Skip to Main Content

Research Guides

Getting Published: An Introduction to Issues in Scholarly Publishing

Supports the Getting Published Workshop Series offered by UTL on the St. George campus.

Overview

Some unique features (D’Agostino, 2018):

  • Much of the labour is provided to publishers for free
  • Lack of “moral hazard” on part of participants
  • Price discrimination strategies
  • Monopolistic competition (i.e., products are not substitutable)

That being said, publishers do provide value:

  • Maintenance and upgrading of technological systems and standards
  • “Publication” serves important function in careers of researchers
  • Growth in price has corresponded with growth in # of publications
  • Since end of WW2, number of researchers publishing research has grown exponentially

 

The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era

Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015)
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

“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.”

 

Growth of Open Access

Number of articles (A) and proportion of articles (B) with OA copies, estimated based on a random sample of 100,000 articles with Crossref DOIs. 10.7717/peerj.4375/fig-2