Morris observed in 2007 that “[t]here is surprisingly little hard information about the landscape of peer-reviewed journal publishing” particularly when broken down by demographics. One decade on the situation has changed little, as recently observed by Johnson et al. (2017) with particular regard to the influence of publisher demographics on their OA policies. In the absence of a systematic and comprehensive overview the current state of play has to be gleaned from a variety of different and often dated sources, rather than any comprehensive overview.

Publisher size

As Ware and Mabe (2015) have noted, journals are not evenly distributed across publishers. They write, “at one end of the scale, 95% or more publish only one or two journals, while at the other end, the top 100 publish 67% of all journals. The top 5 publish nearly 35% of journals, while three publishers (Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley-Blackwell) have well over 2000 journals each”. The EU OpenAIRE report (Johnson et al. 2017) found that 50% of all articles were published by five large publishers (Reed-Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, and Sage). Other studies (Morris 2007; Crow 2005) report similarly skewed distributions although with slightly different proportions.

In terms of the impact of publisher size on OA policy, the series of Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)-commissioned studies of society publishers’ approaches to online publishing provide some insight. The most recent ALPSP study divided responding publishers into small (0–10 titles), medium (11–99) or large (100 +) groupings for analysis (Inger and Gardner 2013). Although they only had a small number of large publisher respondents (15 out of 261) they found that smaller publishers were less likely than medium sized publishers, who in turn were less likely than large publishers, to allow authors to submit either their pre-print or post-print (defined as the author’s version of the corrected, accepted manuscript) to an institutional repository. However, small publishers were actually more likely to allow the self-archiving of the publisher PDF than either medium or large publishers. Inger and Gardner (2013:42) speculate that larger publishers may have more to lose in allowing publisher PDFs to be mounted on open access repositories whilst “[s]mall and medium-sized publishers may be happier to take a risk in favour of increased exposure and possible citations.”

Inger and Gardner (2013) also perform an interesting trend analysis relating to publishers’ changing positions on allowing posting to repositories over time. This shows that as of 2012, smaller publishers had become increasingly permissive with regards to posting to both institutional and subject repositories (see Table 1) whereas larger publishers had become increasingly restrictive. Medium-sized publishers appear less consistent, but were less permissive about posting to institutional repositories and more permissive about subject repositories in 2012 than in 2005.

Table 1 After Inger and Gardner (2013). Percentage of publishers allowing posting to institutional and subject repositories over time Full size table

In terms of Gold OA, a JISC report into Article Processing Charges (APCs) tells us that “a few large publishers capture most of the market share” (Shamash 2016). Pinfield et al’s study into the total cost of ownership of scholarly journals concurs that “most APCs were paid to large ‘traditional’ commercial publishers who also received considerable subscription income” (Pinfield et al. 2015). A blog post by Clarke (2015) regarding the Changing scale of scholarly publication suggests that Gold OA publishing tends to suit large commercial publishers because they have the scale to support the production of a high volume of OA journals at varying levels of quality and the mechanisms to support institutional APC payments. A further influence is the recent growth in so-called mega-journals, publishing large volumes of articles on a Gold OA model (Wakeling et al. 2016).

Publisher type

There are two main ways of considering publisher type in the literature. Some studies focus on whether a publisher is profit-making (commercial) or not-for-profit (NFP), whilst others categorise them according to whether they are commercial, a university press or a learned society. More recent studies point out the emergence of a new category of professional non-commercial publishers such as Public Library of Science (Laakso and Björk 2012). In 2009, Ware and Mabe estimated that 64% of all publishers were commercial, whilst 30% were society publishers, 4% university presses, and 2% were other types.

The distinctions, however, are muddied as a result of some learned societies choosing to publish their journals with commercial publishers. Analysis by Crow (2005) and Morris (2007) estimated that 38% of active refereed journal titles were non-profit, with 45% being commercial, however a further 17% were commercially published and society-owned titles. Morris surmised that this showed that approximately 27.5% of all commercially published journals were society owned and about 30% of all society-owned titles were published by commercial publishers. An analysis by Baldwin (2004), found that over half of society-owned titles were published by third-parties. Having said this, the most recent edition of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) Report (Ware and Mabe 2015) observed that “some learned societies now shy away from working with the largest commercial publishers” as a result of mistrust stemming from some of the rhetoric around OA publishing. Indeed the recent Untangling academic publishing report recommended that “[s]ocieties that co-publish journals or book series with third-parties should reflect on whether the mission and business strategy of the co-publisher is a good fit for the society’s scholarly mission” (Fyfe et al. 2017).

There is a tendency in such rhetoric to refer to the “large commercial publishers” as those with the most restrictive Green OA policies and a propensity opportunistically to take advantage of new income streams offered by Gold OA publishing. Analysis by Morris (2007), however, found that there was “no real difference” between the mean number of journals published by all publishers (2.39) and NFP publishers (2.32). The main differences lay in the fact that the “largest commercial publishers are very much larger than the largest non-profits” with the top four being responsible for almost 25% of all journals.

