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2020 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

4. Profiting from Open Access Publishing

verfasst von : Arwid Lund, Mariano Zukerfeld

Erschienen in: Corporate Capitalism's Use of Openness

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

A total of 830,000 peer reviewers, of which a large part can be estimated to be unpaid or underpaid, are open to Elsevier’s and other commercial academic publishers’ exploitation. On top of that, Elsevier and other commercial academic publishers are prospering from research that is paid for by someone else, and that someone else (often the public) is in most cases paying the companies to publish the research. This is profit for free at its prime. The company Elsevier and other commercial open access (OA) publishers profit from openness in a direct way by charging Article Processing Charges (APCs) for its OA publishing, and by not reimbursing allocated articles (within Read & Publish agreements) that have not been published. It is also hard to control the company’s claim that it is not using the commercial strategy of double dipping in relation to hybrid journals. The system with hybrid journals, together with the engagement of company representatives, naturalizes the existence of high APCs. Finally, the analysis shows that Elsevier profits indirectly and ideologically from openness by open-washing enclosed and toll-accessed subscription articles in hybrid journals with its OA-publishing. Recently Elsevier has started to co-opt and commodify even green OA’s institutional repositories. This move, together with the many other platforms and services (like Mendeley, Scopus and CiteScore) that concern the whole of academic life, risks creating a closed system in which the universities become locked into and dependent on the company.

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Fußnoten
1
After the acquisition, Elsevier owned around 1500 scholarly journals (Malakoff, 2000).
 
2
These licenses restricted the use of public domain content in the publishers’ databases, for example, Elsevier’s Science Direct (Guédon, 2001, p. 43; Kranich, 2007, p. 88), and they were combined with the introduction of heavy files in order to maintain control and profit margins. The TIFF format could not easily be distributed via regular modems and were cumbersome to print (Guédon, 2001, pp. 39–40).
 
3
From its start in early 1990s, OA went through three phases: the pioneering years between 1993 and 1999, the innovation years from 2000 to 2004, and the consolidation years between 2005 and 2009 (Laakso et al., 2011, p. 9).
 
4
The library community launched the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) in 1999 with the aim of providing access to publicly accessible and digital articles through a network of digital repositories (Kranich, 2007, p. 97). The more useful repositories complied with the OAI-PMH protocol (Open Archive Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) for metadata harvesting, and could simultaneously be searched for information through either Internet search engines or more customized search engines (Jisc, n.d.; Suber, 2012, pp. 56–7, 188n6; University of Southampton, n.d.).
 
5
The role of piracy in the process leading up to this partial acceptance of a publishing model is not yet, according to our knowledge, well researched.
 
6
The publishing sector’s interest groups argued in the Brussels declaration of 2007 that short embargo periods of six months were a threat to the subscription model (Annemark, 2017, pp. 37, 39). In 2010 the US Scholarly Publishing Roundtable (SPR) gathered representatives from both libraries and publishers such as Elsevier, AIP, PLoS and the American Society of Plant Biologists, and made recommendations of swift but gentle implementation of green open access (Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, 2010, p. ii). However, Elsevier’s representative Yongsuk Chi refused to sign the document because it allowed too much state involvement (Annemark, 2017, p. 49).
 
7
Parallel publishing of articles that Elsevier has previously published behind a subscription pay-wall is regulated by a restrictive CC license that prohibits derivative works and commercial uses (Tennant, 2018).
 
8
This action is also confirmed by university librarian Helena Juhlin at a seminar held at Linnaeus University, Växjö, April 29, 2019.
 
9
BMC was funded by venture capital, and pioneered commercial OA-publishing of peer-reviewed articles. The enterprise was soon financed by a mix of author charges, advertisements and institutional support (Kranich, 2007, p. 96; Laakso et al., 2011, p. 9). It also applied the cascade theory to legitimate that peer-reviewed submissions that had been rejected by the project’s top journals could instead get published in lower ranked journals (Jackson & Richardson, 2014, p. 231).
 
10
Hybrid journals sometimes open up the access to all their articles after an embargo period (Suber, 2012, p. 140).
 
11
In the time-span between 2008 and 2009, Elsevier had 21,250 articles in hybrid journals (430 OA), Springer had 100,000 (1,520 OA), Taylor and Francis had 15,000 (24 OA), Wiley 24,000 (342) (Jackson & Richardson, 2014, p. 240). The uptake for the various publishers was: Elsevier 2%, Springer 1.5%, Taylor & Francis 0.1%, and Wiley 1.4%.
 
