Academic library budgets are the primary source of revenue for scholarly journal publishing. Given the global economic uncertainty surrounding Covid-19, this month we examine the outlook for academic library spending. A Core Source of Revenue Academic libraries are the majority contributor to scholarly publishing revenue streams. Although exact estimates vary, around 90% of scholarly journal… Read More
Watch the companion News & Views online discussion forum here. Predicting the Impact of Current Events Scholarly publishers are wondering how the COVID-19 pandemic and the unfolding economic downturn will impact the scholarly journals market. Of course, this is an impossible question to answer definitively, but are there events in the past that we can… Read More
Each year we survey the list Article Processing Charges (APCs) of a sample of major and significant publishers. Covering over 16,000 titles, this represents one of the most comprehensive reviews of open access pricing. Headline Changes To compare like for like, we analyze non-discounted, CC BY charges. Overall, list prices are increasing slowly: Maximum APCs… Read More
As part of our annual sizing update at the end of 2019, we added significantly more information about regional publishing adoption to our market analysis tools. This month we examine patterns in global output and find some interesting nuances in the shifting balances between regions. A quick note on multi-author papers When analyzing geographic uptake,… Read More
Overview Delta Think’s OA Market Sizing shows that the open access market continues to grow faster than the underlying journals publishing market, and faster than we previously expected. (Market Size represents revenue generated by providers or, conversely, costs incurred to buyers of content.) We estimate it to have been worth $675m in 2018 and on… Read More
Although it’s still not perfect, the data about scholarly output has improved over the last couple of years. We recently analyzed all 110m records in the Unpaywall data set to see if we could determine the uptake of OA at scale and set it in the context of non-OA output. The results might surprise you.… Read More
Last month we started looking at whether it’s possible to find definitive information about where to publish, and about which journals are fully open access. We looked at the sizes of various indexes to see how comprehensive they are, but noted that size is only part of the story. This month we look at how… Read More
Last month we looked at how inclusion in the DOAJ is increasingly being used as a benchmark to identify an “acceptable” fully OA journal. The DOAJ is not an exhaustive index, as criteria for acceptability can vary between indexes and stakeholders. Therefore, this month we look at additional indexes and journal types. We investigate whether… Read More