This month, we look at how fully Open Access journals are managed differently depending upon who publishes them.
Background
Most publishers need to ensure that their income at least covers their costs, whether they are mission based or profit driven. Assuming constant prices, for open access publishing, income is driven primarily by the number of papers published. For subscription publishing, it’s driven primarily by the numbers of journals published. Costs scale based on numbers of papers for both. It would then be logical to assume that publishers focus increasingly on article volumes over numbers of journals as they publish more open access. But what do the data tell us?
For purposes of comparison, we split publishers into two types:
- Mixed Model publishers, which publish a mix of journal types: fully open, hybrid and those with no OA option. This category includes many established publishers.
- OA Only publishers, which only publish fully OA journals. This category includes PLOS, Frontiers and MDPI. For the purposes of analysis, it also includes F1000 and Hindawi. These are now owned by Mixed Model publishers, but they were born-digital fully OA publishers and so bear comparison with other publishers of similar ilk.
How different publishers scale
Patterns in output vary between publisher types and by journal type, as illustrated in Figure 1.
OA Only publishers publish more articles per journal.
- OA Only publishers’ journals contain 4 to 5 times as many papers as journals from Mixed Model publishers.
- While this is certainly expected for subscription and hybrid journals, this holds true for fully OA journals published by Mixed Model publishers as well. Fully OA journals at Mixed Model publishers are publishing far fewer articles than their OA Only publisher counterparts.
- When looking at fully OA journals, it appears that publisher type, rather than journal type, is a better predictor of journal size.
How the situation has changed over time
Figure 2 shows how the situation has evolved.
We can see that the large difference in average journal size discussed above hasn’t always been the case. Average fully OA journal sizes of Mixed Model publishers are shown in grey (the left-side of each pair of bars), and those of OA Only publishers in orange.
- Fully OA journals from OA Only publishers have always been larger than those from Mixed Model ones.
- A decade or so ago the difference was small, but journals from OA Only publishers have grown exponentially over the last few years.
- The jump in OA Only publisher journal size around 2012 was driven by PLOS One really taking off, against a background of relatively few titles at that time. As more OA Only publisher titles came out, the averages fell back slightly even though output was growing.
Conclusion
The scaling of fully OA journals shouldn’t be surprising. Unencumbered by physical print constraints, digital journals can simply publish more papers to meet demand – assuming the publisher workflows can keep up.
The economics of OA publishing support this too. As the publisher publishes more papers, income follows directly. The paper is the basic unit of economic output. Contrast this with a subscription journal, where greater throughput means more cost and less margin (surplus) until the publisher can increase prices. The journal is the basic unit of economic output, so the main way to justify greater subscription prices is to publish more journals and sell larger collections. The economics of fully OA journals favor growth in journal size, but those of journals relying on subscription income inhibit growth.
However, it appears that publisher type, rather than journal type, is a better predictor of journal size. Whatever the journal’s economics – and whether the organization is for profit or not – it seems that Mixed Model publishers continue to publish fully OA journals of similar sizes to their other journal types. OA Only publishers have historically published slightly larger journals, but the size of their journals has really taken off over the last decade.
It appears that Mixed Model publishers continue apply their tried and trusted subscription thinking to their fully OA journals. This means that they need to create more and more journals to keep up with demand, with all the overhead that implies. Meanwhile, the new kids on the block have no such qualms. Why publish more journals when you can simply publish more stuff?
This article is © 2023 Delta Think, Inc. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Please do get in touch if you want to use it in other contexts – we’re usually pretty accommodating.
TOP HEADLINES
PeerJ announces a new Open Access model and the University of Bath as their first institutional partner – May 16, 2023
“PeerJ has announced a new Open Access model…Annual Institutional Memberships (AIMs) remove payment barriers to Open Access for authors, reduces the administration of Open Access payments, and guarantees value for partners. The University of Bath is PeerJ’s first partner in this new program, which will provide unlimited publishing for Bath’s faculty for a flat annual fee.”
Principles of Diamond Open Access Publishing: a draft proposal – May 15, 2023
“The Action Plan for Diamond Open Access outlines a set of priorities to develop sustainable, community-driven, academic-led and -owned scholarly communication. Its goal is to create a global federation of Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) journals and platforms around shared principles, guidelines, and quality standards while respecting their cultural, multilingual and disciplinary diversity.”
The MIT Press receives $10 million endowment gift for open access to knowledge – May 8, 2023
“The MIT Press today announced that it has received a $10 million gift from Arcadia…to establish the Arcadia Open Access Fund. The new fund will support the MIT Press’s ground-breaking efforts to publish open access books and journals in fields ranging from science and technology to the social sciences, arts, and humanities.”
EU ready to back immediate open access without author fees – May 5, 2023
“The EU is ready to agree that immediate open access to papers reporting publicly funded research should become the norm, without authors having to pay fees, and that the bloc should support non-profit scholarly publishing models. In a move that could send shockwaves through commercial scholarly publishing, the positions are due to be adopted by the Council of the EU member state governments later this month.”
2023 OA Week Theme Announcement: Community over Commercialization – April 27, 2023
“‘Community over Commercialization’ is the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week (October 23-29). This theme encourages a candid conversation about which approaches to open scholarship prioritize the best interests of the public and the academic community—and which do not.”
OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES
May 15, 2023 | The MIT Press to launch open access journal Imaging Neuroscience | “The MIT Press today announced that it will launch Imaging Neuroscience in summer 2023. Intended to become the premier journal in the field of neuroimaging, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief will be Dr. Stephen M. Smith, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Oxford University.” |
April 14, 2023 | “On World Quantum Day, Optica Publishing Group announced it will begin publishing a new journal in September 2023 dedicated to highly selective results in quantum information science and technology (QIST). The new journal, Optica Quantum, joins the Society’s portfolio of the most-cited journals in optics and photonics.” |