---
title: "Economics of open science"
chunk: 5/15
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"
---

==== From readers to authors: hybrid and full open access ====
The early developments of Open science and the open sharing of scientific publication on the web was at first a challenge for leading commercial publishers: the executive board of Elsevier "had failed to grasp the significance of electronic publishing altogether, and therefore the deadly danger that it posed—the danger, namely, that scientists would be able to manage without the journal". Initial experiments of scientific journals were mostly led by non-commercial initiatives.
Commercially viable open access journals have appeared in the late 1990s, under the leadership of new competitors such as the Public Library of Science (PLOS), MDPI or Hindawi. They relies generally on the author-pay model: the journal provides an editorial service to the author of a publication and charge an article-processing charge to cover the editing costs. This practice is anterior to open access, as subscription-based journals held by scientific societies occasionally charged for additional services (such as photographies in color). For Peter Suber, this economic model is similar to broadcast television: "If advertisers can pay all the costs of production, then a TV studio can broadcast a show without charging viewers. In the case of scholarly research articles, the model works because authors are willing to relinquish royalties to get their message across and a growing number of institutions that employ researchers or fund research are willing to consider the cost of dissemination".
After 2000 large commercial publishers started to adopt a hybrid business model also termed open choice: authors have either the possibility to submit for free a paywalled articles or pay for a free versions. This practice has been increasingly criticized as double dipping. Due to the complexity of the publishing market, largely structured around big deal license, scientific publishers were in a position of "collecting money twice" Supervisors of open access policies have become more skeptical of the transitory nature of hybrid models. According to the lead coordinator of Plan S, Robert-Jan Smits "when I then asked [the large publishers] when this transition would be completed, they were silent. The reason for this was clear: they saw hybrids as a way to continue the status quo." To overcome this risk, the Plan S stated that transformative journals will no longer be compliant after a transition period that ends in 2023.
While they were originally devised for a subscription-based model, big deals have been repurposed as large scale agreement to generalize commercial open access. Since subscription costs were already bundled at a national level, they could be repurposed as publications licenses or Article-Processing Charges licenses as part of a journal flipping. In 2015, the Max Planck Society issued a White Paper on the economic cost of the transformation to open access: "All the indications are that the money already invested in the research publishing system is sufficient to enable a transformation that will be sustainable for the future." In this context, the APC become the default business model for all journals: "Our own data analysis shows that there is enough money already circulating in the global market – money that is currently spent on scientific journals in the subscription system and that could be redirected and re-invested into open access business models to pay for APCs." The economic debate over journal flipping has largely evacuated the issue of potential savings: negotiations aim rather to ensure a global conversion to open science at the same costs as existing subscriptions licenses. Several national negotiations with big publishers attempted to implement the journal flipping approach with a limited success.
Commercial open access models based on article processing charges create new structural inequalities, no longer in terms of access to read but access to publish. High APC prices mean that in practices global south authors are bound to be cut off from major journals: "APCs also present a problem for researchers in the Global South, who typically have much smaller budgets to work with than their northern counterparts."

==== From publishing to analytics: diversification of revenue streams ====

In parallel with the open science movement, leading scientific publishers have diversified their activities beyond publishing and moved "from a content-provision to a data analytics business". The ubiquituous use of digital technologies in research activities and in the institutional management of science and highed education has been "creating new income streams". Large publishers have been well positioned in this new market, as they already have know-how, the infrastructures and  intellectual property on a large range of scientific outputs. Additionally, they have the necessary resources for long-term investments thanks to the accumulated high margins of journal subscriptions. Negotiation of "big deal" additionally created a favorable framework, as access to subscriptions or APCs could be easily tied with exclusive contracts on other databases and tools.
In the 2010s, leading publishers developed or acquired new key infrastructures for the management scientific and pedagogic activities: "Elsevier has acquired and launched products that extend its influence and its ownership of the infrastructure to all stages of the academic knowledge production process". In the past two decades, there has been 340 merging and acquisitions for Elsevier, 240 for Informa (Taylor & Francis) and 80 for Wiley.  While most of theses transactions were linked to academic content, until the 2010s, it has quickly been expanded to academic "services" and other data analytics tools. Although all leading publishers attempt a vertical integration of existing and new services it can take different shapes. For instance there is "a clear attempt by Wiley to enhance its control over the university decision-making process in education, as Elsevier has for academic knowledge production." By 2019, Elsevier has either acquired or built a large portofolio platforms, tools, databases and indicators covering all aspects and stages of scientific research: