Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020
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By Eric Newman, Dan Strempel and the editors of Simba Information
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Table of Contents Table of Contents _____________________________________ i Methodology ________________________________________ vii Executive Summary ____________________________________ 1 Chapter 1: Open Access Publishing Market ___________________ 5 Introduction _________________________________________________________5 Origins of a Movement_________________________________________________6 Timeline ____________________________________________________________6 Open Access Definitions & Publishing Models ____________________________ 10 Open Access Journals ______________________________________________ 10 Gold ___________________________________________________________ 10 Green __________________________________________________________ 11 Hybrid__________________________________________________________ 11 Megajournals_____________________________________________________ 12 Article Processing Charges___________________________________________ 12 Other Sources of Support for OA Articles ________________________________ 12
The Open Access Ecosystem __________________________________________ 13 Public Funding Agencies ____________________________________________ 13 National Institutes of Health _________________________________________ 14
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European Research Council __________________________________________ 14 Research Councils UK ______________________________________________ 14 The Wellcome Trust________________________________________________ 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute______________________________________ 15 Institutional Mandates ______________________________________________ 15
Market Size ________________________________________________________ 15 APC Journals Revenue ______________________________________________ 15 Other Journals OA Revenue __________________________________________ 17 Other Measures of Market Size _______________________________________ 17
Open Access by Discipline ____________________________________________ 18 Medical _________________________________________________________ 18 Scientific & Technical_______________________________________________ 18 Social Science & Humanities _________________________________________ 18
Open Access by Geography ___________________________________________ 18 North America ____________________________________________________ 19 Europe _________________________________________________________ 19 Asia-Pacific ______________________________________________________ 19 Rest of World ____________________________________________________ 19 Language _______________________________________________________ 20
Table 1.1: Timeline of Open Access Publishing, 2000-2004 __________________7 Table 1.2: Timeline of Open Access Publishing, 2005-2012 __________________8 Table 1.3: Timeline of Open Access Publishing, 2013-2016 __________________9 Table 1.4: Open Access Publishing Market, Various Metrics, 2013-2015 ________ 16
Chapter 2: Leading Open Access Journal Publishers & Repositories _ 21 Introduction _______________________________________________________ 21 Leading Open Access Publishers _______________________________________ 22 Springer Nature ____________________________________________________ 22 Company Overview ________________________________________________ 22 Recent Company Performance ________________________________________ 23 Open Access Publishing Strategy ______________________________________ 23
Public Library of Science (PLOS) _______________________________________ 26
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Competitor Overview_______________________________________________ 26 Recent Company Performance ________________________________________ 26 Open Access Strategy ______________________________________________ 26
John Wiley & Sons __________________________________________________ 27 Company Overview ________________________________________________ 27 Recent Company Performance ________________________________________ 27 Open Access Strategy ______________________________________________ 27
Hindaw i ___________________________________________________________ 28 Company Overview ________________________________________________ 28 Recent Company Performance ________________________________________ 28 Open Access Strategy ______________________________________________ 29
REXL Group/Elsevier ________________________________________________ 29 Company Overview ________________________________________________ 29 Recent Company Performance ________________________________________ 30 Open Access Strategy ______________________________________________ 30
Holtzbrinck (including Frontiers) _______________________________________ 31 Company Overview ________________________________________________ 31 Recent Company Performance ________________________________________ 31 Open Access Strategy ______________________________________________ 32
MDPI AG __________________________________________________________ 32 Competitor Overview_______________________________________________ 32 Recent Company Performance ________________________________________ 33 Open Access Strategy ______________________________________________ 33
Wolters Kluwer (including Medknow) ___________________________________ 34 Company Overview ________________________________________________ 34 Recent Company Performance ________________________________________ 34 Open Access Strategy ______________________________________________ 35
Informa Cogent ____________________________________________________ 35 Company Overview ________________________________________________ 35 Recent Company Performance ________________________________________ 36 Open Access Strategy ______________________________________________ 36
Oxford University Press ______________________________________________ 37 Competitor Overview_______________________________________________ 37
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Recent Company Performance ________________________________________ 37 Open Access Strategy ______________________________________________ 37
Others in the Hunt __________________________________________________ 38 Open Access Repositories (Green Archives) & Other Platforms ______________ 38 Academia.edu ______________________________________________________ 39 arXiv _____________________________________________________________ 40 Chinese Academy of Sciences _________________________________________ 40 CiteSeerX _________________________________________________________ 40 Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard ________________________________ 41 PubMed Central ____________________________________________________ 41 Redalyc ___________________________________________________________ 41 ResearchGate ______________________________________________________ 42 SciELO ____________________________________________________________ 42 SSRN (Social Sciences Research Network) ______________________________ 42 Mergers & Acquisitions in Open Access Publishing Market __________________ 43
Table 2.1: Leading Open Access Publishers Share, 2015 ___________________ 22 Table 2.2: Leading Open Access Publishers, 2013-2015 ___________________ 24 Table 2.3: Notable Open Access Repositories ____________________________ 39 Table 2.4: Notable Open Access Publishing M&A Activity 2008 – 2016 ______________________________________________ 44
Chapter 3: Issues Facing Open Access Journal Publishing & Forecast _ 45 Introduction _______________________________________________________ 45 Issues Facing Open Access Publishing __________________________________ 46 Open Access Business Practices Continue to Evolve ________________________ 46 APC Pricing Is an Issue for Editorial Boards ______________________________ 47 The Librarian Complaint Is Double Dipping_______________________________ 48 Despite Objections, APCs Will Continue to Rise ___________________________ 49 Leading OA Publishers Branded as Predatory _____________________________ 49 Every OA Publisher Has Faced a Credibility Problem ________________________ 50 Peer Review Is a Particular Target for Criticism ___________________________ 51 Some Publishers Work Towards Greater Transparency ______________________ 52
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Going OA Is Not a Magic Bullet _______________________________________ 53 Major Publishers Have the Potential of Transforming OA Publishing ____________ 54 More Journals Are Being Converted from Subscription to Open Access __________ 54 Has Megajournals Growth Stalled? _____________________________________ 55
Open Access Publishing Forecast ______________________________________ 56 Introduction _____________________________________________________ 56 World Economy & Exchange Rates _____________________________________ 58 Open Access Will Capture a Significant Share of Emerging Market Research ______ 58 Authors Will Better Understand the Good & Bad of OA Journals _______________ 59 Mandates Will Increase & They Will Work________________________________ 59 OA Articles Published Per Year Will Continue to Grow _______________________ 59 The Humanities & Social Sciences Will Be Accommodated ___________________ 59 APCs Will Continue to Rise ___________________________________________ 60
Forecast of Leading Publishers ________________________________________ 60
Table 3.1: Open Access Market Forecast, Various Metrics, 2016P-2020P _____ 57 Table 3.2: Leading Open Access Publishers, 2015-2016P __________________ 61
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Methodology Definition of Open Access Journal Publishing The coverage of open access in this report includes journals covered by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR). These include subject matter ranging across scholarly and professional publishing, primarily scientific, technical and medical (STM) but also social sciences and the humanities. Journals in this report are defined as electronic periodicals and peer reviewed journals that are published more than once a year. In its other reports, Simba uses a definition of at least three times per year, but that is not DOAJ ’s standard.
Scope of the Report Sales are global and include all publishing that fit the definition of subject and level common to Simba’s research. Scientific, technical, medical and social science publishing—particularly research and specialty journal publishing —is dominated by English language. Signif icant revenue is also produced in Japanese, German, F rench, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. These other languages are particularly important in social science and humanities publishing, and the more applied aspects of engineering and health care. Major industry trends are identified, including the meaning of recent merger and acquisition activity. Ten leading open access journal publishers are identified and analyzed along w ith 10 open access repositories.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Methodology
The report concludes with estimated sales for 2016 through 2020.
Sources of Information Primary Researc h
Interviews with key executives from hundreds of professional publishing and information companies. Simba maintains an archive of newsletter articles dating from 1979 and also has a large file of notes from interviews conducted with industry leaders.
Statistical analysis of Directory of Open Access Journals, Directory of Open Access Repositories.
Publisher websites including earnings reports, press releases and analyst briefings.
Secondary Research
Published academic research
Group reports such as the Finc h Report
Interviews with financial analysts
Industry conferences
Other government and company resources sourced throughout this report.
The Simba team uses a combination of primary, secondary research and competitor interv iews to gather financial data. The team obtains and analyzes secondary data to gain a comprehensive understanding of each competitor. Simba also consults industry experts. The team contacts various levels of management and product management at competitor organizations to get detailed p roduct descriptions, pricing, sales figures, market share data and delivery options, as well as strategic information they may provide.
Methodology For Projecting/Estimating Results Estimates of sales and projections are based primarily on individual publisher information compared w ith Directory of Online Journals statistics . Guidance from analysts, Annual Reports, 10-Ks and industry insider observations of growth or weakness are then applied.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Executive Summary
Simba’s forecast methodology is similar to its approach to building STM and professional global market size numbers. We discuss trends and insights with industry executives and research secondary sources, analyst reports and industry studies. We also draw inherences from previous publishing market changes such as when the conversion of print to e-journals began to approach market saturation. Principal drivers of the 2016-20 forecasts are:
Global and national GDP forecasts
Industry forecasts
Company forecasts
Impact of announced mandates
Particularly important in open access are article metrics.
These projections are demand based, assuming that publishing output will follow economic opportunities presented in different market sectors and different countries. Media trends assume a continuation of recent trends in technology. GDP growth forecasts are used for year-to-year variations. These come from a variety of sources but Simba relies most heavily on The Economist’s Poll of Forecasters, IMF World Econom ic Outlook and the Conference Board Global Economic Outlook. Growth rates in individual countries with strong publishing industries are particularly important.
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Executive Summary Introduction This report provides an overview and f inancial outlook for the global open access (OA) journal publishing market based on specific research and analysis of the leading competitors’ performance through 2015. Simba has used the information it gathered through primary and secondary research to project company performance through 2016 and market performance through 2020. This research was conducted in conjunction with a larger study of the overall market for professional publishing, including legal and business publishing, the results of which are availa ble in the associated reports Global Open Access Book Publishing 2016-2020, Global Social Science and Humanities Publishing 2016-2020, Scholarly & Professional E-Book Publishing 2015-2019, Global Medical Publishing 2015-2019, Global Scientif ic & Technical Publishing 2015-2019 and Global Legal Publishing 2015-2016.
What is Open Access Publishing? Open access is the online digital delivery free of charge to the reader and without most copyright and licensing restrictions. The term was only coined a dozen y ears ago and continues to undergo theological debate about how f ree the cost and how restrictive the rights. There is general agreement that open access is divided into two types: gold usually delivered by journals and green delivered by repositories. OA journals are usually peer reviewed though this is often a point of contention. They usually allow copyright to be maintained by the author. Articles offered free within journals, which are
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Executive Summary
otherwise sold on a subscription, are called hybrid. Revenue for these comes almost exclusively from article (or author) processing c harges (APCs) usually paid by funders of the research from w hich the articles are drawn. APCs are charged in fully-OA journals as well as hybrid journals. However, the majority of articles available open access are published without payment of an APC. These articles have become available, after an embargo period, originally supported by a subscription charge.
Key Facts & Trends Because open access removes price barriers, revenue is not necessarily the most important metric for the sector. Furthermore, revenue must be carefully def ined because OA publishers employ many business models. Each publisher is different and often there are differences between publications within the same stable. Author Processing Fees Account for 2015 Global Sa les of $305.5 Million The only major revenue source for open access journals are the funder-paid APC fees from the gold or hybrid journals. Simba’s estimate of these fees yields an open access market size of $242.2 million in 2013 grow ing to $305.5 million in 2015 and to $439.0 million by 2020. OA 2.3% of 2015 Journal Sales, But Is Growth Area in a Mature Market Despite this rapid growth, OA sales revenue only represents 3.2% of global 2015 STM journal sales. But they are a bright spot in a flat market. While Simba estimates STM journal revenue to increase at a compound annual rate of 1.3% between 2016 and 2020, OA revenue is expected to grow nearly six times as fast. Simba predicts they will come to represent 4.3% of journal revenue. Millions of Articles Are Published OA, Growing at More Than 7% Pe r Annum The influence of OA is felt even more strongly in the number of OA articles published. Simba estimates OA already represents about a third of all research articles published when articles completing their embargo periods are included. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists nearly 2.3 million OA articles. Simba estimates this number will continue to grow and will top 3 million by 2020. This is a double the rate of annual growth for research articles as a whole.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Executive Summary
About 80% of OA Journals Do Not Produce Revenue Most journals in the DOAJ do not collect fees and many fees from journals that do are waived because of institutional or low-income country exceptions. The business model for these green articles is uncertain. While some of the larger funders have come out in favor of the gold model offering full access on publication, there is no evidence that funding for repositories is under threat. Springer Nature Largest OA Publisher, But Others Are C losing the Ga p BioMed Central was an early leader in OA publishing and its acquisition by Springer only boosted its presence. Springer remains the market leader in OA revenue, particularly w ith the 2015 merger with Nature and its own rapid growth in OA article output. The large traditional subscription-based publishers have recently joined Springer. Elsevie r and Wiley have overtaken Hindaw i but remain behind PLOS. Open Access Is a Global Phe nomenon Among the biggest benef iciaries of OA journal publishing have been researchers and publishers from Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries, the Middle East, India and China. With the growth of their economies and supported by government policies in the case of China and Brazil, emerging markets have joined the ranks of North American and European dominance in research. Open access archives in Brazil and Mexico have encouraged and given greater access to Portuguese and Spanish researchers and their publishers, the initiatives of publishers in Egypt and India, and more recently mandates in Mexico and China have expanded the marketplac e. Open Access Remains Controversial OA is still a young idea w ithout the centuries of evolution of the traditional subscription and peer review methods. It took years for the online journal charging mechanisms to settle into a few discrete business mode ls and open access still has its critics. Fundamental to the debate is the innate conflict of interest the paid gold model offers: the more that is published, the more money to be made. This creates a strong temptation to lower standards and accept anything. What librarian and blogger Jeffrey Beall calls predatory journals exploit vanity publishing to distribute bad science along with good, abandon the filtering and branding value that publishers traditional brought to the table and create a huge pile of junk.
