---
title: "Economics of open science"
chunk: 1/15
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 economics of open science describe the economic aspects of making a wide range of scientific outputs (e.g., publications, data, software) to all levels of society.
Open science involves a plurality of economic models and goods. Historically, academic journals and other academic institutions, such as learned societies, have favored a knowledge club or a toll access model: publications are managed as a community service for the selected benefit of academic readers and authors. During the second half of the 20th century, the "big 5" largest publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and the American Chemical Society) have partly absorbed or outcompeted non-profits structure and applied an industrial approach to scholarly publishing.
The development of the web shifted the focus of scholarly communication from publication to a large variety of outputs (data, software, metrics). It also challenged the values and the organization of existing actors with the development of an international initiatives in favor of open access and open science. While initially distanced by new competitors, the main commercial publishers have started to flip to author-pay models after 2000, funded through article processing charges and the negotiation of transformative deals. Actors like Elsevier or Wiley have diversified their activities from journal ownership to data analytics by developing a vertical integration of tools, database and metrics monitoring academic activities. The structuration of a global open science movement, the enlargement of scientific readership beyond professional researchers and increasing concerns for the sustainability of key infrastructures has enabled the development of open science commons. Journals, platforms, infrastructures and repositories have been increasingly structured around a shared ecosystem of services and self-governance principles.
The costs and benefits of open science are difficult to assess due to the coexistence of several economic models and the untraceability of open diffusion. Open publishing is less costly overall than subscription models, on account of reduced externalities and economies of scale. Yet the conversion of leading publishers to open science has entailed a significant increased in article processing charges, as the prestige of well-known journals make it possible to extract a high consent to pay. Open science brings significant efficiency gain to academic research, especially regarding bibliographic and data search, identification of previous findings and text and data mining projects. Theses benefits extend to non-academic research, as open access to data and publications eases the development of new commercial services and products. Although the overall economic and social impact of open science could be high, it has been hardly estimated.
The development of open science has created new forms of economic regulations of scientific publishing, as funders and institutions has come to acknowledged that this sector no longer operated in normal market conditions. International coordinations like the cOAlitionS attempt to set up global rules and norms on to manage the transition to open science.

== Economic models ==
Debates on the economic theory of open science have been largely influenced by the classic typology of economic goods between Private goods, Public goods, Club goods and Common-pool resources. According to a common definition matrix gradually developed by Paul Samuelson, Ricard Musgrave and Elinor Ostrom, private goods and club goods are exclusive (they cannot be freely shared and are exclusively used by owners or members), while private goods and common goods are rivalrous (they cannot be consumed simultaneously).
In theory, the outputs of open science could be defined as public goods: they are not exclusive (free-licensed publications, data or software can be shared without restriction) and they are not substractive (they can be indefinitely copied). In 2017 an OECD report underlined that research data "exhibit public good characteristics" as "it is not exhausted in consumption (i.e. it can be consumed many times without being diminished), and it may be inefficient to exclude potential users". For Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess this approach does not fit with the actual uses and constraints of knowledge online. Like shared natural resources, the outputs of open science can be polluted, exhausted or enclosed: "The parallel, yet contradictory trends, where, on the one hand, there is unprecedented access to information through the Internet but where, on the other, there are ever-greater restrictions on access (...) indicate the deep and perplexing characteristics of this resource". Additionally, in contrast to other forms of knowledge commons, open science actors continue to enforce exclusion rules for the creation, curation and administration of resources: "the scientific and scholarly commons furnishes information input into a scientific discovery but the Mertonian norms of priority award the property rights in the claim to whoever is first to publish."
The leading definitions of open access and open science are sufficiently ambiguous to allow for a plurality of allocation systems: "open access is a boundary object that does not refer to a common set of practices, assumptions or principles." Consequently, uses and models of open science can span the entire typology of economic goods:

The coexistence of the differing economic models of open science remains an evolving process. Competing narratives of the future of open access involve all the potential axis of open science goods: they include the disruption of legacy scientific publisher by new competitors, the transformation of private scientific goods into public goods and the rehabilitation of community-led governance. Nikos Koutras has argued for a structural inflexion of the role of commercial publishers, which would act more as editorial service than gatekeeper, as "it is feasible for authors to not rely on [them]".
Models of open science are embedded into wider socio-economic structures. North-South inequalities remain a major structural factor, that affect not only the access and use of open science output, but also the way the discourses and representations on open science.