A publisher’s type can lead to very different ways of engaging with the scholarly journals market, the main way being the prices charged for their products. Bergstrom and Bergstrom (2004) calculated that commercial journals cost 3–9 times more than non-profit journals and that the cost per citation was higher for commercial journals too. They observe that in the field of economics “the average inflation-adjusted price per page charged by commercial publishers has increased by 300% since 1985, whereas that of nonprofit economics journals has increased by ‘only’ 50%.” (Bergstrom and Bergstrom 2004:897). In a more recent study, Liu and Gee (2017) found that commercial publishers charged, on average, over 102% more than non-commercial publishers, although again, there were disciplinary differences. Beyond profit margins, Morris (2007) observes that non-profits publish fewer new titles and close fewer titles than their commercial counterparts. She also found that 69% of the top 500 most cited science journals in the ISI indices were published by non-profit publishers. This suggests that non-commercial publishers are more cautious in the development of new titles, but the ones they publish have a significant impact on the scholarly community.

In terms of approaches to Green OA, Laakso’s 2014 study of 100 large publishers (2014) found that 64% of titles published by commercial publishers would allow the self-archiving of the authors’ accepted manuscript (AAM), compared to 71.1% of society publishers and 28.4% of university presses. Only six university presses (publishing 469 journals) were included in the sample so these figures should be treated with caution. He also found that society publishers were far more likely to allow authors to self-archive the published final version (36%), than were commercial publishers (1.3%) or university presses (0). Assuming society publishers tend to be the smaller publishers, this triangulates with Inger and Gardner’s findings reported above (Inger and Gardner 2013). Covey (2009) found that the Green OA policies of for-profit publishers changed more frequently than non-profit publishers often causing a greater impact due to the number of journal titles under their control.

Laakso and Björk (2012:6) have also studied the growth of pure Gold OA journals over time by taking random stratified samples from the Directory of OA Journals (DOAJ) in 2000, 2005 and 2011. They find that “the early years of OA publishing were largely driven by scientific societies, professional associations, universities and their departments”. However, since 2005 there has been a considerable leap in the number of pure OA journal titles offered by commercial publishers, resulting in an increase from 13,400 articles in 2005 to 119,900 in 2011. Using the same publisher categories Laakso and Björk (2013) went on to study journal publishers’ approaches to delayed OA (defined as “scholarly articles in subscription journals made available openly on the web directly through the publisher at the expiry of a set embargo period”). They found that 98% of all delayed OA content stemmed from three publisher types: 52% by society publishers, 33% by commercial publishers and 13% by university presses. They note the difference between these proportions and the proportion of publishers overall in these categories, observing that society publishers were far more likely to make content available on a delayed OA basis than other types of publisher.

Whilst such analyses might suggest that learned societies are the most ready to engage with OA by offering liberal Green OA policies and delayed OA, it is interesting to note that in Pinfield et al’s study on the total cost of publication (2016), nine of the top ten highest APCs are charged by society publishers—even though it is the large commercial publishers who dominate in terms of percentage share of the Gold and hybrid journals market.

Country (UK/US)

Morris (2007) noted that over half of the journals listed in Ulrichs were published either in the USA or the UK with 34% being US-based and 19% being UK-based. As of May 2017, the SHERPA RoMEO database of 2375 journal publisher copyright policies included 558 (23%) from the USA and 280 (12%) from the UK. Whilst these proportions are slightly smaller, it is clear that the UK and the US are still the dominant players in the scholarly journal publishing market and no other country is home to so many.

It has often been observed how the US and the UK have differed in their approach to OA. In the US from the earliest beginnings of the NIH public access mandate in 2005, the preferred route was Green open access to the accepted manuscript, and this did not change when the Office for Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) instituted their public access to federally funded research memo in 2013. The policy required that all research (publications and data) funded by US federal agencies should be made available on OA with an allowable 12-month embargo period.

In the UK, the Finch report (2012:7) entitled Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications concluded that “a clear policy direction should be set towards support for publication in open access or hybrid journals, funded by APCs, as the main vehicle for the publication of research, especially when it is publicly funded”. The UK Research Councils (RCUK) then instituted an OA policy (2013) which stated that such Gold OA publishing was their preference (although Green OA would be acceptable within certain embargo periods) and they provided additional monies to UK HEIs with large tranches of RCUK funding to pay APCs. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that Laakso and Björk (2012) study of OA publishing showed that Europe had a far higher proportion of pure Gold OA articles than North America at all census points (2000, 2005 and 2011). Johnson et al. (2017:6) also observed that within Europe, “countries [such as the UK] with a significant academic publishing industry are more likely to favour Gold OA”.

Despite this propensity towards Gold in the UK by the core Government funding agencies, Archambault et al. (2014) found that there was more variety in funder OA policies in the UK than the US, with the UK having the largest volume of funder OA mandates (34) followed by Canada (14), the US (9), Denmark (6), Ireland (5), and France (5). Of course, funding agencies do not exclusively fund research performed within the national base, and researchers world-wide may find their work subject to an OA policy that was devised elsewhere.