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Chapter 1 Open Access Journal Market Introduction Open access (OA) is only a small part of the much larger scholarly publishing market. Simba estimates OA journal revenue represents only about 1% of the $26 billion STM publishing industry and just 3.2% of the $9.7 billion STM journal publishing segment. Despite global sales of only $305.5 million in 2015, open access is much discussed within the industry. More than ten thousand journals containing millions of articles have been published open access; about one-third of all research articles published annually is now or will soon be OA. The annual reports of commercial publishers laud their gains in OA because it is grow ing much faster than the traditional subscription business and because OA is good public relations. While sales of all STM journals fell from 2013 to 2015 at a compound annual rate -4.1%, OA journals grew at a compound annual rate of 12.3%. Individual publishers can boast even more impressive gains. Wiley, Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer (Medknow) and Informa OA revenue each grew at a compound rate in excess of 25% during that period. OA is the subject of discussion and debate around the world and major funders of research, both government and private funders have mandated its use. Publishers have embraced it, but this was not always the case. Open access grew out of crisis and conflict.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
Origins of a Movement Open access publishing came as a response to flat library budgets and rising prices for publications. Publishers, libraries, and funders are experimenting with various fee and payment
models
to better serve their respective interests , enabled by
developments in technology. The scholarly community and the publishers that publish their works have historically had a symbiotic relationship relying on subscription prof its to motivate the publisher to promote sales to the widest audience. When funders, scientific progress and globalization brought steady growth in research output , publishers were happy to accommodate with more journals and fatter journals. Unfortunately, library budgets failed to keep pace with this expansion, and librarians and publishe rs became locked into a zero-sum game. Library managers were forced to choose between journal bundles as there is little opportunity for substitution between journals. Each contains a unique collection of articles. Critics described the subscription model as a broken system where normal market rules no longer work. The birth of the Internet permanently changed the economics. By reducing the incremental cost of a copy to virtually zero, online delivery meant that the cost of reaching everyone was nearly the same as reaching a niche market. The author’s and often the funder’s goal, particularly public funders, could now be served independent of the distribution and printing costs associated with traditional print subscriptions. The costs that remained were those of the first copy, overheads primarily comprised of the cost of peer review, editing and layout.
Timeline There were a number of seminal events that shaped the open access movement, contributed necessary foundation steps or reflected change . In 1991, Paul Ginsparg launched the Los Alamos National Laboratory preprint archive in physics later to become arXiv. The BMJ (formerly Br itish Medical Journal) put its contents free online to non-subscribers in 1995 and there were other early harbingers in fields ranging from classical studies to computer science. In the spring 1999, things became particularly interesting in the life sciences. Nobel Prize winner and National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Dr. Harold Varmus proposed E-BioMed Central, “an electronic public library of medicine and other life sciences” originally aiming for a comprehensive fully searchable free repository of
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
Table 1.1: Timeline of Open Access Publishing, 2000 – 2004 Year 2000
2001
Event •Howard Hughes Medical Institute makes commitment to cover open access publication fees for its own researchers (December). NIH, NSF, Max Planck, CNRS, INSERM, Rockefeller Foundation — all now cover costs of publishing in OA journals. •Wikipedia launched (January). •Elsevier acquires Academic Press, further fueling debate on the economics of STM publishing. •PLOS announcement by Brown and Eisen (August). •C opernicus begins OA publishing. •Budapest meeting defines “open access” (February). •BMC began charging APCs. •Redalyc launched.
2002
•The entire editorial board of a major journal resigned in protest of its publisher’s price increases. •NERL consortia vowed to reduce the holdings of Elsevier journals due to their high cost. •Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) launched. To provide free or low cost access to research for developing countries •U.K. Parliamentary committee opens enquiry into STM pricing and access.
2003
•Bethesda (June) and Berlin (October) further refine open access discussions from Budapest used by funders, authors, publishers and librarians. •PLOS launched. •Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) launched. •Wellcome Trust, largest private funder of medical research, publicly commits to open access. •Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) launched. •Hindawi begins conversion of its journals to OA, completed in 2007. •Springer launches Open Choice (June, $3,000 per article).
2004
•Elsevier allows self-archiving for most of its journals. •ARL journal spending reaches $5.6 billion. •Wellcome Trust announces plans for a European PubMed Central and intention to require archiving of funded research.
Source: Simba Information
full-text research articles. Virtually at the same time, commercial publisher BioMed Central announced plans to offer free online access to all its journals. BioMed Central published its first journal in July, and although tens of thousands signed the VarmusBrown-Eisen petition, most researchers/article authors did not act upon its terms.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
Table 1.2: Timeline of Open Access Publishing, 2005 – 2012 Year
Event
2005
•NIH policy requires every scholar receiving an NIH research grant to deposit a digital copy of any article published in PubMed Central. •Wellcome Trust issues open access mandate.
2006
•Research Council UK releases OA policy. •Re Press published their first OA book in humanities.
2007
2008
•European Research Council will pay APCs. •OAPEN collection of open access books developed 2008-11 with Dutch and EU funding. •University presses of Rice, MIT and Yale publish OA books. •Open Humanities Press launched •Springer announces its acquisition of BioMed Central (October).
2009
•Jeffrey Beall begins to formulate thinking about predatory open access journals when he reviews Bentham Open in The Charleston Advisor.
2010
•The Directory of Open Access Journals tops 5,000 titles.
2011
•Wolters Kluwer acquires Medknow. •Directory of Open Access Books launched. •Finch Report (UK) published.
2012
•European Union Horizon 2020 will require OA. •OA book project Knowledge Unlatched launched. •Internet hosts reach 1 billion.
Source: Simba Information
In August 2001, Brow n and Eisen announced they would start their own non-profit publishing operation PLOS which would join BMC and PubMed Central at the beginning of the take-off phase in open access journal publishing. With maturity, open access publishing is being shaped by mandates rather than petitions, and by acquisitions as much as start-ups. It spread from the U.S. and Europe worldw ide and from a bioscience burst, it reaches most areas of scholarly and academic research. Between 2000 and 2004, terms were defined, major funders both public and private had begun to attach conditions to research awards and w ith that most of the current players in OA publishing had taken steps to accommodate the new reality.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
Table 1.3: Timeline of Open Access Publishing, 2013 – 2016 Year
2013
Event •Seventy organizations from Germany, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Canada, India, Japan and C hina in addition to those from the U.S. and U.K. encouraged open access to scientific publications resulting from their financial support (May). •Obama administration releases open data rules expanding access to federal data (May). •Nature Group acquires majority stake in Frontiers. •RC UK OA policy takes effect. •US FASTR Bill and White House directive define OA. •Finch progress report. •The two largest research funders in China announced researchers must make their papers in online repositories and make them publicly available within one year of publication (May). •Mexico signed legislation ensuring access to scientific information to ‘the whole society’ (May). •Nature announces plans to convert high impact megajournal Nature Communications from hybrid to full open access (August).
2014
•Springer reinstated into OASPA (August). •U.S. House C ommittee passed amendment to its FIRST Act (H.R. 4186), which shortens the embargo period from 24 months to 12 months. However, OA proponents continue to support the stronger OA language in a rival FASTR bill. •Wellcome Trust, British Heart Foundation and four other UK medical research charities jointly committed £12 million for a two-year pilot program to cover APCs for research they fund to be immediately published OA (September). •Elsevier reached agreement with Dutch universities on 3-year OA and subscription deal. •Springer S+B and Nature/Macmillan complete merger (May). •Elsevier filed lawsuits against free article websites Libgen and SciHub (June).
2015
•Springer Nature’s Nature Publishing Group reaches 63% of original research articles published during 2015 (October). •PLOS ONE increases its APC for the first time since 2009. •Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a case dating from 2005 that Google’s scanning of millions of copyright works was NOT infringement because users can only see snippets, not the complete works. •The EU’s Research Ministers set a goal of making all scientific papers in the EU freely available by 2020 (May) 157 research funders subsequently introduced OA policies. 514 universities now have OA policies.
2016
•Elsevier acquires social science preprint repository SSRN (May) •Wellcome Open Research website launched to encourage findings to be shared ahead of peer review (July) •European Union offers $350 million for research in personalized medicine but only on condition research is open (August)
Source: Simba Information
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
From 2005 and 2012, some publishers and funders began to experiment with open access books, a trial that continues today. Governments around the world began to get more formally involved, first in the U.S. and U.K. but throughout the European Union. Funders began to pay APCs and in 2008, the largest OA publisher, BioMed Central, was acquired by a traditional subscription-based publisher, Springer. Websites were created to discover or host the proliferation of OA titles. All of this took place with the backdrop of a grow ing Internet. More recently, open access has become of interest to governments in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Frontiers was acquired by the Nature Publishing Group —later to merge with Springer—which fully committed to OA in 2013 by converting one of its new, but highly successful journals, Nature Communications to a full, open access. But, open access also had some missteps. PLOS stumbled, suffering a decline in its Impact Factor, then a decline in papers leading to financial problems and price hikes. Efforts to set standards with Jeffrey Beall’s web list of Predatory Open Access Publishers established in 2009, did bring abuses to the market’s attention, but some of the largest, most respected of OA publishers also faced criticism.
Open Access Definitions & Publishing Models Open Access Journals By the definition developed at the Budapest Open Access Initiative meeting (2002), and developed further at meetings in Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003), it is commonly accepted that open access journals are journals that permit users to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full texts of these articles.” Journals must exercise editorial quality through peer review of some nature, contain primary results of research or overviews of research appearing more frequently than annually. Journals may be gold, green or hybrid. Gold Articles from gold journals are hosted and distributed by a publisher w ho is also responsible the peer review and editing. These services have a cost, up to tens of thousands per published article at some elite journals, so publishers often charge an Article Processing Charge (APC) as compensation. Gold is particularly strong in STM
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
fields where research funding is strong, but less successful in some social sciences and humanities and some STM sub-disciplines where it is not. APCs are seldom paid out of the author’s ow n pocket. The costs are more often drawn from research grants. Most of the revenue associated wit h OA publishing comes from the Gold version of open access, although only a-quarter to a-third of journals employ this model. Gree n Green journals are archived and made available by the author, the author’s institution, employer or funder. These repositories do not act as publishers. Repositories do not peer review the articles, but they usually take responsibility for preserving them. Articles can either be deposited before or after publication subject to an embargo period, but are then immediately accessible for free. Collections can be along subject lines such as the original physics print archive now called arXiv or by institution. Examples include SciELO in Brazil and DASH at Harvard. Hybrid Hybrid journals are journals which are not in themselves open, but that allow individual articles to be open. In some cases, the publishers make individual articles open because of a public interest , such as a medical breakthrough impacting public health. More often, publishers offer this option to authors. Typically with brands like Springer Open or Wiley Open, authors can have the prestige of being accepted in a high impact selective subscription-based journal and to enjoy open access benefits. Articles need to undergo the same peer review process, but after payment of the fee, they become accessible to non-subscribers. Springer launched its version with a splash in 2004. By 2006, it was followed by most major publishers. Elsevier, Wiley, Informa, American Physical Society and Nature Publishing Group offer this option for all or a substantial number of their titles and most continue to expand coverage to more of their titles. Major publishers’ adoption of the hybrid model was necessitated by the grow ing number of funders that mandated open access as a condition of their grants. Research supported by these funders could not be published in these subscription-based journals were it not for the hybrid option. Still, the uptake of the hybrid option has been modest. Springer reportedly reached 2% of its articles opting for open access a few years after launching the option. Other publishers have had a similar or lesser uptake, while some have recently reached 7%.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
Megajournals Megajournals are not distinguished by their access or business model. As their name suggests, it is size that sets them apart. PLOS ONE published more than 31,000 articles in 2013 alone, more articles than several of the top ten open access publishers co mbined. Megajournals tend to be broad in their subject coverage, entire fields or multi-disciplinary. Some like PLOS ONE also adopt a standard of technical competence for acceptance. This allows rapid publication of a large number of articles. Other examples include BMJ Open, Scientific Reports, Cell Reports and SAGE Open. Article Processing Charges/Author Processing Cha rges (APC) APCs vary both between publishers and between journals from the same publisher. In fact, many journals have different fees for different types of articles. There is one price for clinical trials and a different one for review articles for instance. Some OA publishers charge for letters and book reviews. The rationale for APCs is usually to compensate for the peer review and editing that goes into publishing an article. The rationale for such large differences between APCs include the selectiveness of the publication, subject area, differences in the review ing process, labor and article type. Globally, most APCs start at about $500 if there are charges at all and some go as high as $5,000 per article. Well-established journals offering access in the hybrid model are typically $2,500 to $3,000 per article. Higher APCs generally correlate with areas like life sciences with better research funding, higher Impact Factors and wealthier countries of origin. In most cases, the APC is paid by the research funder rather than the individual. Major funders include publication fees as part of the research grant or tie their financial obligations to the mandates they impose on recipient authors. The availability of funds for research is much stronger in some fields than others. Molecular biology, oncology, cardiology and some areas of physics have much stronger support than humanities and many areas of mathematics for example. Other Sources of Support for OA Artic les Foundations, scholarly societies, governments support scholarship and research in general as they have done historically for print as well as online. Traditional publishers can subsidize their experiments with OA publishing (and that is how many see it, or at least did so at the beginning) with their subscriptions and advertising.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
Furthermore, some publishers limit the length of articles or charge for images or charge for including supporting data, in effect up-selling after hooking the customer with the first bite. Value-added author services are a more direct source, charging for the use of color, for reprints, e-prints and editing services. Wolters Kluwer’s Medknow relies almost exclusively on such premium services. Finally, some academic institutions pay a membership fee to give free or discounted APCs to their staff. The sums are generally small by comparison with w hat is spent on subscriptions but it gives the institution a stake in promoting OA. Member income had balanced discounts given to members but in 2014, PLOS ended this with membership dropping to $20,000 and discounts fell by two-thirds. It had only reached 1.5% of PLOS income, compared to 3% at Hindaw i, but others continue to expand their plans, both to save authors money and to simplify administration.
