The Latest Trend Adopted by Traditional Publishers

Publishers have been the gatekeepers of scientific information ever since they started acquiring journals in the 1960s and ’70s. Today, there are more than 2000 publishers with an estimated 30,000 journals under their belt.

In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing unit, the biggest commercial publisher, reported a profit margin of 36%, higher than what Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year. With revenues touching USD 25 billion, commercial academic publishing is an extremely profitable industry—and has been for a very long time.

Even in the internet age, with information on everything freely available, and the open access movement threatening to disrupt this model, commercial publishing has remained profitable.

The cash cow of the academic publishing industry is scientific articles. Publishers relied on the subscription model, where readers would pay a fee to access articles on the journal owned by the publisher. But today, almost all journals offer open access—they are either fully open access or offer the option of publishing under open access. More than 2,300 of Elsevier’s 2,500 journals offer the option to publish open access and make an article freely available.

In the early 2000s, the open access movement started gaining more importance. People felt that taxpayer-funded research should be made available to the public for free. There were growing calls from key stakeholder groups in Europe (e.g., Plan S) and Latin America (e.g., SciELO) to open science and make research accessible to all for free.

Open access has been a topic of debate among publishers, a majority of whom feel that making high-quality research available for free will make their business unsustainable.

But many publishers are embracing open access.

What has led publishers to go from protesting against such initiatives to embracing them? And how did publishers turn this into a successful model?

If you can’t beat them, join them

Publishers probably realized that the only way to survive the threat of open access and stay relevant was to adapt. And adapt they did.

Many journals switched from a subscription model to a pay-to-publish model. The readers no longer have to pay to read, but researchers who wish to get their papers published under open access, do. They also offer options: gold vs green access and fully open access vs hybrid.

Publishers have been taking steps to show their commitment to open access to various degrees. SAGE Publications, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley are part of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. In 2019, Wiley signed a 3-year contract with Projekt DEAL, allowing more than 700 academic institutions to access Wiley’s articles.

Many eggs, many baskets

Publishers are looking at diversifying their portfolio by offering a variety of researcher solutions—often integrated into one ecosystem.

The best example, again, comes from Elsevier. The publishing giant’s products and services include Scopus (abstract and citation database), EMBASE, SciVal (research performance visualization tool), Pure (research information management system), Analytical Services (research performance analytics), Elsevier Fingerprint Engine (NLP-powered techniques to extract information from unstructured text), Mendeley (reference management software), QUOSA (literature management tool), and Veridata (data collection).

Publishers are not shying away from exploring solutions outside. After Elsevier acquired the SSRN eLibrary, it launched First Look, a service that enables journals can publish preprints on SSRN. Taylor & Francis acquired F1000Research, a platform that allows researchers to publish preprints, invite open peer review, and revise the papers after publication. Wiley and Springer Nature offer a similar preprint service: Under Wiley’s Under Review, authors can submit their manuscripts and track them on the Authorea preprint server (Wiley acquired Authorea in 2018). Springer Nature’s In Review service allows researchers to track the status of their manuscripts, including when reviews have been received, after hosting them on the Research Square server.

There are a host of researcher solutions available, and surely many more are in the offing. With publishers looking more actively to add these solutions to their bouquet, authors can expect a more seamless publishing experience. No longer do they have to use one solution for literature search, another to identify suitable journals, then a third to run a submission readiness check, and one more to submit their paper. More publishers are moving toward becoming a one-stop-shop for all researcher solutions.

Going with the tide

One aspect that is not commonly explored is the direction key players are moving in. While we have explored the motivation for publishers to move toward open access—at least to some extent if not completely—we must acknowledge that funders have played a key role in bringing about this change.

Plan S, backed by the European Commission and the European Research Council, is a major force in Europe. In the US, the movement received a boost in 2013 when the Obama administration introduced a policy that required taxpayer-funded research to be made freely available online within 12 months of its publication in a journal.

In the last few years, open access policies have been implemented by major funders like the Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation (both members of Plan S) as well as institutes like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA.

The publishing landscape is highly integrated and its key players interdependent. Changes in one segment are bound to effect changes in another. With funders and research institutes moving toward open access, it is not surprising to see publishers follow suit. But what’s interesting to observe is the level of innovation they have brought about. They are not just embracing open access; they are evolving it into something more powerful. It’ll be interesting to see what further innovation publishers can bring about— something that researchers over the world are keen to observe.

This article is a part of ScienceTalks Magazine issue Welcome to the New Era of Open Publication.