12
OA-advocates understand the publishers’ growing embrace of gold OA during this period as also being a result of the protests from the library community and different national authorities and consortiums that for example canceled their contract with Elsevier (Persson, 2018, pp. 4–5; Wideberg & Lundén, 2019).
 
13
As of April 2019, the cOAlition S has 15 national research funding agencies, with added support from the Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and Campagnia di San Paulo (Science Europe, 2019a).
 
14
Non-disclosure agreements are very much at play and make information asymmetrical. Such enclosures impede transparency as comparisons between universities are made impossible (Björk, 2017, p. 104). Library Journal’s survey had to use the standard retail price for printed journals as many journals do not make their online-only pricing available (Bosch & Henderson, 2017). The survey’s result should therefore be taken as a rough estimate of contemporary tendencies.
 
15
The market for hybrid journals is characterized as dysfunctional by several scholars (Björk & Solomon, 2014b; Tennant, 2018).
 
16
Market leaders such as Elsevier and Microsoft, in the realm of software, often favor pay-walls, whereas companies like Springer Nature and IBM experiment more with openness in order to strengthen their business models as non-dominant market players.
 
17
Already in 2004, Elsevier had launched Scopus, a new “abstract and index database and navigational tool” (Reed Elsevier, 2005, p. 4). Two years later, in 2006, the database contained 30 million article abstracts from more than 15,000 peer-reviewed publications of scholarly articles (Reed Elsevier, 2007). At the same time, between 2006 and 2007, the use of ScienceDirect increased by as much as 20% (Reed Elsevier, 2008, pp. 20–1).
 
18
“Open access” is mentioned twice in the annual reports of 2013 and 2014, and three times in the 2015 and 2016 annual reports (Reed Elsevier, 2014, p. 16; RELX Group, 2015, pp. 16–17, 2016, pp. 14, 16–17, 2017, p. 16).
 
19
The category “transactional” is opaque, but includes the APCs.
 
20
It is unclear from these numbers if they include people who sit on multiple boards or review more than one article per year.
 
21
The use of big data in services of all sorts are mentioned in relation to the STM segment, but is highlighted in relation to all sectors of the company. HPCC systems (high performance computing cluster) is presented as Elsevier’s “open source big data technology” (RELX Group, 2018, pp. 10, 15). Big data seems to be of especial importance to risk and business Analytics (RELX Group, 2018, pp. 20–2), but LexisNexis also continued to develop its “analytical decisions tools” (RELX Group, 2018, p. 29) (RELX Group, 2018, p. 34).
 
22
The numbers in the table should be interpreted in an indicative and illustrative way, as they are based on categories that have changed between the years. The profit is the adjusted operating profit, the net income of the company (Law insider, 2019). Other sources claim that the profit could be as high as 40–50% before taxes (Van Noorden, 2013, p. 427).
 
23
USD 5200 is the highest APC that we have found.
 
24
The limits for this lower spectrum are only estimates.
 
25
The APC prices in full OA journals are increasing, and a positive correlation between high impact factor and increasing publishing cost is identified (Kungliga Biblioteket, 2019, pp. 10–11).
 
26
SJR takes its data from Elsevier’s Scopus.
 
27
There are also several types of editors. Most journals have a chief editor, one or two full editors, up to a dozen associated editors and even more editorial board members (Robson, 2017). Elsevier is claimed to be willing to compensate editors in order to prevent them from leaving and setting up an OA journal elsewhere. Science Guide also points out the potential effects of Plan S in this regard (de Knecht, 2019).
 
28
The most common embargo periods are 12 months and 48 months, but one journal Limnologica has an embargo time of 5 years (RELX Group, 2019b)
 
29
Zotero’s reference management system is licensed under Affero GPL v. 3. Zotero describes the relationship to Elsevier like this: “Mendeley 1.19 and later have begun encrypting the local database, making it unreadable by Zotero and other standard database tools. Elsevier made this change a few months after Zotero publicly announced work on an importer, despite having long touted the openness of its database format as a guarantee against lock-in and erroneously continuing to state in its documentation that the database can be accessed using standard tools. At the same time, Mendeley continues to import data from Zotero’s own open database, as it has since 2009” (Zotero, n.d.-a).
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Profiting from Open Access Publishing
verfasst von
Arwid Lund
Mariano Zukerfeld
Copyright-Jahr
2020
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28219-6_4