---
title: "Economics of open science"
chunk: 3/15
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"
---

==== Knowledge club and open science ====
The OA Diamond Study states that non-commercial journals in open access "maintain a secular tradition of "club" journals, set up for the uses and interests of a specific closed community of knowledge." While access to read is no longer a material condition for membership, non-commercial journals are still largely managed for the benefits of a community. They are "still strongly embedded in institutional environments (from a legal and governance perspective)."
Club journals have gained a new relevance with the development of electronic publishing and played a fundamental role in the early development of online open science in the early 1990s. Pioneers of open access electronic publishings were non-commercial and community-driven initiatives that built up on a trend of grassroot publishing innovation in the social sciences and the humanities: "In the late '80s and early '90s, a host of new journal titles launched on listservs and (later) the Web. Journals such as Postmodern Cultures, Surfaces, the Bryn Mawr Classical Review and the Public-Access Computer Systems Review were all managed by scholars and library workers rather than publishing professionals."
The development of the web and free editing tools for scientific publications like Open Journal System made it possible to run non-commercial journals and apply automated editorial routines at a limited cost: "model made economic sense as outsourced specialisation, but technological change has upended that logic by dramatically lowering the cost of in-house production." Equipment in personal computers has additionally reinforced the free exchange of services among club members, as new contributions could be made beyond peer review evaluation: "The wide availability of desktop hardware and software enabled new capabilities among authors, and an expectation from publishers that authors would self-manage much of the layout and editing of articles." Unless they had largely transformed their publication in a commercial activity, knowledge clubs and historical scientific societies have embraced open access: since 2014, the Royal Society has published the Royal Society Open Science journal.
New forms of research infrastructure developed in the context of open science have also retained some features of a "club model". While they create and manage a common or a public goods, research data repositories are frequently developed for the selected benefit and prestige of a few institutions: "In the case of research data repositories, such a "privileged" situation may arise for research funders, research centres, universities, or a disciplinary group or society that may gain recognition and further funding from supporting or hosting an open data repository." Yet, a full membership or club model, that would also include restrictions to access, remains rare among research data repositories as "it is difficult to develop and maintain a group large enough to cover costs, affecting both scale and sustainability."
Despite the continuities, the articulation between the historical values of the club (exclusion, internal management, centrality) and the new values of open science remain challenging. Scientific clubs have long maintained an ambiguous position on the value of openness. While openness was held as fundamental scientific principle, that makes it possible to have a free exchange of ideas, knowledge club have also relied on structural mechanism of exclusion: "A claim of openness, and a narrative that this openness sits at the core of the value system, that is not quite realized in practice. The building of institutions that seek to enhance openness – the Royal Society holding formalized meetings, open to members, in the place of private demonstrations – that are nonetheless exclusive (...) Yet what is passed down to us today, is less that exclusive gentleman's club and more the core values that it sought to express."
Recent developments of open science and citizen science creates a new source of tension that is still not resolved: "There are profound challenges to adapting our institutions to interact productively with differing knowledge systems, but we are perhaps for the first time well placed to do so." According to Samuel Moore, the main discourses on open science and scientific commons continues to encover exclusionary practices reminiscent of historical knowledge clubs : "many uses of the term commons in scholarly communications are themselves ill- or un-defined and intend to evoke a kind of participatory, inclusive or freely accessible resource."

=== Open Science market ===

==== Scientific publishing: a hybrid market ====
In Western Europe and North America, direct ownership of journals by academic communities and institutions started to wane in the 1950s. The historical model of scientific periodicals seemed unable to keep up with the quickly increasing volume of publication in the context of big science. In 1959, Robert Maxwell created one of the first giant of scientific publishing, Pergamon and through the following decades acquired hundreds of journal to small university press and scientific societies. While theses journals were not very profitable individually, with such a high concentration made Pergamon became "too big to fail" and was able to impose its own conditions to academic libraries and other potential customers. This approach was applied as well by Springer and Elsevier. Scientific publishing in the second half of the 20th century has been described as a two-sided market with "significant network externalities" since "authors prefer to publish in academic journals with the largest readership, and readers prefer the journals with the best authors".
Due to high market concentration, scholarly journal are not "subtractable": they cannot be replaced by equivalent product on the market, which hinders  competition. The development of bibliometric index has reinforced this locked-in process, as highly quoted journals will receive more submissions.
By the 1980s, the CEO of Elevier, Pierre Vinken aimed for an annual growth rate of 20%, mostly through an uncontrolled raise of subscription prices. From 1985 to 2010, the budget allocated by American Research Libraries to periodicals increased five-fold.