The Open Access Ecosystem The history of open access shows that petitions are not sufficient to make change. Funders, employers or governments put teeth into their goals in the form of mandates. An open-access mandate is a policy that requires researchers to make their articles open access by either self-archiving their articles in a repository (green OA) or by publishing them in an open-access journal (gold OA) or both. Those issuing the rules have power over the researchers either because they are staff or faculty of universities or institutes, or because they are recipients of research grants. Mandates vary, but most recognize exceptions for classified military research or patentable research. Mandates may either authorize or oblige, but they do change behavior. Public Funding Agenc ies One of the driving factors in calls for open access was the argument that the fruits of publicly-funded research should be made available to the public. This idea has grow ing resonance in a number of countries. Many OA initiatives focus on publicly-funded research. Some examples include NIH in the U.S., The European Union’s European Research Council (ERC) and Research Council U.K. In 2014, Mexico and China issued sweeping mandates. In the U.S., two competing bills, one favoring more open policies than the other are working their way through Congress.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
National Institutes of Health The U.S. NIH is one of the most open examples of open access. Research funded by the NIH, one of the largest funders of medical research and one of the largest areas of research in the U.S. economy, is both royalty-free and publicly funded. In December 2007, NIH mandated that articles based on research it funded be made freely available to the public within 12 months of publication and that they be submitted to the public repository of medical articles PubMed Central. By mid-2014, the number of NIH funded articles available open access reached a half -million. European Researc h Council The ERC funds research in the European Union across disciplines from the life and physical sciences to the humanities. The council requires all peer reviewed articles based on research projects they fund be deposited in online libraries within 6 months of publication. Research Counc ils UK The seven Research Councils in the United Kingdom are collectively one of the largest funders of research across all ac ademic disciplines. Its mandate, which came into effect in April 2013, requires research they funded be open access. While expressing a preference for publishing in gold OA journals because it allows immediate access, RCUK allows green OA w ithin a minimu m of 6 months embargo period, 12 months in certain subject areas. The Wellcome Trust The OA movement is not limited to publicly-funded research. Private charities and companies are also major research funders. The Wellcome Trust is a U.K. charity established to support biomedical research and medical humanities. Beginning in 2003, Wellcome supported unrestricted access to the published output of its research “as a public benefit.” The current mandate requires Wellcome-funded researchers ma ke their articles freely available through PubMed Central (PMC) and EuropePMC as soon as possible, and in any event, within six months of publication. From October 2014, they require authors sign a Creative Commons license. Wellcome prefers t he immediate access offered by gold OA.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
Beginning October 2013, Wellcome extended the mandate to include scholarly monographs and book chapters authored by grant recipients. Howard Hughes Medical Institute HHMI is a major American employer of biomedical researchers. In October 2007, the institute
mandated
research
published
by
HHMI
laboratory
heads—including
investigators, leaders and fellows—be made available on PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. Institutional Mandates Mandates may also come f rom employers which could be different from the funder of research. Faculty and staff at Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but also University College London and ETH Zurich are a just few examples. Exceptions are often made for tenured faculty and compliance is not 100%, but the mandates do work, often through peer-pressure.
Market Size The global open access market in 2015 totaled $305.5 million, w hich was up 2.0% over 2014, held back by most world currencies against the dollar. Simba estimates the market grew at a compounded annual rate of 12.3% from 2013 to 2015. Even with this rapid growth, revenue f rom open access journals still account for only 3.2% of total journal revenue. But growth is important even f rom this small base as the overall journal market is grow ing only slow ly, so any source of growth is vital. Projecting from recent studies, Simba estimates that more than a-fifth of all research articles are available OA on publication and more than a-third will be available OA after completion of an embargo period. Of all research articles published about 10% are gold, APC-paid immediate access, with less than 5% hybrid and the balance coming f rom delayed access or open freely, but without APCs. Revenue is weighted differently ow ing to large differences in APC rates. APC Journals Revenue Virtually all of open access journal revenue is contributed by article processing fees. Simba estimates that approximately a third of this revenue comes from gold
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
Table 1.4: Open Access Publishing Market by Various Metrics, 2013-2015 Metrics OA Journals Revenue ($ millions) 1 OA Journals Revenue % of STM Journal Revenue STM Journal Revenue ($ millions) 2 No. of OA Journal Titles No. of Journal Articles
3
3
2013
2014
2015
Change, 2014-2015
CAGR, 2013-2015
$242.2
$299.4
$305.5
2.0%
12.3%
2.3%
2.8%
3.2%
-
-
$10,506.2
$10,640.0
$9,671.2
-9.1%
-4.1%
10,006
10,500
11,246
7.1%
6.0%
1,736,684
1,978,639
2,150,000
8.7%
11.3%
1
Mostly APC fees, but also includes advertising and membership dues based on modeling reported revenue of OA publishers against academic studies and analysis of article counts, APC trends and Simba estimates. 2 Simba estimates. 3 Title and Article counts based on DOAJ Press Releases and modified by Simba estimates. Article counts are cumulative. By some calculations, 400,000 OA articles are added per year. Source: Simba Information. Copying prohibited.
journals, but the majority comes from hybrid journals. This combination of revenue sources is favored by most of the leading OA publishers and gold is favored by many of the most influential funders and opinion leaders. The number of OA articles is much larger than those generating revenue. Less than a quarter of the journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have charges at all. Furthermore, there are many exceptions and discounts offered off of posted APC rates. Some publishers discount or waive charges based on the economic index of the author’s country; others have a strict allowance, a fund made up of 10% of APCs received for a journal. Many authors benefit from discounts negotiated w ith publishers by their society or institution affiliation or fun ders. Increasingly funders pay APCs as a condition of making the research open access. Furthermore, OA articles can also be found in repositories and were not OA on publication. These are articles, usually supported by subscriptions, which have become open after an embargo period mandated by the funder of the research. While such articles do not contribute toward Simba’s estimate of OA revenue, they are included in many OA statistics. What does contribute signif icantly to OA revenue are hybrid articles, those where APCs are paid for articles contained in a largely
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
subscription-based journal to allow that article to be made freely available on publication. Simba estimates these hybrid articles make up the largest part of OA revenue ow ing to their generally high price but probably account for less than a quarter of all OA articles. Hybrid revenue is also one of the fastest growing. Other Journals OA Revenue OA publishers have developed a number of revenue sources to supplement APCs. Membership dues (which are a form of endorsement , but also bring discounts on APCs to those associated with a particular organization, usually a university) have been collected by several publishers, but reports from PLOS and Hindaw i suggest these represent no more than 3% of revenue. Medknow makes most of its money from selling PDFs, primarily as commercial reprint sales to pharmaceutical companies which can be significant. In the case of PLOS advertising represents more than 4% of revenue and since 2009 has grown even faster than APCs. More importantly for the funders and most authors, revenue is not the point of OA. Other Measures of Market Size The majority of open access articles in the Directory of Open Access Journals are either in fee-free journals or granted fee-waivers. About 40% of the articles in DOAJ are gold, the balance are green, including nearly 80% of the titles. Funder mandates on articles published in traditional journals account for most of these. Table 1.4 also shows the number of titles which has grown to over 10,000 and the number of articles have grown at a compounded annual growth of 11.3%. Journal and article counts are taken from the DOAJ but adjusted by Simba estimates. After tightening standards of what constitutes a legitimate OA journal in 2016, DOAJ dropped nearly a third of the journal titles it once listed. Data from 2011 to 2015 show 80% of the journal titles and 61% of the articles in were free of APC charges. According to the latest calculations by American library w riter Walt Crawford, the average APC is $611 in pure gold journals or $241 when averaged across all articles in the database.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
Open Access by Discipline Medical Medicine and the biosciences were central to the origins of PLOS and BioMed Central. They are also some of the richest areas of research funding. Key players in mandates are heavy in the life sciences. The Wellcome Trust, National Institutes of Health and Howard Hughes have always been central in mandate developments. These subject areas have driven much of the OA agenda, so it is not surprising they do well in measures of gold. Biomedical research, clinical medicine and health have the highest rate of gold articles, between 5% and 8%. This is double to triple the rate of gold articles overall. Scientific & Technical More than a-third of articles in math and physics (largely owing to arXiv), and social sciences are available open access, but more than 90% of these are green open access, which it shares with physics. Not surprisingly, computer science was an early adopter of open access and the topic of several important archives. Chemistry is at the other end of the scale, among the lowest in share that it is available open access. Social Science & Humanities The arts and humanities have the lowest uptake of open access, 10% to 15% and less than 2% gold. Economics are well represented ow ing to a pre-digital culture of sharing preprints represented by Elsevier’s recent acquisition, SSRN.
Open Access Publishing by Geography The iconoclastic nature of open access has been particularly well-received in emerging markets. The national origins of some of the key players illustrates an effort both to open access for readers, but to open up the playing field of scholarly publishing to non-American, non-European and non-English language publishers and authors. SciELO (Brazil), Hindawi (Egypt), MedKnow (Wolters Kluwer, India) are significant players. While Hindawi emphasizes that Egypt does not make its top 25 by origin of articles, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are ranked much higher in their author rankings than in Scopus or Science Citation Index (SCI) article rankings. SciELO quickly expanded beyond its Brazilian origins, first to include Chile, then Latin American countries, Spain and Portugal. Scholars and publishers in Africa have
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
identif ied it as a model for breaking North America’s and Europe’s traditional dominance of the industry. North America While the U.S. is still largest open access publishing market representing 16.8% of the journals and 20.1% of the repositories in DOAJ, this is about half of its share of traditional global journal sales. North America is also a mature market. The library sector is experiencing price resistance and a climate of budget cuts. While American OA is still growing, both Brazil and India have added more new OA journal titles in 2012-2013 than the United States. Europe Europe is also a mature subscription market. Weak economies, partic ularly in Southern Europe are hit further by government austerity. While the U.K. and Germany remain near the top of OA publishing, as they do in subscription publishing, Spain and Portugal are more prominent because of the Ibero-American repositories Redalyc and SciELO. Asia-Pacific Asia-Pacific (APAC) has been the bright spot for academic publishers for several years. India and China, the two fastest growing major economies in recent years are also highly engaged in open access. India is home to dozens of OA publishers and publishes nearly 5% of OA articles. In China, the number of OA titles continues to grow from a small base but copyright and APCs are primitive. Only 19% of journals in a recent survey formally allowed self-deposit and only 7% had CC licenses. Only a handful of Chinese journals charge APCs. Japan has been particularly slow in adopting OA policies. But in 2015, Kyoto University mandated faculty members to publicize in principle their academic articles on the Internet by depositing them in “Kyoto University Research Information Repository KURENAI” which now hosts 200 journals and 131,000 articles. Most of Japan’s OA journals are hosted on J-STAGE. Rest of the World Brazil and the Middle East are important in the open access world. Newcomers as producers of scientific literature, Brazil’s rankings are boosted by the SciELO repository based in Sao Paulo and the Middle East ’s by Cairo-based OA publisher Hindaw i. Like China, none of these countries had strong journal traditions, so they
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Open Access Journal Market
were able to exploit the internet without the legacy issues of U.S. and European publishers. Although Hindaw i points out the number of countries contributing more papers than Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia score much higher than in SCOPUS or Thomson’s Science Citation Index. Language These differences between subscription publishing and OA publishing are also reflected in the language mix. While 83.4% of the DOAJ articles are available in English and 79.8% of the journals, SciELO and Redalyc bump Spanish up to 26.2% of the articles and 18.9% of the journals and Portuguese 21.4% of the articles and 12.2% of the journals. (Many journals are available in more than one language.) English continues to be the language of science, but for most Spanish and Portuguese speakers, open access seems to be their starting point for both reading and publishing. While not yet fully reflected in the DOAJ numbers, OA has made important strides in Chinese as well. Even measured in the English language-biased SCOPUS and Science Citation Index statistics, China has emerged as a major producer of scientific research and already dominates some research fields. According to a 2011 survey of Chinese scientific society journals, more than one third were open access, with engineering, medicine, physical sciences and life sciences, earth sciences and agriculture the most represented. The 2014 open access deposit mandate from the National Nature Science Foundation of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences will only serve to accelerate the role OA plays in Chinese language research.
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Chapter 2 Leading Open Access Journal Publishers & Repositories Introduction Simba
identif ied
representative
10
of the
open sector.
access
journal
The
publishers
publishers have
and
aggregate
10
repositories
201 5 sales
of
$216.8 million or about 71.0% of the global open access (OA) publishing market ranked by revenue. The repositories are leaders in other metrics (number of journals, number of articles), are important to the history, a particular field or the future of the open access landscape. Simba determined its list of leading or influential players after looking at public information such as annual reports and presentations, the Directory of Open Access Journals, Directory of Open Access Repositories, as well as interviews and articles related to the industry. These organizations include publicly-traded companies, private companies and society publishers. T hey are headquartered in the traditional publishing strongholds of the U.S., U.K., Germany and Sw itzerland, but Brazil and Egypt are also prominent. Although the vast majority of the articles are delivered in English, each has a worldwide market and many offer articles in multiple languages.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Leading Open Access Journal Publishers & Repositories
Table 2.1: Leading Open Access Publishers Share, 2015
Informa 3%
OUP 2%
Others 15% Springer Nature 29%
WK Medknow 4% MDPI 6%
Frontiers 6%
RELX 7% Source: Simba Information
PLOS 14% Wiley 8%
Hindawi 7%
Leading Open Access Journal Publishers The merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Nature Publishing Group has yielded a publishing group with a 28.8% share of 2015 open access revenue. This is even larger than Elsevier’s 19.5% market share in traditional subscription-based STM journal publishing. Springer Nature is followed by open access publishers PLOS 14.1% led by its mega-journal PLOS ONE, then John Wiley & Sons, Hindaw i, Elsevier, and Frontiers closely bunched together with 6% to 8% each.
