---
title: "Economics of open science"
chunk: 6/15
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"
---

the largest supplier of academic journals is also in charge of evaluating and validating research quality and impact (e.g., Pure, Plum Analytics, Sci Val), identifying academic experts for potential employers (e.g., Expert Lookup5), managing the research networking platforms through which to collaborate (e.g., SSRN, Hivebench, Mendeley), managing the tools through which to find funding (e.g., Plum X, Mendeley, Sci Val), and controlling the platforms through which to analyze and store researchers' data (e.g., Hivebench, Mendeley).
Since it has expanded beyond publishing, the vertical integration of privately owned infrastructures has become extensively integrated to daily research activities: "the privatised control of scholarly infrastructures is especially noticeable in the context of 'vertical integration' that publishers such as Elsevier and SpringerNature are seeking by controlling all aspects of the research lifecycle, from submission to publication and beyond". In contrast with publication, which was an outsourced business separated from institutional and community activities, the new services developed by large publishers are embedded in the infrastructure of universities and create potentially stronger dependency links: "Pure embeds Elsevier within the university workflow process through its abilities to manage research at the university level, including the provision of a dashboard to facilitate decision making by university research administrators (Elsevier, "Features")."
Metrics and indicators are key components of vertical integration: "Elsevier's further move to offering metrics-based decision making is simultaneously a move to gain further influence in the entirety of the knowledge production process, as well as to further monetize its disproportionate ownership of content". While depency subscription journals has been fragilized by the open science movement, metrics can create a new locked-in situation for scientific institutions: "For universities keen on raising or maintaining their rankings, publishing in Elsevier high impact journals may help them gain the advantage (...) vertical integration and the promotion of citation metrics and algorithmic recommendations may, in fact, constitute rent-seeking behavior designed to increase." Consequently, a shift of leading publishers to data analytics is not incompatible with the parallel development of a large APC market for open science publishing. For Samuel Moore, it is even "incentivised by the governmental policies for OA through APCs, repository services" as it create new "need to track compliance".
The emerging open science market has been compared with the business models of social networks, search engines and other forms of platform capitalism. While content access is free, it is indirectly paid through data extraction and surveillance. "If the primary negative manifestation of market power in the publishing sector is high paywall price (lack of access, therefore), the result of monopolistic competition in academic data analytics will be the combination of dependence and surveillance that we might associate with, e.g., Facebook." Increasing similarities with other digital platforms may have contributed to the increased regulations on the academic publishing market in Europe in the 2010s: "It's why Facebook, Apple and Google are now dominant: once they are controlling X per cent of the market, it's almost impossible for a competitor to come up."

=== Open Science Commons ===
The concept of commons was originally developed to describe the management of "a resource shared by a group of people" and the establishment of common governance rules to ensure that the resource is not overused or polluted (which would result in a tragedy of the commons).</ref> Similarly to club goods, common goods are used and maintained by a community. Yet, the membership is no longer exclusive: "toll goods (also called club goods) share with private goods the relative ease of exclusion". Typical forms of commons include shared natural resources like timber, berries or fishes. They are managed by unformal local associations. Governance rules are neither rigid nor pre-existing but have to be adapted to the specific requirements of the resource and the local environment: "One of the central findings was that an extremely rich variety of specific rules were used in systems sustainable over a long time period. No single set of specific rules, on the other hand, had a clear association with success." Common goods are also differentiated to Public goods (such as air or radio waves) due their subtractibility: natural resources can be depleted and rules have to be put in place to ensure they will not be overused.