Oligarchification of Journals

Increasingly, academic journals (particularly those in the sciences) are controlled by a small number of publishers.

• From the Springer Nature Annual Progress Report 2023, Springer owns:

  • • the world’s largest fully OA journal, "Scientific Reports"  

    • more than 600 other fully OA journals across six imprint brands

  • more than 2,200 hybrid journals 

    • more than 30 "Nature" research journal

• From the RELX (formerly Reed-Elsevier) Anuual Report 2022:

  • RELX accounts for about 25% of all academic articles published globally

• From this study (Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127502. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502), published in 2013, it was demonstrated that an academic journal oligarchy was on the rise, and had been since the mid-1990s:
  • "This paper provides such analysis, based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973-2013. It shows that in both natural and medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis increased their share of the published output, especially since the advent of the digital era (mid-1990s). Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. Disciplines of the social sciences have the highest level of concentration (70% of papers from the top five publishers), while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% from top five publishers). NMS disciplines are in between, mainly because of the strength of their scientific societies, such as the ACS in chemistry or APS in physics"