Springer Nature Company Overv ie w Springer Nature was formed in May 2015 merging Holtzbrinck’s Nature Publishing Group and Palgrave Macmillan with Springer Science+Business Media, including BioMed Central. The combined enterprise with annual sales of €1.5 billion is 53% owned by Holtzbrinck, but the executive team comes mostly from the old Springer management. For this report, Simba is treating the two companies as if they had merged in January 2015. Nature/Holtzbrinck’s majority stake in Frontiers 50 OA journals was not part of the deal and is reported separately in this report.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Leading Open Access Journal Publishers & Repositories
With its BioMed Central (BMC), SpringerOpen, Springer Open Choice, SpringerPlus and Chemistry Central imprints, Springer was already the largest open access publisher by revenue and number of titles prior to the merger. BMC currently publishes more than 300 OA journals while other Springer brands add another 200 more. The company also offers an open access option in 1,600 Springer-branded hybrid journals. Palgrave Mac millan adds one OA journal (Palgrave Comm unication) and 40 hybrid journals (up from 18 journals in 2011). Nature Publishing Group adds 3 full OA multidisciplinary journals, 16 Nature-branded and 22 society hybrid journals. Rece nt Company Performance While privately owned, the company discloses mid-year Financial Results and a brief Annual Report. Simba’s open access revenue estimate for Springer Nature is based on historic numbers and estimates of constituent parts. Company statements suggest the Springer open access brands BioMed Central, SpringerOpen and Chemistry Central are grow ing organically as a mature business. The Nature Publishing Group part of the company exploded in 2014. Boosted by the conversion of high-impact Nature Communications from a hybrid megajournal journal to fully open access, the number of OA research papers took off, reaching 63% of output by October 2015 (up from 44% in 2014). Simba estimates Nature/Mac millan published 12,000 OA articles in 2015, more than a-quarter of this increase coming from the conversion of Nature Communications. Open Access Strategy As independent companies Springer and Nature/Mac millan had each made open access central to their strategy. Springer was a pioneer, moving well before its large peers first by starting the first hybrid option Springer Open Choice in 2004, then by the acquisition of BioMed Central in 2008, the largest OA publisher at the time w ith over 180 titles. Springer launched SpringerOpen in 2010, a portfolio of more than 200 f ully open science journals ranging f rom specialized titles to SpringerPlus, their interdisciplinary journal launched in 2012, emphasizing case descriptions, methods, and data reports and large datasets. Nature Publishing Group/Palgrave Mac millan was slower to
move, but
made
spectacular efforts just before the Springer Nature announcement. In announcing the conversion of Nature Communications in late 2014, company executives stated their aspiration as “we want to be leaders in open research.” The “shift in policy fits into Nature Publishing Group’s wider strategy…(of) accelerating our open acc ess program,
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Leading Open Access Journal Publishers & Repositories
launching… Scientif ic Data (2014) and Palgrave Communications (2015). Together with Scientific Reports and our non-Nature branded journals with an open-access option, we can now offer an OA home for specialists and high impact research across the natural sciences…and in the humanities and social sciences” said Carrie Calder, the director of strategy for open research, Nature Publishing Group/Palgrave Macmillan.
Table 2.2: Leading Open Access Publishers, 2013-2015 1
($ in millions ) 20131
2014
20151
Change, 2014-2015
CAGR, 2013-2015
$57.3
$63.3
$88.1
39.2%
24.0%
$46.3
$44.8
$43.0
-4.0%
-3.6%
$14.0
$22.7
$24.1
6.2%
31.2%
$16.30
$19.10
$21.4
12.0%
14.6%
$13.0
$19.0
$21.1
11.1%
27.4%
$26.3
$35.6
$17.3
-51.4%
-18.9%
$8.8
$12.2
$17.2
41.0%
39.8%
Wolters Kluwer (Medknow) 9
$6.8
$10.1
$12.1
19.8%
33.4%
Informa 10
$3.0
$6.0
$8.2
36.7%
65.3%
Oxford University Press 11
$7.1
$7.8
$7.3
-6.4%
1.4%
$198.9
$240.6
$259.8
8.0%
14.3%
Company Springer Nature PLOS
2
3
John Wiley & Sons 4 Hindawi5 RELX Group/Elsevier 6 Holtzbrinck Frontiers MDPI
7
8
Total Top Ten
Source: Simba Information, company interviews, analyst interviews, annual reports. Copying prohibited.
©2016 Simba Inf ormation, Stamf ord, CT · 203-325-8193 · www.simbainf ormation.com. Copy ing Prohibited. 24
Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Leading Open Access Journal Publishers & Repositories
Table 2.2: Leading Open Access Publishers, 2013-2015 (C ontinued) 1
Figures include publishing revenue generated by products in all languages. Sales represent publisher revenue, net of wholesale and retail discounts or commissions. Revenue is calculated after converting all currencies to U.S. dollars using average exchange rates in 2013 (£1 = $1.56, €1 = $1.32); 2014 (£1 = $1.65, €1 = $1.33) and 2015 (£1 = $1.53, €1 = $1.11).
2
Springer Science+Business and BMC revenue is based on company presentations Facts & Figures and academic studies of its publishing output. Nature Publishing Group and Palgrave are based on company website and interviews with company executives. Springer Nature restates revenue as if merger took place in January 2015 rather than May 2015.
3
PLOS revenue is taken from Audit Report total program revenue. Revenue for 2015 is estimated based on articles published.
4
John Wiley & Sons’ revenue reflects its fiscal year ended April 30, 2016, not calendar year 2015. Open Access revenue is taken from earnings reports and analyst presentations, adjusted for the calendar year.
5
Hindawi is based on published interviews and company guidance.
6
Elsevier revenue estimated from comparison with peer-data and measures of articles published/APCs.
7
OA estimates are based on Frontiers Annual Progress metrics and blog posts. Revenue also includes Nature Publishing Group for 2013 and 2014.
8
MDPI revenue based on website information and June 2015 Against the Grain interview for revenue and average APC calculations.
9
Wolters Kluwer OA revenue is primarily Medknow. Revenue growth is based on rapid launch of new journals. Unlike other publishers in this table, Medknow revenue is primarily from the sale of PDFs and pharma reprint sales.
10
Informa revenue is estimated as a percentage of hybrid articles from their large journal program and ramp up for Cogent launch.
11
Oxford University Press revenue based on article metrics, APCs and comparisons with peer data.
Source: Simba Information, company interviews, analyst interviews, annual reports. Copying prohibited.
By combining the Springer and Nature portfolios, Springer Nature aspires to be not only the largest open access publisher, but to lead in innovation. The company has started to emphasize “open research” (BMC calls it “open science”)—including open data. “Our goal is to release the enormous positive power that open approaches can have in facilitating collaborative and interdisciplinary research to solve today’s global challenges.”
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Leading Open Access Journal Publishers & Repositories
Public Library of Science (PLOS) Competitor Overvie w Founded as a non-profit in 2003, PLOS was built in direct response to the call for scientists to pledge to only submit articles to journals who would make their articles freely available w ithin six months of publication. PLOS’s f irst journal PLOS Biology was followed by seven more journals. What set PLOS apart were its high impact factors (PLOS Biology 12.69 in 2014) and the number of articles in its journals, particularly its megajournal PLOS ONE (31,000 articles in 2013). Rece nt Company Performance It took several years for PLOS to gain its financial footing. By mid-2011 PLOS no longer had to rely on subsidies from foundations and was covering operating costs with APCs. However, its impact factor peaked in 2010 at 4.411 and has fallen every year since to 3.057 in 2015. In early 2014, PLOS ONE reported monthly submissions down 25% after years of steady expansion. Revenue peaked in 2013 after an increase of 32.2% in that year, but fell 3.3% in 2014 and Simba estimates it continued to fall in 2015. Open Access Strategy PLOS addressed PLOS ONE’s impact factor woes by being more selective, but this only exacerbated the decline in APC income. Across all PLOS publications, articles fell 8.2% from 2013 to 2015. In October 2015, in response, PLOS ONE increased the Article Processing Charge (APC) by 10.7% to $1,495, the f irst increase since 2009. Member income had balanced discounts given to members, but in 2014 PLOS ended this with membership dropping to $20,000 and discounts fell by two-thirds. The Institutional Membership Program was replaced by the Institutional Account Program where Institutions will cover the full publication fee for corresponding authors. PLOS’s response to financial problems followed a familiar pattern. In 2006, PLOS was losing money and was only kept afloat by grants. First, PLOS nearly doubled its APC from $1,500/article to $2,500. Second, it launched PLOS ONE to which it applied a new editorial standard, technical competence. By 2010, PLOS ONE was the largest scientific journal in the world. PLOS continues to add functionality, speed, discoverability and of course a growing corpus of archived articles. It also continues to build alliances with institutions like
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Leading Open Access Journal Publishers & Repositories
the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. But it has been slow to launch new titles.
John Wiley & Sons Company Overv ie w With its 2006 take-over of Blackwell, Wiley became one of the world’s largest journal publishers, now with over 2,300 titles. The company also publishes 9,000 books, a significant
number
of
which
reflect
the
company’s
traditional
strengths
in
engineering, materials science, applied chemistry and architecture at the student and practitioner level. For a U.S.-based company, Wiley is particularly strong in the U.K., Germany, India, Australia and Southeast Asia, and most recently China. With the conversion of five subscription journals to the Wiley Open Access Program, the company reached 61 OA journals at the beginning of 2016. Now over 80% of Wiley’s journals support gold (funded) open access and — with such a large stable of journals — this is beginning to produce significant income. Rece nt Company Performance Wiley began spotlighting open access or author-pays in its earnings announcements at the end of 2012. The company soon forecasted greater than 50% compound annual growth from open access through 2017. More recent earnings reports have been very positive about OA growth, but are clearly falling short of that ambitious target. Wiley reports OA sales represent 2% of their journals sales, a share that has held fairly steady as OA has slowed. After growing 62.1% in the year ending January 31, 2015, quarter-on-quarter growth was relatively flat. Unlike 2013 when each quarter showed double-digit growth over the prior quarter, Simba estimates calander 2015 growth as 6.2%, fairly average for OA publishing. However, this was still better than Wiley’s overall journal subscritpion sales which were only up 0.3% for Calendar 2015. Timing problems, the Swets bankruptcy and a net loss of society journal contract revenue compounded a flat library market. Open Access Strategy While presentations to analysts emphasize that libraries are flat, company executives talk about the need to develop new business models in high growth/margin
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businesses. This means a greater emphasis on digital, mobile and emerging markets. Open access is the first of a list of eight targets for growth. Part of Wiley’s OA growth strategy seems to be in attracting authors. The company’s Author Services has participated in Copyright Clearance Center’s OA webinars, draw ing the connection between open access and the need for OA publishers to compete for a share of authors’ wallets. A number of Wiley open access journals participate in a manuscript transfer program. After review in a supporting journal, rejected articles of suitable quality can be identified by the editor as candidates for publication in a Wiley open access journal. This approach captures papers for publication that might otherwise be lost to another publisher.
Hindawi Company Overv ie w Based in Cairo, Egypt, Hindawi open access title count is more than 360 active OA titles, many of which also sell a print subscription. With a staff of over 1,000, the company is a major player in STM journals as well as some social sciences. Founded in 1997 as a traditional subscription journal publisher, the company observed the success of OA publishers BioMed Central and PLOS. As a physicist, founder Ahmed Hindaw i had already been exposed to arXiv before the Web became commonplace and was comfortable with the author-pays model as physics was one of the few fields where “page charges” were commonplace. Between 2004 and 2007, Hindawi converted its entire portfolio to gold OA. Despite its Egyptian location, only 1% of Hindawi’s published articles come from there. The U.S. is number one with 16.9% close followed by China, then India, Italy, and Canada comprising the top five. Turkey No. 12, Iran at No. 15 and Saudi Arabia No. 18 are the only Middle Eastern countries in the top twenty, and Egypt just misses the cut. Rece nt Company Performance A September 2012 interview with founder Ahmed Hindaw i reported net profit of $2.3 million in 2011 and forecast $6 million in 2012 on sales of $12 million, double the prior year. Ninety-seven percent of its revenue is derived f rom APCs. Hindaw i no longer distinguishes between Institutional APC's (paid directly) and those paid by individuals. It seems like the market for memberships is continuing to grow and that
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many of the traditional publishers are seeing significant growth in this area—how that actually translates into institutional APC's is more difficult to discern. Hindaw i and many OA publishers offer free or discounted APCs for newly -launched journals. Published articles in 2014 were artificially inflated by more than 6,000 of these free articles to nearly 30,000. As a result, articles increased 16.0% in 2014 only to fall 22.2% in 2015. Revenue was up 8.7% then down 2.5% respectively. Open Access Strategy Hindaw i’s original conversion f rom subscription to open access took advant age of the low labor costs in Egypt and the flexibility that APCs brought to matching revenue with costs. This model enc ouraged and funded rapid growth. But realizing this approach was dependent upon maintaining quality and was ultimately unsustainable, Dr. Hindawi determined to compete less on price than the ease of interaction with authors, quality of graphics, copy editing, reference validation and world class editorial boards. APCs have risen and quality has been fully defended. Hindaw i continues to fight for credibility. In mid-2015, Hindaw i initiated a seven month investigation of peer-review fraud in its own programs, finding that three external editors appeared to create fraudulent reviewer accounts to accept 32 articles (out of 57,000 published) that otherwise might not have been published. They dismissed the reviewers and brought identif ication of reviewers in-house. Hindaw i consulted with industry association Council of Publishing Ethics in this review and in early 2016 hired two veterans of large traditional STM publishers to its London-based management group. Over the last year Hindawi has made signif icant invest ment into its London operations as well as its senior management and production capabilities. January 2015, founder Cr. Hindawi moved to Chairman and created 100-employee strong Chestnut e-learning company for K-12 students.
