The European Commission-backed Plan S project to promote open-access publishing may have “inadvertently” strengthened the dominance of big for-profit publishers despite hopes it would curb their market power, a new study claims.
In a recent Scientometrics paper charting the rise of a new “oligopoly of open access publishing”, Fei Shu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Science and Education Evaluation at Hangzhou Dianzi University, and Vincent Larivière, from Université de Montréal, explain how hundreds of new outfits have entered publishing in recent years, with the number of open-access journals increasing from 1,368 in 2008 to 8,442 in 2020.
Over this period, the number of open-access publications increased tenfold from about 194,000 to 1.9 million annually – a compound growth rate of 21 per cent, the paper adds.
However, while the arrival of new players showed the overall market had become “more competitive”, the trend in the “high-end market” of open-access journals – those indexed by the Web of Science, which also grew tenfold, from 65,434 in 2008 to 640,169 in 2020 – showed a “shift in market concentration” towards larger publishers.
