---
title: "Economics of open science"
chunk: 9/15
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"
---

=== Editorial work and evaluation ===
Editorial work and the management of peer review remain the core activity of academic journals and their most identified contribution and service rendered to scientific communities. It is the main expenses of the non-commercial journals surveyed by the OA Diamond Study: "the five main expenses/payables of the journal are editing (531), copy-editing (463), technical and software support (393), typesetting (384), and design (336)". Translation is a frequently quoted added cost, that may have been incentivicized by open science as the potential audience of local non-academic readers create incentives to maintain a multilingual website. Even before their conversion to electronic publishing, non-for-profits journals have maintained an affordable price, due to a nearly exclusive focus on editorial services: "in 2013, the mean price per article in for-profit journals was 3.2 times higher than in non-for-profit journals, and that the corresponding ratio for the median price per article was even 4.33:1". With Internet publication, costs can be significantly lower, due to additional cuts in transaction and labor costs, use of share platforms and infrastructure or reliance on voluntary work: "over 60% of journals reported annual costs in the previous year under $/€10,000, including in-kind contributions."
In contrast with the more technical aspects of scientific publication, editorial work cannot be easily scaled. Unless relying on volunteer work, cost in time and expertise is roughly similar: "For certain tasks, for example copyediting or typesetting, there are hundreds of individual companies worldwide providing those services (...) having compared the pricing of those service providers with others, we found only a very small variation of cost for such tasks". The only potential margin is by allocating this work to the scientific authors: "The wide availability of desktop hardware and software [has created] an expectation from publishers that authors would self-manage much of the layout and editing of articles."
For Peter Suber, the expenses of open science journals "peer review is the most significant." As an inheritance of the historical model of knowledge club the main costs of peer review are not directly supported by journals: the evaluation is performed freely by researchers. Following the expansion of commercial journals since the late 20th century, free services of peer review have increasingly become an over-exploited resource. The conversion of subscription journals to author-pays model of open access has added new pressure to a strained practice: as authors are the main customers of what has essentially become an editorial service, fast-track evaluation are in high demand. While the development of integrated editorial system has streamlined the editorial process of receiving and managing reviews, locating competent reviewers is major issue and create added costs and work to journal editors: "finding, recruiting and retaining reviewers" are a major concern of non-commercial journal editors.
The development of new Open science platforms and infrastructure makes it possible to unbundle the academic editorial workflow: "costs are reduced by eliminating the need for type-setting and copy-editing, with web-hosting costing only $15/year, and a total operating cost of between $6.50–$10.50 per article." Through theses mechanism, "open access has the opportunity to become a cost-reducing mechanism for scholarly publishing."

=== Technical infrastructure ===
Conversion to electronic publishing has created significant economies of scale. Large scale publishers has been among the first beneficiaries of reduced editorial and technical cost, through to the concentration and the standardization of the publishing infrastructure: "These newly empowered players brought an industrial approach to the publication and dissemination process, for the first time realising the benefits that these specialised capital and skills could provide by operating at a scale that was unprecedented to that date." This process started before the development of electronic publishing, with the creation of internal databases to manage peer-review and other key aspects of editorial management. Large academic search engines finalized this process: "As the dominant publishers build databases, discovery systems, and online platforms to house large and integrated collections of journals, it is more difficult for small publishers to compete with them. Building an effective platform for publishing e-journals is expensive (...) After a platform has been created, it is much cheaper and easier to add new journals to it than to build new and redundant platforms."
After 2000, non-commercial publishers and infrastructure have gradually benefited from the same economies of scale, due to the development of open software tools dedicated to academic production such as Open Journal Systems, that facilitated the creation and the administration of journal website and the digital conversion of existing journals. Among the non-commercial journals registered to the Directory of Open Access Journals, the number of annual creation has gone from 100 by the end of the 1990s to 800 around 2010. By 2021, Open Journal Systems has become "a widespread solution in the peer review management of journals".
Many Open Science Infrastructure run "at a relatively low cost" as small infrastructures are an important part of the open science ecosystem. 16 data research repositories surveyed by the OECD in 2017 quoted technical infrastructure and shared services among the costs "most likely to be susceptible to cost optimisation". In 2020, 21 out of 53 surveyed European infrastructures "report spending less than €50,000". Overall, European infrastructures were financially sustainable in 2020 which contrasts with the situation ten years prior: in 2010, European infrastructures had much less visibility: they usually lacked "a long-term perspective" and struggled "with securing the funding for more than 5 years".
Beyond the economies of scale, technical infrastructure also created fixed costs to standard publishing services such as article identification (DOI), plagiarism check, long-term digital preservation and standardized XML. While most of theses services are covered by flat fees at a limited expenses, it can still affect significantly the tight budgets of small non-commercial journals.