RELX Group/Elsevier Company Overv ie w Elsevier, the scientific publishing division of what was renamed RELX Group in 2015, has a complex relationship with open access. The company is the largest STM
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publisher in the world, market leader particularly in the lucrative science and technology journal library market. The company was vilified at the beginning of the open access movement, but it has slowly come to accept alternatives to the traditional subscription model, which has been so important to its financial health. Rece nt Company Performance Elsevier does not breakout journal revenue let alone open access revenue, but total STM sales were down 7.4% to $3.1 billion in 2015 heavily impacted by the euro and British pound weakening against the dollar. Simba estimates Elsevier’s traditional journal revenue to be more than $2.0 billion, more than double the subscription revenue of its nearest competitor. For several years, annual reports have spoken of good revenue growth in primary research (journals) from double -digit growth in usage and strength in emerging markets. For 2015, the company reported: “Strong growth in usage and article submissions to primary research subscription journals ….” Nothing suggests a departure from the May 2015 announcement of author pays articles “grow ing rapidly from a small base.” Based on reported revenue from Wiley and Springer as the closest peers, Simba estimates Elsevier’s 2015 OA revenue at $21.1 million and continuing to grow. Open Access Strategy In a mid-2015 presentation, Elsevier described its OA approach as wanting to grow author pays articles by targeting medium editorial quality. Elsevier achieves this by cascading article submissions submitted to more than 1,600 of its nearly 2,500 traditional subscription-based journals which have a hybrid opt ion or directly to more than 500 titles full Open Access journals. With its vast range of titles, Elsevier turns away more than 700,000 articles a year, publishing only about a third of those submitted. Many medium quality articles which do not reach the e xceptional standards of its highest impact factor titles like The Lancet or Cell will be published in less selective OA journals. While the company was less accepting of open access than some of its peers (Wolters Kluwer and Springer made acquisitions, Wiley and Informa have given more prominence to their OA initiatives), it is so dominant in STM journals that even small shifts in strategy can make a big difference. Elsevier’s APCs range from $500 to $5,000 per article depending on the individual journal. Furthermore, Elsevier has agreed terms with Wellcome Trust and Research
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Councils U.K. along with 31 other funding bodies, many from small countries like Czech Republic and Austria. With an average APC of $2,000 and 3% of its 400,000 articles published annually would generate $24 million in sales. This is not a large number, but Elsevier appears to view this as supplemental revenue to the multiyear, multi-campus big deals that makeup the overwhelming majority of their journal sales. In May 2016, Elsevier acquired SSRN presumably aiming to do in social sciences what it has been trying to do in life sciences with Mendeley, and generating the same backlash among the anti-Elsevier, pro-sharing community.
Holtzbrinck-Frontiers Company Overv ie w When Springer Nature was formed, majority owner Holtzbrinck’s left Swiss open access publisher Frontiers out of the deal. Holtzbrinck had acquired a majority stake in Frontiers through the Nature Publishing Group in February 2013. Frontiers was launched in 2007 by scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. A staff of more than 200 largely in Lausanne, but also London, San Francisco, Albany and Madrid produce 54 English language open-access STM journals. Nineteen of Frontiers 57 journals currently have impact factors, nine of them over 4.0. Frontiers journals currently rank in the top 12% of the journals listed in the in the 2015 Journal Citations Reports. Twelve of the 16 journals indexed in 2014 increased their impact factors, an average increase of 7%. Rece nt Company Performance Holtzbrinck does not breakout sales of operating units, but Frontiers has continued to publish a Progress Report. Recent growth has been just short of 20%. Frontiers in Psychology launched in 2010 is the largest psychology journal in the world, and formed the basis of 19 off-shoot OA journals. Frontiers in Immunology, Frontiers in Physiology and Frontiers in Plant Science are also the largest open-access journals in their respective fields. Since the Holtzbrinck/Nature invest ment, Frontiers expanded into new areas, most recently in Education, Sociology, Comm unication and Library and Information Science. In a F rontiers blog post, the publisher stated expenses of some $20 million in 2014, and breakdowns of where that money was spent .
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Frontiers has also faced controversy. In 2015, the publisher fired some 31 medical editors who complained that Frontiers’ policies “are designed to maximize the company’s profits, not the quality of papers, and that this could harm patients.” In September of that year, the publisher was added to University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory publishers. As w ith other publishers profiled in this report, many scholarly supporters of the publisher supported their peer-review procedures. Open Access Strategy The company’s roots are in the neurosciences, but it quickly branched out into psychiatry, physiology, neurology, psychology; then other life sciences and clinical medicine before moving into natural sciences and engineering. Again, like its investor-partner Nature Publishing Group, Frontiers aimed for field-wide coverage of a topic and high impact factors. Future launches include robotics, space science, cardiovasc ular medicine, digital humanities and even Frontiers for Young Minds aimed at 8 to 15 year olds. Frontiers peer review makes use of an interactive review forum where authors, reviewers and editors interact in real time. Reviewers’ names are disclosed on published articles. Reviewers and editors must reach consensus on the final decision. Frontiers has a transparent, but varied author-pays structure. Editorials, book reviews and opinion pieces are free, but APCs range from $750 for specialty level research articles to $2,600 for clinical trial and technology reports in specialty publications. Based on these numbers Simba estimates average $1,000, so growth in line with article growth: Articles published per annum grew from 1,178 in 2010, to 2,416 in 2011, 5,023 in 2012 and 7,389 in 2013 and 11,131 in 2014 to 13,000 in 2015. APCs range from $450 for Code, Data or Opinion to $2,490 for most original research or clinical trials.
MDPI AG Competitor Overvie w Swiss-based open access, peer reviewed journal publisher Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI AG) started life as Molecular Diversity Preservation International, a non-profit institute to promote and preserve diversity of chemical compounds. The institute gradually became a publishing house and became a larger
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one after a 1995 fight over the disputed ownership of the journal Molecules with Springer. MDPI fully converted to open access in 2008. Under the ownership of Swiss-based scientist Dr. Shu- Kun Lin, MDPI grew largely in China where 90% of its staff is based. Leading titles include not only Molecules, but Sensors, Toxins, Marine Drugs. MDPI has also hosted or organized several scientific conferences, including electronic (virtual) conferences. MDPI currently publish more than 152 English language peer-reviewed journals ranging across STM, social science and the humanities. Rece nt Company Performance MDPI has grow n steadily in recent years, launching 12 new titles in 2014 and 13 in 2015. Staff grew from 100 in 2012 to 350 by the end of 2015. Even more importantly, articles published have grown strongly every year despite so me recent skirmishing with Beall for publishing a number of articles that have been branded as pseudo-science. More than 216,000 individual authors have already published with MDPI and the company’s website receives more than 4.2 million monthly webpage views. Impact factors for some of its leading titles have suffered somew hat in recent years, but they are still in a high respectable range between 2.2 and 3.4. Open Access Strategy Despite its unconventional origins, MDPI is taking many of the same initiatives as its peers. It is seeking acceptance through active participation in industry groups, expanding from its historic fields and it is going mobile. MDPI participates in many international organizations. Eighty-four percent of its content was indexed by Web of Science in 2015. While the company continues to launch titles mostly in science and engineering, they also publish in the social sciences and philosophy. In mid-2015, Dr. Lin reported while APCs average $1,250, 25% of the articles were published APC free. APCs are only set after journals have established themselves with impact factors or other metrics of success. MDPI also has a free membership program that reached 60 institutions by mid-2015 and seems to have at least 100 members now. MDPI also collects income from author services, for example an English language editing surcharge. In future it
may charge for institutional
membership which is currently offered free an d for Sciforum.net, which is a
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registration and abstract processing platform for scholarly societies to handle their conferences. MDPI has been able to capitalize on the growth in scientific research. Not unlike its peers, China had been running a close second to the U.S. in authorship of published articles. In 2015, China became the number one source of MDPI articles: China 22.3%, U.S. 21.7% Germany 7.4%, Italy 6.5%, and U.K. 6.3%.
Wolters Kluwer (including Medknow) Company Overv ie w Wolters Kluwer took a giant leap into open access publishing w hen it acquired Medknow at the end of 2011. Medknow is an Indian company based in Mumbai and founded in 1997. It claims to be “the largest open access publisher publishing on behalf learned societies and associations.” Medknow ’s 376 journals represent 334 associations/societies from India, Africa, the Middle East , China and even the U.S. Medknow published over 152,000 articles in 2016, Medknow can certainly justify a claim of being among the leaders. Covering more than 40 specialties puts it among the world leaders in medical journals published. Under its Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW) imprint, Wolters Kluwer recently launched five OA journals and offers a hybrid option in 214 of its traditional LWW subscription journals. Rece nt Company Performance Wolters Kluwer Health’s journals include Medknow and LWW journals. The company reported declines in print journals and the advertising they carried, but these were offset by online growth from its Ovid online journals. Medknow contributed to the move away from mature national markets to emerging ones. Wolters Kluwer does not break out OA revenue from subscript ion revenue and Medknow does not charge authors or their institutions for the majority of their journals, so it is difficult to estimate revenue. However under Wolters Kluwer ownership, the number of titles more than doubled f rom 155 to 376. Reporting 2015, the annual report stated “open access journals achieved strong double-digit organic growth. Medknow, our open access publishing platform in India, performed well.”
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Open Access Strategy Wolters Kluwer was not a big player in the open access movement until its 2011 acquisition of Medknow. In announcing the acquisition, Karen Abramson, then president and CEO of Medical Research, stated “research is changing in the developing world with clinicians and researchers looking for more access to locally written content that is peer reviewed and accessible via open platforms. Our acquisition of Medknow aligns with our strategy of continuing to invest in providing the latest, most trusted information to our customers around the world to help them fuel discoveries and enhance patient care.” The deal accelerated advances in the open access arena as well as accelerating international expansion in key emerging markets. Medknow flirted with engineering, science, law and ethics, but its journals are concentrated in health care where its ownership by Wolters Kluwer, the second largest medical publisher in the world is a real plus. Medknow pioneered what it calls the “fee-less-free” model where articles in the majority of its journals are published without APCs. Lower quality HTML versions of all articles are f ree to readers. Medknow makes its money from charging for add -ons such as PDFs and bulk reprints, particularly lucrative in s elling to pharmaceutical companies for delivery to doctors. Medknow also publishes print editions of its journals for w hich it charges traditional print subscriptions even while making them open access online.
Informa Cogent Company Overv ie w Informa became a leading STM and scholarly publisher w ith the 2004 merger w ith Taylor & F rancis.
Key
imprints
included social science
publisher
Routledge,
Psychology Press and Taylor & Francis. The company gets about half its revenue from books and has strengths in social sciences as well as chemistry, physics and engineering. Informa claims to be the largest publisher in humanities and social science and is also a major STM book and journal publisher. The group has offices in the U.K., New York, Boca Raton, Philadelphia, Singapore, Sydney and India.
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Informa stepped up its open access journal publishing in 2011 w ith the launch of Taylor & Francis Open and Routledge Open and a new open access brand Cogent OA. The company’s Open Select hybrid gold OA option is available on more than 2,300 Taylor & France and Routledge journals. Rece nt Company Performance Informa continues to grow in both STM and Social Science journals through acquisitions and organically. It s large and profitable base in scholarly/academic publishing is a good foundation for Cogent OA and other open access initiatives. Open Access Strategy Informa’s most visible step in launching its new OA imprint was to recruit Bryan Vickery, former COO of Springer’s BioMed Central to head the new initiative. The company announced its initial plan is to launch 15 broad, subject -based and interconnected open access journals in areas like behavioral science, biology and engineering. In announcing its annual results the company would only say “ we will continue to invest behind this and other product initiatives, such as Cogent OA.” The company
hopes
Vickery’s
predominantly
medical
publishing
experienc e
will
comple ment Informa’s traditional strengths in its targeted area, but Informa’s real strengths in social science and humanities have not proven to be fertile ground for OA research funding. Informa has been publishing open access since 2006 but stepped up its OA journal publishing in 2011 with the launch of their first Taylor & Francis Open title, like many of its peers by converting subscription journals to OA gold. Informa publishes OA under four brands. Taylor & F rancis Open and Routledge Open publish specialized journals in their respective STM and SSH fields while Cogent OA publishes broader megajournals. Open Select is their hybrid journal option. Over 90% of Informa journals comply with the gold and green mandates of major research funders. In late 2014, Informa’s default was subscriptions with green OA. Initially they had a different approach that was all about gold but authors complained: ”The first thing I get on acceptance of my paper is you asking for money. ”
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Oxford University Press Company Overv ie w Oxford University Press (OUP) has been publishing open access journal content since 2004. With 33 OA journals and the majority of their nearly 400 journals offering hybrid OA options, OUP narrow ly missed Simba’s top ten in our 2014 report and just held on to edge Copernicus this year. Since that time, gold OA has grown dramatically and proven effective in some disciplines. For example, Nucleic Acids Research moved from a subscription publication to an OA model in 2 005 and has gone from strength to strength, currently boasting a very strong 9.202 impact factor. OUP journals span the full range of STM, social sc ience and humanities publishing but only represent about 10% of the organization’s $1.2 billion in sales. Rece nt Company Performance OUP is very prof itable, 11% pre-tax return on sales according to its 2015-2016 annual report. The organization’s global reach and invest ments in digital publishing make it competitive with even the largest commercial multinationals. Journals have had recent success in China and Mexico. Highlights include many social science and humanities sectors: “academic publishing, particularly journals, dictionaries and licensing.” Digital sales rose 7% across the organization in fiscal 2015 and digital publishing with digital now accounting for 20% of total sales 17% of OUP’s total sales and more than 50% of academic sales. OUP’s largest OA journals were relatively stable in 2015. There was some fall off in articles published, compounded by weakness of the pound against the dollar. Open Access Strategy The organization operates in the customary open access models, Oxford Open which offers authors an open access option to individual articles within a subscription journal, and 33 fully open access journals primarily in the life sciences but across the whole range of STM, social science and humanities subjects. APCs are relatively high ranging from $1,385 to $2,770 as are its impact factors. Nucleic Acids Research, which moved from a subscription model to OA in 2005, now boasts an impact factor of 9.112 earned after the switch.
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Management protected invest ments in accelerating the transition to digital despite a difficult year. By subject matter, OUP expects some topics to be more amenable to the sponsorship necessary to pay APCs in gold OA, while green OA and subscriptions will prove more suitable in others.
Others in the Hunt There is a long tail of open access publishers, which Simba estimate to have goldmodel revenue between $5 million and $8 million in 2015. BMJ Group and Bentham Open are just a few of the organizations that compete for the last spots. Copernicus and BMJ are quality publishers who continue to add titles and expand their commit ments of open access publishing. Bentham Open was in the top ten a few years ago when it published more than 230 OA journals, but its reputation has been damaged by bad publicity and in 2014, the company’s website listed half of its journals had been recently discontinued. Active titles have recently fallen to less than fifty. De Gruyter, Dove Press, and Copernicus also rank high among the outsiders.
Open Access Repositories (Green Archives) & Other Platforms Open access repositories play a key role in the open access world. Although lacking the clear business model that has started to develop among gold journals, the majority
of
journals
and articles
are
green,
not
gold.
Repositories
rely
on
governments, institutions and charities for their funding, but their costs are much lower than a publisher per article because they do not edit or peer review. They bring their institutional benefactors prestige, greater visibility, and greater impact of research output. Many repositories use open source software solutions, which further helps control cost. While the focus of this report will be on publishers, several of these repositories are of particular interest. The physics repository arXiv was important in shaping the evolution of open access publishing. It built on the pre-digital Los Alamos National Laboratory preprint archive (LANL) to replace a manual,
multinational e -mail
distribution list for preprints in physics. Economic s and management also had a strong pre-Internet preprint culture and account for one of the larger repositories, SSRN. SciELO, Redalyc and the Chinese Academy of Sciences are regionally and linguistically significant.
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Table 2.3: Notable Open Access Repositories
Repository
Location
Year Started
Academia.com
San Francisco
2008
arXiv
Cornell Univ.
1991
Penn State
1997
Chinese Academy of Sciences IR GRID
Beijing
2008
Digital Access of Scholarship at Harvard (DASH)
Harvard
2008
NIH, USA
2000
3 million biomedical and life science articles.
Mexico C ity
2002
550 journals and 116,000 articles edited in and about Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries.
Berlin
2008
8 million researchers have signed up.
Sao Paulo, Brazil
1998
1,149 open access journals as well as dissertations and books from all over the Portuguese and Spanish-speaking world. Traditionally strong in life sciences but now including science and social sciences.
Rochester, NY
1994
380,000 articles and abstracts across the social sciences.
CiteSeer
PubMed Central Redalyc ResearchGate
SciELO
SSRN (now Elsevier)
Notes 10 million preprint articles, more than 33 million researcher users. Hosts approximately 1 million preprint articles mostly in physics, mathematics and computer science. 750,000 documents in computer and information science. The Institutional Repository hosts more than 400,000 articles while the COAJ portal hosts 780 OA journals. Supports open access to research in more than half of Harvard schools, including OA journal articles, conference presentations and PhD dissertations.
Source: Simba Information, company interviews, analyst interviews, annual reports. Copying prohibited.
Academia.edu Academia.edu is a platform founded in San Francisco in 2008 for academics to share research papers. The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research is a social networking site for researchers to talk about research manuscripts together online before submitting them to journals. Despite a staff of only a couple of doze n, the firm has attracted almost 33 million academics have posted nearly 10 million
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papers
on
1.8
million
researc h
topics.
Like
Mendeley,
Academia.edu
gives
researchers a powerful tool, both to share interests and research results within a large but specialized community.
arXiv In many ways, arXiv was a foundation for open access publishing. Started by Los Alamos physicist Paul Ginsparg in 1991 to replace pre-digital physics efforts, it was later expanded to include mathematics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics and quantitative finance. Articles have doubled since 2008 to over 1 million in December 2014. There were 105,000 new submissions and over 139 million dow nloads in 2015. Since moving to Cornell in 2002, the operating budget grew from two people and $150,000 to nearly $1 million in 2015 including indirect and volunteer costs. Funding comes primarily from Cornell University Library ($75k/yr), the Simons Foundation ($50k) (in both gift and challenge grant forms) and $372,000 from 188 member institutions from 23 countries.
Chinese Academy of Sciences In May 2014, National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)—one of the country’s major basic -science funding agencies, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which funds and conducts research at more than 100 institutions— announced that researchers they support must deposit their papers into online repositories and make them publicly accessible within 12 months of publication. T he National Ministry of Science and Technology, is also researching open-access policies. CAS policy will require all research that it funds to be submitted t he CAS’s open-access repositories w ithin twelve months. CAS’s Institutional Repositories GRID contains 400,000 articles from more than 100 institutions.
CiteSeerX CiteSeerX began at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J. in 1997, but moved to Penn State in 2003. Over its lifetime, the repository grew from a prototype public search engine in computer science to index over 750,000. It is not confined to
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research articles but also contains algorithms, data, metadata, services, techniques, and software that can be used to promote other digital libraries.
Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard Harvard University’s digital access repository was established in 2008 and currently includes more than 3 million documents from the Faculties of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, Medical School, Business School, Kennedy School, Graduate S chool of Education and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The idea originated in 2008 when faculty representatives unanimously adopted an open access policy for research. Harvard’s individual schools signed on and faculty began to add both current material and retrospectively. Articles posted annually reached nearly 7,000 in 2014, dipping to just over 6,000 in 2015.
PubMed Central PubMed Central (PMC) is the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s free repository of biomedical and life science journa l articles which grew out of the NIH’s original call for open access. PubMed Central contains nearly 3.7 million articles and is growing at about 100,000 articles a year. Articles are accessible to anyone via a Web browser subject to an embargo period, usually six to twelve months. The American PMC inspired similar efforts and mirror sites in Canada and Europe.
Redalyc Redalyc (Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y El Caribe, España y Portugal) is an important repository of 1,079 journals and nearly 452,000 full-text articles, up four-fold in the last two years. Redalyc was formed in 2002 to providing access to academic research produced in and about Spanish and Portuguesespeaking countries. Redalyc also evaluates the scientific and editorial quality of know ledge in Ibero-America, producing bibliometric tools concerning the journals, authors and countries included in the collection. Redalyc is the product of hundreds of higher education institut ions and collaborations throughout Latin America, but the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México is foremost among them.
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ResearchGate Founded in 2008 in Hannover Germany and Boston, it is now based in Berlin w ith 190 employees. ResearchGate reached 8 million researchers and scientists from 193 countries in late 2015 (up from 2 million in 2012). Its business model is to collect and sell data about researchers. It is a venture capital-backed for-profit. Investors include Bill Gates. It has been compared to “Facebook for researchers.”
SciELO SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library) is a Sao Paulo-based journal collection as well as an aggregator of doctoral dissertations. Established by the government of Brazil in 1998, journals were quickly added f rom Chile, then many other Latin American and Caribbean countries, Portugal and Spain to challenge the perceived dominance of English and the developed nations in scientific publishing. SciELO’s success is being closely watched in other developing countries, spawning SciELO South Africa for example. The core of the collection began with medicine and life sciences from Brazil and the top ten journal titles by usage remains dominated by this category. However, recent expansion has included many social science titles . As of January 2016, SciELO hosted 428 open access books and 1,249 open access journals containing 573,525 articles It holds a major share of the Portuguese and to a lesser extent Spanish scholarly publishing market and is highly influential in the developing world as an alternative to the traditional subscription-based, Northerndominated model. The number of articles, journals and users has steadily grown, but with Brazil’s current financial and political crisis, government support has been cut back substantially.
SSRN (Social Sciences Research Network) SSRN holds more than 550,000 preprints and working papers. In economics and to some degree in the field of law and economics, SSRN fills a similar role to ArXiv in physics. Virtually all papers in these subjects are first published there as preprints even before being submitted to a journal. Although it relies on 1,000 scholar volunteers, it has 15 full-time staff in a central Rochester, N.Y. office and a $1 million annual budget. SSRN began as the Financial and Economics Network but now ranges from humanities to political science. Most material is open access, but it also contains material which can only be accessed pay-per-view. The network includes
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researchers and institutions from around the world. It is available in English and Hebrew. In May 2016, SSRN became part of Elsevier.
Mergers & Acquisitions in Open Access Journal Publishing Market The barriers to entry are low in open access publishing, but this has not kept traditional subscription-based publisher from using acquisitions to infuse vitality and credibility into their open access initiatives. There have only been a few acquisitions in open access publishing, but they have been signif icant. Social science publisher SAGE’s which has its own SAGE Open invest ment in OA is not out of character. From November 2007 to November 2011, Hindaw i had a partnership w ith SAGE that produced 33 open access journals. Per the original contract, each publisher could bid for titles and in 2011, Hindawi acquired SAGE’s entire stake and continues to publish them. SAGE took over three editor-inchief led journals. De Gruyter’s January 2012 acquisition of Czech journal publisher Versita kick-started that company’s shift of even more of its efforts to OA. In May 2016, SAGE also acquired C roatian OA publisher InTechOpen’s six English language OA journals. The recent Springer Nature formation impacted open access as a side effect of bringing to large traditional journal publishers together, both of whom saw the importance of OA in their fut ures. Less common are acquisitions of OA individual journals or small lists. De Gruyter continues to be acquisitive and to grow their open access offerings.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Leading Open Access Journal Publishers & Repositories
Table 2.4: Notable Open Access Publishing M&A Activity, 2008 –2016 Company
Acquired/Sold/ Date of Deal
Remarks
Springer Science+Business
Acquires BioMed Central Oct. 2008
First major acquisition of an early OA leader by a major traditional publisher gave commercial legitimacy to the movement.
Springer Science+Business
Acquired 12 OA Springer continues to invest by acquisition as well as journals from Hindawi organically. March 2011
Wolters Kluwer Health De Gruyter
Nature Publishing Group/Holtzbrinck
Acquires Medknow December 2011
Medknow not only made Wolters Kluwer a major OA publisher, an area where it had lagged, but expanded its emerging market footprint.
Acquired C zech OA journal publisher Versita/Jan. 2012
Versita gave De Gruyter critical mass and expertise in OA publishing which it used to accelerate efforts.
Acquires 51% of Frontiers February 2013
First partnership of its type entered into by The Nature Group. In making the announcement, Nature praised the cultural fit. Both companies produce high impact factor, field-wide journals.
SAGE, O’Reilly and Established in late 2012, two OA journals PeerJ and others make new PeerJ PrePrints cover biological and medical sciences. investment July 2014
PeerJ Inc.
Acquired 8 Polandbased journals distributed by Springer/Sept. 2014
De Gruyter
Holtzbrinck/Nature Publishing Group and Springer Science+Business RELX Elsevier
SAGE Publishing
Convert from subscription to OA effective Jan. 2015.
Combining operations Merger includes Springer Science+Business Media creates an even more including BMC and Holtzbrinck’s Nature Publishing Group dominant OA and Palgrave Macmillan. presence, May 2015 Acquires Social Science Research Network, May 2016
Elsevier adds SSRN to its Web tools, stirring controversy but giving Elsevier a major tool to break into the social science community.
Acquires InTech’s OA journals, May 2016
SAGE continues to shop the world for journals, adding six OA STM journals from Croatian publisher.
Source: Company Press Releases, Simba Information
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Chapter 3 Issues Facing Open Access Journal Publishing & Forecast Introduction Open access journals revenue will grow 8.3% in 2016 and w ill grow at a compound annual rate of 7.4% to reach $439.0 million by 2020. Simba estimates at that point OA revenue w ill represent 4.3% of Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) journal revenue. Despite the impressive growth of OA revenue over the last ten years, there are limits. There have also been unintended consequences. Librarians who generated much of the early energy for breaking the traditional subscription model have often been stuck with the bill, asked to fund the APCs. And, some publishers are accused of double dipping: charging both subscriptions and APCs for hybrid journals, which now represent the vast majority of journals and the primary source of OA revenue. Even with the emergence of new players like China, India and Brazil, there is only so much research being done. Most studies suggest the number of research articles produced worldwide is grow ing at 3.5% per year. Funders are increasingly paying APCs, but there is no great increase in funding behind the research itself. With underlying output of growth at these levels, APC growth will inevitably slow . But while limits on the total number of articles will inhibit OA growth, there are a grow ing
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number of conversions from subscription to OA, and a global movement among funders pushing for it. So, it is possible that OA growth could be dramatic and sudden. There are signs of both. Within the market leader Springer Nature, we can see both. Springer is showing maturity while Nature has grow n dramatically. As further evidence of a slowdown, monthly contributions to PLOS ONE have fallen, Bentham Open seems to have stumbled, and Springer Nature’s BMC no longer brags about rapid growth. On the other hand, there is evidence of more room for growth among the large traditional publishers. Some proponents of open access that also offer subscription models have achieved OA article rates of 16% to 18%—most of this comes from their pure gold journals. The uptake in hybrid journals is only 1% or 2% for many publishers, while Nature Publishing Group grew from 38% in 2013, to 44% in 2015, then jumped to 63% in late 2015. Each of the leading publishers have more than 2,000 journals, meaning an increase in OA uptake from 1% to 5% could represent hundreds of millions of dollars in new APCs. Open access publishing is a young phenomenon. History tells us the future will be different from the past. Many of the changes that fueled rapid growth were tied to low hanging fruit and struggling journals being converted to a new model en mass or first movers staking out new territory with a new approach. The industry is now facing the growing pains of adolescence and it faces severa l hurdles before a secure and mature future is assured.
Issues Facing Open Access Publishing Open Access Business Practices Continue To Evolve Major publishers have evolved their open access business models toward a mix of hybrid and fully open access titles supported by APCs, which loosely correlate w ith impact factors. Larger publishers have found they can command high prices for their OA options and can even charge APCs on top of their big deal journal site licenses. This has also inf luenced smaller players and recent startups. PeerJ, which has been widely praised for its membership model, announced a gold APC in 2015. Bentham started as a pure open access publisher, but now has as many subscription journals alongside its open access list .
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Issues Facing Open Access Publis hing & Forecast
But not every publisher has gone down this path. Wolters Kluwer’s Medknow continues to make its money through author services. Many publishers forgo APCs for at least some of their titles, relying instead on institutional subsidies or the sale of print editions, reprints or ads. Publishers continue to experiment. Informa’s Cogent OA launched Freedom APC mid-2015 giving authors a range of APC options including one w here authors could state a price they were willing to pay. Informa recognized that different disciplines and different parts of the world had different levels of funding. Informa hoped this option would encourage submissions and start a dialog w ith authors. EDP Sciences recently launched Liberty APCs w ith a similar approach. Open access is still re latively young. It took centuries for subscription variations to unfold and several iterations before publishers felt comf ortable w ith pricing print +online bundles, the big deal and other variations. Some funders have already negotiated terms directly wit h publishers concerning APCs. This contact and dialog can be expected to lead to other negotiated terms. As some of the prime movers have shown a clear preference for gold OA, a great deal can be done with opening up the hybrid model further. Change produces unintended consequences and surprising stakeholders. Sales forces and other stakeholders w ill want a piece of APCs and other OA Income, particularly if they are losing out on traditional revenue streams. Should they be credited with APC income? How about memberships? APC Pric ing Is an Issue for Editoria l Boards Defending a mix of subscription, hybrid and pure open access has not been without it challenges. Elsevier, which has been a particular target of boycotts and petitions from the beginning of the open access movement, continues to face criticism. In 2012, 12,000 researchers signed a petition protesting Elsevier pricing starting w ith in the mathematics community. Elsevier opened the archives of 14 mathematics journals, but the protesters were not satisfied. In late 2015, six editors and 31 editorial board members of Elsevier journal Lingua resigned after the company rejected their requests for lower APCs and formed a new OA journal Glossa, which charges a $400 APC to authors, and waives that fee for authors who do not have the funds. Lingua’s APC remains $1,800. In a statement Elsevier said that a $400 APC is “not
sustainable.”
According to
the company,
APCs
depend on factors
like
“competitive considerations” and “market conditions,” like how much competing companies are charging. The editorial board members of the Elsevier journal Cognition took similar steps in 2016, starting a petition asking for “significantly lower (APC) fees” in its hybrid option.
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The Librarian Complaint Is Double Dipping Another complaint, a consequence of hybrid gold open access was that libraries find themselves paying for a subscription to a journal priced as if all the articles would be behind a pay wall, but for a growing percentage of these articles, an APC has also been paid making it publically available online. Librarians, particularly when they support OA fees in their institution, complain they are paying twice. Many publishers have declared that they do not “double dip,” but it is not always that simple. Journals subscriptions are very often part of a multi-year, multi-institution big deal. So how and w hen w ill the library get back what they had paid in advance for articles that turned out to be open access? When there was only a smattering of OA articles in hybrid journals, this was a nuisance, but most journals from the large publishers, the ones w ho enter into big deals, are now hybrid. And w hile less than 2% of articles from some publishers are OA, the percentage can reach 20% and 30% in others. A 2014-2015 survey of pricing policies at 24 publishers by German librarian Bernhard Mittermaier revealed that “while a small number of publishers appear to be fully offsetting their hybrid open access income, or making no additional charge for hybrid open access at all, for the rest of those surveyed no clear evidence could be gathered that double dipping does not take place, and many appeared to be double dipping to some extent.” OUP and SAGE declare they do not double dip. Elsevier is a bit less emphatic. Alicia Wise, the company’s director of universal access asserted in a recent Research Fortnight interview that there was no connection between subscriptions and APCs. Many traditional publishers are trying to fly under the radar, denying there is a problem. Wiley’s company website explains they “adjust the variable portion of each title’s subscription
price
(or
core
title
fee)
proportionately,
for
any
shift
from
subscription-funded articles to pay-to-publish open access articles.” About 260 Wiley hybrid titles had their 2016 subscription prices cut by an average of 1.84% as a result of this policy, which also requires the number of subscription articles to have declined due to Online Open. Open articles represented 4.7% of all articles carried by these journals, up from 0.6% in 2012.
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Despite Objections, APCs Will Continue to Rise APCs have and will continue to increase despite these objections. Foremost because APCs will have to cover the production costs in the long run or publishers w ill run out of money. APCs still do not fully do so. Secondly, APCs w ill rise because higher impact journals and more commercially-oriented are increasingly taking OA artic les. Such journals have learned they can command a higher price. The rise in APCs has been dramatic. PLOS Biology ’s fee started at $1,500 in 2003. It is now $2,900. BioMed Central’s Journal of Translational Medicine charged $525 in 2004. Today it charges $2,145. Hindawi’s Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology’s APC started at $495 in 2004, increased to $2,000 today. Humanities and Social Science articles cannot match these rates. The cost of publishing an article varies greatly, from about $10 per article to be posted in arXiv to $30,000 to $40,000 per paper in Nature, according to its editor. More typically, the average cost of publishing an article is somew here in between, $2,289 for the average OA article and $3,509 for the average hybrid article, according to a 2013 Nature news report. It costs eLife $8,300 per article. APCs remain stubbornly short of these costs, but they are rising. They will need to continue to rise until at least covering the costs of publication. Hybrid journals, w hich average higher APCs than pure OA journals, w ill grow. And, APCs will rise as OA journals become more accepted and gain higher impact factors. There is a strong correlation between impact factors and APCs. A recent article in Frontiers Communication demonstrated this across scores of journals f rom a dozen publishers. This makes perfect sense. High impact factors attract greater numbers of submissions. Higher demand means their publishers can afford to charge more and still be selective as they will need to be to preserve their hard earned scores. Leading OA Publishers Brande d as Predatory Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, maintains an online newsletter Scholarly Open Access and an annual list of predatory publishers that he recommends be avoided because they “are corrupt and exist only to make money off the author processing charges.” Central to his criticism is that such journals “unprofessionally explo it the author-pays model of open access publishing (gold OA) for their ow n prof it. … Operating essentially as vanity presses and operate using fly by-night, unsustainable business models.”
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Beall himself has been criticized as too quick to judge. In 2015, he created controversy by branding the Brazilian repository SciELO and Mexico’s Redalyc as “favelas,”
a
derogatory
reference
to
Brazilian slum
informal
neighborhoods.
Individual target companies and journals have pushed back that his list too often makes its judgment without formal criteria. But his list has helped focus attention on real abuses in the gold (author pays) open-access model including abusive APCs, misleading or made up metrics, plagiarism, journals or publishers made to appear to be websites of other legitimate journals or publishers, spam e- mail promotion practices, and pseudo-science—all among the unethical and deceptive practices he rails against. The list began with criticism of Bentham Open in 2009, then a list of questionable OA journals that Beall urged authors to avoid. Beall’s list has changed over time, but the overall number has grow n rapidly from 23 suspect publishers in 2012 to 923 today, as well as an additional 882 individual journals at the beginning of 2016. Early targets Bentham Open and Dove Press do not make Simba’s list and no doubt suffered in part from Beall’s spotlight. Over the years, his targets have included some of the largest OA publishers including Hindawi, w hich he criticized for having “way too many journals than can be properly handled by one publisher” , and Medknow, which he said had a “vague business model. It charges for the PDF version.” MDPI was criticized for publishing pseu do-science and Frontiers concerning their peer review practices and controversial articles they have published. Every OA Publisher Has Faced a Cre dibility Problem APCs create an inherit conflict: lower editorial standards lead immediately (if temporarily) to increased sales. Virtually every open access publisher has faced a credibility problem at some point. In late 2014, a-half dozen OA publishers including BioMed Central and Hindawi disclosed systemic abuse perpetrated by external reviewers in a number of their journals. Elsevier has faced a series of protests from both its librarian customers and editors of its own journals concerning its policies relating to open access. Frontiers fired 31 medical editors who complained that Frontiers’ policies “are designed to maximize the company’s profits, not the quality of papers, and that this could harm patients” And later got in trouble w ith Beall. The ecosystem of open access publishing is also raising standards. In spring 2014, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) expanded the questions asked of journals from 6 to 56, recognizing that inclusion in DOAJ brought a certain standing
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to journals that might not deserve it. Ninety-nine percent of the 9,770 journals in the DOAJ faced re-examination and nearly a-third were dropped, mostly for not having a working website or a lapse in publishing. Springer was thrown out of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) for failures in peer review of several of its conference proceedings before being reinstated after a few months suspension. Peer Revie w Is a Particular Ta rget for C riticism Much of the criticism of OA journals concerns the peer review process. Relaxed standards not only cut out a major component of publishers’ costs, but give a direct bump to revenue. This creates temptations not only for publishers , but for authors, editors and reviewers. Many OA publishers have been aggressive in reinventing the peer review process. Pure OA startups are unencumbere d w ith the legacy of traditional
peer
review
processes.
Experimental
as
many
of
them are
by
temperament, they also face pricing pressures, trying to cut cost rather than pass it on. Peer review represents a much larger share of OA publisher cost than traditional print subscription publishers, so their attention should come as no surprise. Some have tried to automate processes, others employ crowd sourcing or formalize editorial triage. Publishers continue to evaluate business models and peer review continues to evolve. Whether OA journals live up to their peer review claims was put to a formal test in 2013 w hen a fake article was submitted to 304 open access publishers. The article should have been rejected immediately for deliberate scientific errors, but the article was accepted by Bentham, Dove, Scientific Research Publishing, among other Beall targets. But Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer (through its Medknow division) and Sage were also caught in the sting. When the results were published in the journal Science, more than half the publishers had accepted the paper and less than a third rejected it. In late 2014, several OA publishers including BioMed Central and Hindaw i, disclosed systemic abuse in a number of their journals. Hindawi initiated a seven- month investigation of fraud and found three e xternal editors had created fraudulent reviewer accounts to submit favorable review reports, thereby accepting 32 articles that otherwise might not have been published. In response, Hindaw i established procedures for Hindaw i staff to verify the identity of every reviewer for any of its journals.
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But maintaining quality control is a challenge. Frontiers for example claims they use 55,000 editors for the 54 journals they publish. That is an astonishing 1,018 editors per journal to whom they have devolved considerable responsibility about editorial decisions. An internal staff of only 200 is available to oversee this process. PLOS has also had to defend its editorial technical standard for accepting papers in PLOS ONE. In November 2014, Hindaw i had to investigate systematic fraud among its external reviewers. Even the highest impact publishers of all, New England Journal of Medicine, T he Lancet, Nature and Science have all published articles that later had to be withdraw n. Elsevier was embarrassed several years ago w hen six medical journals were exposed to have been sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, yet were made to look like independent peer reviewed medical journals. Peer-review is imperfect. What makes open access different is that publishers start off with questions about their business model and, many being startups, they have little brand goodw ill to draw on. Some Publishe rs Work Towards Greater Tra nspa rency One of the ways open access publishers are addressing skeptics is by brand association with membership groups like the International STM Group, acceptance into indexing and abstracting services or quality measures like Impact Factors. By being more transparent, particularly using metrics, they aim to reassure customers about their integrity. Publishers vary in what they reveal or emphasize, but the goal is to earn trust:
Frontiers uses high impact graphics to share impact factors, authors, articles published,
viewed
and
dow nloaded,
expenditure
analysis,
employment
acceptance rate (8%), days from submission to acceptance, top referring sites, All associate and review editors’ names are made public upon the publication of articles, acknow ledging their contribution. As a result reviewers are constructive, but also responsible for the paper and provide rigorous feedback that delivers the highest possible quality publication. Conf lict-of interest, if present, is openly apparent.
Hindawi pulled back on disclosing information after its founder revealed a great deal about revenue and prof its for a private company in a 2012 interview, but it does report acceptance rates and average acceptance measures by journal.
Informa emphasizes author demographics in its annual OA surveys.
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MDPI has a timeline show ing headcount, articles published, journals indexed, downloads and other milestones.
PLOS has an independent audit, fully disclosing its financials.
Springer Nature’s Nature Publishing Group discloses a great deal of information in press releases and company blog.
Wiley is the only large commercial publisher reporting revenue-related metrics. It also spells out its specific adjust ments to t he double dipping concern in their hybrid journals.
Wolters Kluwer’s Medknow reports articles dow nloaded daily and regularly updates the number of journals, societies, articles published and manuscripts submitted.
Going OA Is Not a Magic Bullet According to
a recent study
“Journal Usage
Half-Lives,”
available
from the
Association of American Pub lishers website, articles in the health sciences (which carried most of the early advocacy in the early days of OA), had the shortest half lives, average 25 to 36 months. This means that an embargo took a smaller bite of their commercial value. Humanities, physics and mathematics had a median half-life of 49-60 months and nearly 17% of all journals had usage half -lives of more than six-years. This is a particular problem for the humanities and some social sciences. The U.K. government’s Finch Report observed many of the rules concerning embargo periods and cost assumptions based on article length, half -life and other characteristic were driven by prime movers in f ields with strong research funding. Multi-million dollar research grants as found in molecular biology, oncology, cardiology, simply do not exist in pediatrics let alone art history or Basque studies. A six month embargo period w ill have a different financial impact in a field where the half-life is six months rather than six years. Even as Hindawi was converting f rom subscription to open access gold from 2004 to 2007, the company made the decision to sell one of its major journals International Mathematics Research Notes (IMRN) rather than convert it to OA. For some topics, a high subscription price is simply the best way to go. Not every journal works and OA is no panacea. Many OA journals have disappeared. Bentham has closed dozens of titles. BMC and Copernicus have a list of closed titles as well. PLOS has been careful about launching new titles. OA publishers and
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journals are not immune to market pressures. Success attracts competition and authors can become spoiled for choice. Major Publishe rs Have the Potential of Transforming OA Publishing Major publishers like Elsevier, Wiley and Informa have greatly expanded their OA activities. With less than 5% of journal revenue coming from APCs, most of the remaining 95% comes from the traditional subscription business model. Furthermore, the top f ive STM journal publishers account for about 60% of the journal market, so changes in their behavior can transform OA revenue very quickly. By converting Nature Communications from f irst a hybrid to a full-OA journal, the Nature Publishing Group OA research papers reached nearly two-thirds by late 2015, up by almost half in just 18 months following their signal to make the conversion. Many major publishers channel articles submitted to their more prestigious journals into hybrid or full OA options. Elsevier alone turns away more than 700 thousand articles a year, which can either go to their competition, or those that are good enough can be published OA. A shift of hybrid journals adding just 2% to 3% to the total number of articles could add tens of millions of dollars to OA revenue. Peter Ashman, Director of Learning & Publishing at BMJ and Chairman of ALPSP recently told Simba earlier this year that he believes revenue from open access will reach current levels of subscription revenue for his company by 2020. OA articles currently represent about 7% of articles in hybrid journals at BMJ, but range by topic from 0% to 20%. Wiley’s website indicates just under 5% of the articles in the hybrid journals receiving subscription price adjust ments were OA. Ninety-five percent of articles are still available for conversion. And, Informa continues to invest in its own OA efforts. More Journals Are Being Converted from Subscription to Open Access The conversion of subscription journals to OA by major and highly profitable commercial publishers like Springer Nature, Elsevier and Wiley, suggest grow ing confidence that publishers have a handle on cost and can make a profit at the APCs they set. One way of doing this is to convert subscription journals to open access. There are many drivers to do so. For one, government and other funder mandates are keeping up the pressure. Society owners of licensed journals and academic editorial board
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Issues Facing Open Access Publis hing & Forecast
members a re asking for this, and sometimes the subscription model is just no longer working. But a wide range of publishers are converting well-established subscription journals with strong impact factors to OA. One of the most prominent was Nature Communications which announced the switch in late 2014 when the title had an impact factor over 10, ranking it third after only Nature and Science among multidisciplinary science journals in impact factor. It was clearly thriving, but in 2013, 30% of the articles opted for the hybrid OA option. Furthermore, an independent study of this journal demonstrated that OA articles had greater visibility. So w hat did Nature do? They announced the conversion effective January 2015 to full OA, increased the APC, more than maintained the article count and continued to maintain a high impact factor, now 11.33. This can happen very fast, particularly when a large journal (as happened w ith Nature Communications) or group of journals (as the start of Hindawi or more recently at De Gruyter) is converted from subscription to open access. In its blog, Nature Publishing Group reported the uptake of open access grew from 38% in 2013 to 44% in 2014. By October of 2015, after the Nature Communications sw itch and the launch of Scientific Research, the company reported it had reached 63%! An analysis undertaken by Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL), found that a flip to open access would be possible at no financial risk, “maybe even at lower overall costs” to the system. This was followed up by an invitation only Berlin 12 Open Access Conference in December 2015 aiming to create a coordinated effort to shift library budgets toward paying APCs and away from subscriptions was attended by 96 participants from 19 countries. Has Mega journals Growth Stalled? PLOS ONE is the poster child for the megajournal. It single handedly lifted PLOS to financial independence. Two features set PLOS ONE apart. Traditional peer review typically filters submitted articles as to whether they fit the editorial scope of the journal and w hether their findings are important enough for publication. PLOS ONE eliminated these criteria. Articles were accepted based only on w hether they met a technical standard and included articles from a broad multidisciplinary range of topics. PLOS succeeded spectacularly, publishing more than 31,000 articles in 2013. But after peaking in 2010 at 4.411, PLOS ONE’s impact factor has fallen every year since to 3.057 in 2015. In early 2014, PLOS ONE reported monthly submissions down 25% after years of steady expansion. Revenue peaked in 2013 after an increase of 32.2% in that year, but fell 3.3% in 2014.
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Scholarly Kitchen blogger Phil Davis predicted authors would return to disciplinebased journals w hen the impact factors began to fall. In early 2014, this appeared to be happening. A 25% monthly decline in articles could have been evidence of Davis’s prediction. Other factors may also have been at play. Davis mentioned the U.S. government shutdown and a decline in U.S. federal research funding. It is also possible that growing publication times might have contributed. In Simba’s view, there is nothing fundamentally w rong with megajournals. They continue to offer many pluses from the author’s perspective: wide exposure and faster publication times. The fate of high prof ile megajournals bears watching, but most likely, PLOS ONE is simply facing competition (which Davis also mentioned). Having been so successful so quickly and for so many years, PLOS ONE could not help but attract imitators. Not all of these succeeded. Palgrave Communications published only 51 articles in 2015. SAGE Open is considered a success, but it took four years to publish 1,000 articles. That is average revenue of about $500,000 per year. But some did. Nature Communications spectacular conversion from hybrid to open access could account for the decline of PLOS ONE on its own. Megajournals are still young and are just now being tested under new conditions including a proliferation of imitators, but Simba believes they are here to stay.
Open Access Publishing Forecast Introduction Despite the impressive growth in OA revenue over the last ten years, there are limits. Even w ith the opening up of large new players like China, India and Brazil, there is only so much research being done. Most studies suggest the number of research articles worldw ide is growing at 3.5% per year, about half the rate of OA article growth. Funders are increasingly paying APCs, but there is no great increase in f unding behind the research itself. This suggests a slow ing of growth as in aggregate the industry begins to mature. Simba forecasts the revenue f rom OA publishing will reach $331.0 million in 2016, up 8.3% on 2015, and will grow to $439.0 million by 2020. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 7.3% between 2016 and 2020, compared to 12.3% compounded growth 2013 to 2015. Open access publishing grew rapidly over the last decade. Articles in the Directory of Open Access Journals increased six-fold from under 1,600 in July 2009 to more than
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Table 3.1: Open Access Journal Forecast by Metric, 2016P-2020P
Metrics OA Journals Revenue ($millions) 1 OA Journals Revenue % of STM Journal Revenue STM Journal Revenue ($millions) 2 No. of OA Journal Titles 3 No. of OA Journal Articles 3
Change, 20152016P
CAGR, 2016P2020P
$439.0
8.3%
7.3%
4.0%
4.3%
-
-
$10,049.9
$10,179.4
$10,309.3
1.2%
1.3%
9,860
10,530
11,200
11,800
-17.3%
6.1%
2,480,000
2,660,000
2,860,000
3,040,000
7.0%
7.2%
2016P
2017P
2018P
2019P
2020P
$331.0
$356.0
$382.4
$409.8
3.4%
3.6%
3.8%
$9,786.9
$9,916.3
9,300 2,300,000
1
Gold Revenue is estimated based on modeling reported revenue of OA publishers against academic studies and analysis of article counts, APC trends and Simba estimates. 2
Simba estimates.
3
Title and Article counts based on DOAJ Press Releases and Simba estimates. Changes in DOAJ conditions in including titles in their count resulted in a drastic reduction between 2015 and 2016 but Simba believes any erosion took place over several years and does not reflect a trend, hence the forecast of continued growth in the title growth. Source: Simba Information. Copying prohibited.
9,000 in mid-2016. Articles grew seven-fold, 300,000 to more than 2.2 million in today. Mandates, new publishers, even more new journals and the explosive growth of megajournals were major contributors. In the early days, whole publishing programs converted from print subscription to open access in response to the serials crisis, compounded by the Great Recession and stimulated by the need to respond to technological upheaval. APCs grew much faster than inflation. For growth to be sustained, new markets need to develop. Too many of these factors were one -off changes, not to be repeated. While remaining strong, the pace of growth will inevitably slow as has already been the case. Simba’s forecasts for OA journals are based on the following assumptions:
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Issues Facing Open Access Publis hing & Forecast
The world economy will continue to fund an expansion in research worldw ide but at a slower pace
Open access will capture a significant share of emerging market research
Ethical publishers and other interested parties w ill educate authors and provide better tools to distinguish good publishers from bad
Mandates, especially in the U.S. and Europe, will continue to build compliance
Smaller subscription publishers will follow the lead of Springer Nature, Elsevier, Wiley and Informa to increasingly embrace OA, converting both struggling journals and thriving ones from subscription to OA, launching new OA journals, and through greater uptake of their OA options in hybrid journals
Articles published per year will continue to grow, but at a slower pace
Minor accommodations w ill be made concerning embargo periods and funding for the fields in the social science and humanities sufficient to sustain growth
APCs prices will rise but at a slower pace.
World Economy & Exchange Rates The health of the world economy will have a direct impact on research spending worldwide whether public through the relationship between tax receipts and budgets, corporations, or foundations dependent on the performance of their invest ments. Simba assumes moderate economic growth based on World Bank, IMF and other economic forecasts. Simba’s projections are exchange rate neutral for 2016-2020 using 2015 exchange rates. In reality, currency will have a significant impact on some of these rates throughout the forecast period. Open Access Will Capture a Significant Share of Eme rging Market Researc h According to a 2011 Royal Society report, China, Brazil, South Korea and India have emerged as major contributors of research papers alongside the traditional scientific superpowers of the U.S., Western Europe and Japan. In studies of ISI data, China more than doubled its share of authorship in recent years. India produced even more science and engineering graduates a year than China. Growth in China and India is projected to slow, but both countries have accepted open access and open access can expect to capture a growing share of their new scientif ic research output. This has already happened in Brazil. OA is well established in this young market making indigenous subscription titles a rarity.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Issues Facing Open Access Publis hing & Forecast
Authors Will Bette r Understand the Good and Bad of OA Journals Ethical publishers and other interested parties w ill educate authors and provide better tools to distinguish good publishers from bad. The criticisms of Beall and the recent expose in Science have brought changes in DOAJ’s rules of acceptance. It is not likely to happen overnight, but authors will learn from their mistakes and funders and employers will help them avoid embarrassment. The OA ecosystem is still evolving and w ill get better alignment between researchers and funders. Mandates Will Increase & They Will Work Mandates, especially in the U.S. and Europe, will continue to build compliance. Unlike petitions, mandates do change behavior even if enforcement is less than universal. A study based on ISI data concluded that mandates tripled self -archiving rates from around 20% to between 60% and 70%. NIH, Wellcome and RCUK have shown the way for funders to get more for their money, not only in w ider exposure, but in an attitude about the purposes of research they hold. Other stakeholders w ill continue to follow, using both carrots (paying for APCs and other forms of support) and s ticks (explicit contract, embargo and repository requirements). OA Articles Published Pe r Yea r Will Continue to Grow Articles published per year will continue to grow. Simba forecasts a continuation of current trends and mandates dictate expansion, but the pace of expansion must slow. With research funding growing at 3% a year and article output grow ing at 3.5%, OA articles will reach a saturation point at some stage. Quality will have to suffer if total output increases too fast, but OA articles have several more years of high double-digit growth. The Humanities & Soc ial Sc ience Will Be Accommodated Major social science and humanities publishers like OUP, SAGE and Informa are actively pursuing open access. They and their authors know the differences in usage half-life, the different character of reflective research, and they have lived in a different funding world than much of STM. T he Finch Report recognized these differences as well. Simba does not expect social science and humanities journal publishing to suddenly flourish. In fact, the book is still better suited for some types of scholarship than journal articles, but OA shows promise in the humanities and social sciences. Among the fastest growing areas are multi-disciplinary topics and these are particularly well-suited for publication in megajournals. We forecast minor
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Issues Facing Open Access Publis hing & Forecast
accommodations will be made concerning embargo periods and funding sufficient to sustain growth in these disciplines. APCs Will Continue to Rise For all the reasons stated above, APCs will continue to increase. They still do not cover the cost of publication costs in most cases and greater participation by large publishers and hybrid journals w ill raise the average. Double dipping charges and w holesale conversion from hybrid to pure OA may curb subscription revenue growth, but APCs will grow.
Forecast of Leading Publishers In 2016, the ten open access journal publishers prof iled in this report grew 13.3% over 2015 and at a compounded annual rate of 26.6% since 2014. Collectively, they hold 88.9% of forecast 2016 global OA revenue. The most important change identif ied in Simba’s forecast is the emergence of traditional STM subscription-based powerhouses like Elsevier and Wiley as serious open access publishers.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Issues Facing Open Access Publis hing & Forecast
Table 3.2: Leading Open Access Journal Publishers, 2015-2016P ($ in millions)
Company
2015
2016P
Change, 2015-2016P
Springer Nature
$88.1
$100.4
14.0%
20.6%
30.3%
PLOS
$43.0
$44.5
3.5%
-1.3%
13.4%
Elsevier
$21.1
$26.4
25.1%
26.6%
8.0%
John Wiley & Sons
$24.1
$26.2
8.7%
23.2%
7.9%
Hindawi
$21.4
$23.5
9.8%
13.0%
7.1%
MDPI
$17.2
$19.7
14.5%
30.8%
6.0%
Holtzbrinck Frontiers
$17.3
$19.3
11.6%
-9.8%
5.8%
Wolters Kluwer (Medknow)
$12.1
$14.8
22.3%
29.6%
4.5%
Informa Cogent
$8.2
$11.4
39.0%
56.0%
3.4%
OUP
$7.3
$8.1
11.0%
4.5%
2.4%
$259.8
$294.3
13.3%
14.0%
88.9%
Top 10 Total
CAGR, Market Share, 2013-2016P 2016P
Source: Simba Information, company interviews, analyst interviews, annual reports. Copying prohibited.
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Open Access Journal Publishing 2016-2020 Issues Facing Open Access Publis hing & Forecast
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