing should cost and how much profit should be returned to shareholders. Some people advocate for a more efficient publishing process (whereby an individual article is cheaper to produce) or a transparent market to inform purchasing decisions, while others argue for an entirely non-profit space or a restriction on the profiteering of large commercial publishers. Both of these are ideological arguments that either reflect faith in market outcomes to produce efficient results or distrust in markets and the need for interventions to generate healthier publishing cultures. (of course, this is not a simple binary for many people but a broad generalisation.)

Yet what gets lost in the debates about the cost of publishing is the nuance around what publishing actually is and who publishers actually are. Publishing isn’t a specific practice by a certain kind of organisation, but instead reflects a multitude of practices, business models, formats, political modes, and so on. But this diversity is obscured by the fact that publishing is also a highly concentrated industry. The skewed debate exists not just because publishing means a range of different things, but also because 5-6 publishers have a market share of roughly half of the entire academic publishing industry. This means that the way in which many researchers interact with publishers is largely influenced by the oligopoly, even though publishing represents a plurality of practices.

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