2019-12-15
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Here are a few quotes from:

	The Oligopoly of Academic 
	Publishers in the Digital Era

	by

	Vincent Larivière
	Stefanie Haustein,
	Philippe Mongeo

	Published: June 10, 2015 

	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

I have tried to not change the content, although I did
pick the most interesting parts. Please check out the
original paper for full content. 

I may write some commentary on this, but for now, here
are the quotes which I hope you will find interesting.
I think the subject is extremely important.

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   This year (2015) marks the 350^th anniversary of the
   creation of scientific journals. Indeed, it was in
   1665 that the Journal des Sc,avans and the
   Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
   London were first published, in France and in England
   respectively. They were founded with the intent to
   advance scientific knowledge by building on
   colleagues' results and avoid duplication of results,
   and established both the principles of scientific
   priority and peer review. They changed the process of
   scholarly communication fundamentally, from personal
   correspondence through letters (which had become "too
   much for one man to cope with in his daily reading and
   correspondence"), society meetings, and books to a
   more structured and regular distribution of scientific
   advancements. This structured form, combined with a
   regular and wide dissemination, enabled systematic
   recording and archiving of scientific knowledge.

   Although the digital format improved access, 
   searchability and navigation within and between 
   journal articles, the form of the scholarly journal 
   was not changed by the digital revolution. The PDF 
   became the established format of electronic journal 
   articles, mimicking the print format. What was affected 
   by the digital revolution is the economic aspect of
   academic publishing and the journal market.

   On the whole, 44,483,425 documents are analyzed 
   for the 1973-2013 period, which include all
   document types published by various journals.

   In terms of numbers of papers published, the five
   major publishers in NMS, accounted, in 1973, for
   little more than 20% of all papers published. This
   share increased to 30% in 1996, and to 50% in 2006,
   the level at which it remained until 2013 when it
   increased again to 53%. In this domain, three
   publishers account for more than 47% of all papers in
   2013: Reed-Elsevier (24.1%; 1.5 fold increase since
   1990), Springer (11.9%; 2.9 fold increase), and
   Wiley-Blackwell (11.3%; 2.2 fold increase). The
   American Chemical Society (3.4%; 5% decrease) and
   Taylor & Francis (2.9%; 4.9 fold increase) only
   account for a small proportion of papers. In the SSH,
   the concentration increased even more dramatically.
   Between 1973 and 1990, the five most prolific
   publishers combined accounted for less than 10% of the
   published output of the domain, with their share
   slightly increasing over the period. By the mid-1990s,
   their share grew to collectively account for 15% of
   papers. However, since then, this share has increased
   to more than 51%, meaning that, in 2013, the majority
   of SSH papers are published by journals that belong to
   five commercial publishers. Specifically, in 2013,
   Elsevier accounts for 16.4% of all SSH papers (4.4
   fold increase since 1990), Taylor & Francis for 12.4%
   (16 fold increase), Wiley-Blackwell for 12.1% (3.8
   fold increase), Springer for 7.1% (21.3 fold
   increase), and Sage Publications for 6.4% (4 fold
   increase). On the whole, for these two broad domains
   of scholarly knowledge, five publishers account for
   more than half of today's published journal output.

   Since the creation of scientific journals 350 years
   ago, large commercial publishing houses have increased
   their control of the science system. The proportion of
   the scientific output published in journals under
   their ownership has risen steadily over the past 40
   years, and even more so since the advent of the
   digital era. The value added, however, has not
   followed a similar trend. While one could argue that
   their role of typesetting, printing, and diffusion
   were central in the print world, the ease with
   which these function can be fulfilled--or are no
   longer necessary--in the electronic world makes one
   wonder: what do we need publishers for? What is it
   that they provide that is so essential to the
   scientific community that we collectively agree to
   devote an increasingly large proportion of our
   universities budgets to them? Of course, most journals
   rely on publishers' systems to handle and review the
   manuscripts; however, while these systems facilitate
   the process, it is the researchers as part of the
   scientific community who perform peer review. Hence,
   this essential step of quality control is not a value
   added by the publishers but by the scientific
   community itself.

   Thus, it is up to the scientific community to change
   the system in a similar fashion and in parallel to the
   open access and open science movements.

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