---
title: "Economics of open science"
chunk: 8/15
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"
---

==== Consolidation of the common ecosystem (2015-) ====
Since 2015, open science infrastructures, platforms and journals have converged to the creation of digital academic commons. While they were initially conceived either as a public good (a "grid" that ensure the distribution of a non-excludable resource) or a club good (with a limited range beyond a specific communities), open science infrastructures have been increasingly structured around a shared ecosystem of services and standards has emerged through the network of dependencies from one infrastructure to another. Open science infrastructures face similar issues met by other open institutions such as open data repositories or large scale collaborative project such as Wikipedia: "When we study contemporary knowledge infrastructures we find values of openness often embedded there, but translating the values of openness into the design of infrastructures and the practices of infrastructuring is a complex and contingent process".
The conceptual definition of open science infrastructures has been largely influenced by the analysis of Elinor Ostrom on the commons and more specifically on the knowledge commons. In accordance with Ostrom, Cameron Neylon understates that open infrastructures are not only a public good characterized by the management of a pool of common resources but also by the elaboration of common governance and norms. The economic theory of the commons make it possible to expand beyond the scope of limited scope of scholar associations toward large scale community-led initiatives: "Ostrom's work (...) provide a template (...) to make the transition from a local club to a community-wide infrastructure." Open science infrastructure tend to favor a non-for profit, publicly funded model with strong involvement from scientific communities, which disassociate them from privately owned closed infrastructures: "open infrastructures are often scholar-led and run by non-profit organisations, making them mission-driven instead of profit-driven." This status aims to ensure the autonomy of the infrastructure and prevent their incorporation into commercial infrastructure. It has wide range implications on the way the organization is managed: "the differences between commercial services and non-profit services permeated almost every aspect of their responses to their environment".
As of 2022, major actors that have formally adopted the core principles of open science infrastructures (or POSSE) include Crossref, CORE, OpenAir, and OpenCitations.
Consolidation of the commons ecosystem has been also visible in non-commercial journals, which moved from a knowledge club paradigm to more global commons initiative. While the daily management of non-commercial journals fit better to the definition of a knowledge club, more innovative models of governance "tend to bridge the secular heritage of scientific societies with the new wave of digitized knowledge commons such as Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap". New forms of common-based regulations and distributed decision-making processes have been gradually introduced: "The ascending role of the editorial committee and volunteers brings OA diamond journals closer to community-run projects where contributors are constantly self-learning and appropriating tasks" Integrations of the specific perspectives of the global South have redefined the common "understandings of the commons" beyond the perspectives of "more powerful stakeholders, wealthy disciplines and countries in the Global North".
The future of scientific commons remain a debated issue. The OA Diamond Study underlines the Open Access Commons as a potential future road of development for non-commercial open access journals and beyond: "The OA Commons will be a new more integrated international OA publishing system and ecosystem that serves the research community." Fragmentation has hindered on the development of non-commercial structures. Reliancy on small local communities result on a low visibility to potential readers or funders: most of the estimated 17,000 to 29;000 non-commercial journals are currently off the charts of scientific publishing indicators. The creation of common services and infrastructures as well as inter-disciplinary and inter-community coordinations may contribute to overcome built-in limitations of the knowledge club model: "The OA Commons will be community-driven and will bring communities together who already are or want to work together to become more effective." Alternatives visions of scientific commons include more decentralized models of "small, semi-autonomous projects that are loosely affiliated but mutually reliant" as large platforms and infrastructures could be "unable to account for nuanced relational practices of commoning in local communities and a variety of contexts."

== Cost ==
Due to the coexistence of several economic models, there can be no unilateral estimate of the cost of open science. Cost-estimate frequently relies on different "scenarios" that match the different models of open science. In 2021, Grossmann and Brembs retain 7 different scenarios that includes outsourcing to a leading commercial publisher, small-scale non-commercial journals supported by free software and volunteer contributions or a hypothetical "decentralized, federated platform solution where all scholarly articles are published without being divided into journals". Economies of scale are also a significant factor, as large platforms and infrastructures can benefit from bundled expenses in numerous areas.
According to Grossmann and Brembs the total costs of scholarly publication range between $194.89 to $723.16 per article. Regardless of the wide variation per models and potential economies of scale, even the highest estimate of costs of publications in open science are low: "publication costs only cover 15% of the subscription price (...) assuming a conservative profit margin of 30% (i.e., US$1,200 per article) for one of the large publishers there remains a sizeable gap of about US$2,200 in non-publication costs, or 55% of the price of a scholarly subscription article".