---
title: "Economics of open science"
chunk: 15/15
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_open_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:49:05.253185+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Economic regulation of open science ==
Economic regulation of scientific publishing has long be stuck in a "collective action dilemma", due to the lack of coordinations between all stakeholders: "To truly reduce their costs, librarians would have to build a shared online collection of scholarly resources jointly managed by the academic community as a whole, but individual academic institutions lack the private incentives necessary to invest in a shared collection."
Although it was initially expected by some economists, that the academic publishing markets would be structurally disrupted by new open access competitors, change was mostly driven by scientific communities, scientific institutions and, lately, coordinations of funders. In the 2000s, forms of regulation appear at a local scale to solve obvious market failure in the management of open science outuput. Development of research data repositories has been sustained by the implementation of "government or funder mandates for open data that require the producers of data to make them openly accessible". Mandates have been less easily expanded to other scientific outputs such as publications, that could not be covered by open data programs and were already invested by large commercial structures. In the great recession, scientific institutions and libraries had to balanced significantly reduced budgets, which entailed a first wave of big deal cancellation as well as "promoted the search for alternatives to this model". This specific context created a precedent for a secondary wave of big deal cancellation, no longer solely motivated by fund cuts but also by "the advance of open science"<ref>
In the early 2010s, leading publishers had come under heightened pressure to convert to open access. Along with the mobilization of researchers, the realization that academic publishing no longer operated in normal market conditions has redefined the position of scientific funders and policy-makers: [For Robert-Jan Smits], "if we really want OA to become a reality, we just have to make it obligatory, I thought: no more friendly requests, but rules and implications." Freedom of Information Requests has come to unveil the real cost of big deals in several countries. On July 17, 2012 the European Union issued a recommendation on Access to and Preservation of Scientific Information that called to "define clear policies" on open access. This approach "was a major shift compared with the previous EU 7th Framework Programme (2007–13), which had defined OA merely as a pilot action in select areas." It initiated a new cycle of regulatory policies of large academic publishers. The Horizon 2020 research program made open access a requirement for funding.
The Plan S was originally "a simple plan" mostly addressed to funding agencies: "any researcher who receives a grant from one of them must only publish in an OA journal under a CC BY licence". The early draft included a mechanism to cap the price of Article-Processing charges that was finally not retained in the final version. The first official version released in September 2018 favored "transformative agreements, where subscription costs are offset by publication costs, can help to accelerate the transition to open access." While criticized for its bias in favor of commercial open access, and the perpetuation of high publishing costs, the Plan S has facilitated the creation of a global coordination in negotiations with large publishers.

== References ==

== Bibliography ==