---
title: "Economics of open science"
chunk: 4/15
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 small society presses, struggling to cope with growing scale, were supported and then largely supplanted by the 'Big 5' commercial presses: Elsevier (which acquired Pergamon in 1991), Wiley, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Sage. 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.
As it became a private good, the scientific journal was also transformed into an industrial product, with an increased standardization of publishing norms, peer-review process or copyrights. In contrast smaller scientific publishers participate to a more typical publishing market, with a persistent competition. Four out of the five most costly journals "are published by big five publishers".
With the conversion to electronic journals, scientific publishing became a hybrid market: along with individual subscriptions, leading publishers introduced big deals or pluri-annual licenses to large bundle of journal titles. Big deals were typically negotiated with national networks of research libraries and academic institutions. Big deals proved advantageous to publishers as well as they limited the "administrative costs" of managing a large number of contracts between journals and buyers. The bundling of thousands of journals titles made it possible to ensure the commercial viability of journals that would have had a limited success. In 2011, David Colquhoun showed that 60% of the journals included in the Elsevier licenses granted to the University College were accessed less than 300 times per year and 251 journals were not even accessed once. Even though the inflation of individual subscription cost has slowed, the total amount allocated to scientific periodicals has continued to rise: "While the North-American research libraries spent about a third more on journals than on monographs in 1987, this ratio had risen to about four to one by 2011."
Following the generalization of the big deal model, the main transactions between large publishers and scientific institutions no longer operated under normal market conditions with fixed public prices: "An optimal pricing strategy when bundling electronic information still does not exist (...) Prices will be determined in bilateral negotiations and every library pays a different price according to its institutional willingness to pay." Opting out of a big deal is a nearly impossible choice for major scientific institutions as "big deals of different publishers are complementary and not substitutes". Big deal licenses are usually covered by non-disclosure agreements, so that prices can be determined on the basis of the financial capacity of the buyer: "these practices give publishers pricing flexibility that allows them to try to charge the highest price that each institution is willing to pay and make it hard for new publishers to compete." For Jason Potts et al., this deviation from the market norms shows that the market model is fundamentally less efficient than the knowledge club in the context of scientific publishing. It creates more ecosystemic costs than the direct management of the journals and other scientific outputs by the community: ""If our argument is that clubs and communities are capable of acting together to solve collective action provisioning problems in ways that are more efficient than either markets or the state, then the dissolution of clubs, or their inability to coordinate, will lead to inefficient or non-existent provisioning." Due to increased concentration, large publishers also became a powerful lobby: in the United States, Elsevier had long influenced some key policy issues relating to the economy of publishing and was able to significantly slow down the transition to open access.
The scientific market is structured by large scale inequalities. Overpriced subscriptions and paywalls have been "a major barrier to progress in developing countries"' While leading publishers have initiated programs at a reduced costs for developing countries, their impact has been limited by the complexity of the subscriptions procedures: "the library or consortia have to go through a procedure to request the discount, assuming they know it exists and can navigate the bureaucracy involved."