Delta Think

News & Views Webinar: APC Update 2026

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:29:19 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our March News & Views companion online discussion forum!

Each year, this session brings the community together for a data-driven look at article processing charge trends, market dynamics, and what the latest data signals for publishers, societies, funders, and institutions. If APCs factor into your strategy, pricing, or planning for the year ahead, this webinar offers insights grounded in longitudinal data and practical analysis.

If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

Ensuring Value in a Zero-Click World

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:14:55 GMT

What happens when the value of your content is extracted, summarized, and delivered via an AI tool … and the audience stops there?

As highlighted in The Scholarly Kitchen , this emerging dynamic, known as “the Crocodile Effect,” places AI systems between publishers and their audiences, consuming value while limiting downstream engagement. Recent data underscores the problem and urgency to address it.

Publishers across industries – not just scholarly – are seeing dramatic declines in traffic, and AI-driven upstream interfaces, though growing, contribute only a fraction of overall referrals. At the same time, emerging “zero-click” behaviors on search engines, social media, and AI driven platforms are conditioning users to expect answers without leaving the platform. This dynamic is particularly acute in scholarly publishing: highly structured, fact-rich content is uniquely susceptible to being summarized, recombined, and delivered elsewhere.

This creates a growing threat to how publishers capture and sustain value from their content through audience engagement.

What’s at stake for scholarly publishers

The implications go well beyond traffic metrics for scholarly publishers. The traditional model depends on a chain of value: discovery → access → engagement → monetization (via subscriptions, APCs, licensing, advertising, institutional relationships, etc.). AI summaries disrupt that chain at the very first step.

When key findings, data points, or interpretations are surfaced directly in AI interfaces:

Attribution becomes diluted , weakening brand recognition and authority.
Engagement declines , reducing usage along with opportunities for deeper reading, citation, and reuse.
Monetization pathways erode , particularly where metrics like cost per download (CPD), impressions, and click through rate (CTR) are used to determine value, collection development, and ad spend.
Content integrity risks increase , as summaries may omit nuance, context, or limitations critical in scholarly work.

In effect, publishers are providing the foundation for the knowledge economy without benefit, while AI platforms capture increasing portions of the user relationship.

What can you do in response?

Delta Think partners with publishers to address these issues, focusing on the following strategic areas related to usage and engagement:

1. Reassess what constitutes “value” in your content
If core insights can be summarized and consumed elsewhere, publishers must emphasize elements that are harder to replicate. The question shifts from “How do we get clicks?” to “What experiences require coming to us?”

2. Strengthen direct relationships with audiences
Invest or partner in channels where there is visibility. Developing strategies that involve your society networks, institutional integrations, and researcher and author workflows allow you to maintain direct engagement with readers and authors.

3. Optimize for visibility within AI ecosystems
Conduct research to evaluate how your content is represented and implement recommendations to address problem areas. This includes assessment and development of metadata strategies, structured content, licensing approaches, and partnerships that ensure accurate attribution and appropriate use.

4. Explore new monetization and licensing models
Identify the right approaches and determine the right deals for your content, while maintaining overall portfolio integrity.

5. Differentiate through utility and trust
Lean into this by establishing your market positioning as an essential destination for validation. Establish your voice based on voice-of-the-customer market research methodologies to ensure your messaging establishes you as the authoritative source for verification, context, and deeper understanding.

6. Monitor and measure emerging referral dynamics
Identify and implement new ways of tracking influence, reach, and downstream impact beyond clicks to demonstrate and quantify your value.

What’s Next: Work with Delta Think to Turn the AI Threat into an AI Benefit

Delta Think has expertise in all the areas outlined above. We ensure organizations develop actionable strategies to address current market changes and dynamics. The rise of AI-mediated discovery and zero-click experiences is an active and accelerating shift that requires evidence-based decision-making today. This is where Delta Think thrives.

Our expert insights provide publishers with the data needed to understand where their exposure to AI-driven disintermediation is greatest, how usage patterns are evolving across channels, and which strategic responses are most likely to drive sustainable value. This includes identifying where traffic loss is most acute, where new forms of engagement are emerging, and how content, data, and licensing strategies must adapt in response.

Delta Think can guide you in the development of a successful strategy that ensures the sustainability of your publishing program.

Lori Carlin and Heather Staines will be attending the upcoming STM Annual Conference (April 22-23, Washington, DC) and SSP Annual Meeting (May 27-29, Chula Vista, CA), and Heather will be at the 2026 CSE Meeting (May 3-5, Durham, NC), so please reach out to set up a check in and continue the conversation. Not traveling this spring? We are always available at info@deltathink.com .

News & Views: Open Access Charges – When “On Trend” Still Means Higher Spend

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:54:14 GMT

This month we examine our latest data about Article Processing Charges (APCs). Per article pricing is a fundamental building block for all paid publishing models, so our review provides an invaluable insight into how the cost of open access continues to evolve. APC prices in general continue to increase, but at a slower rate compared with this time last year. Important nuances in the distribution of prices continue to affect the value and cost of paid publishing models.

Background

Each year we survey the list price Article Processing Charges of a sample of more than 40 scholarly publishers. Our dataset covers more than 20,000 titles dating back to 2016 and represents one of the most comprehensive reviews of open access pricing.

To compare like for like, we consistently analyze non-discounted, CC BY APCs. We take a snapshot annually in January, so we can track yearly changes while controlling for publisher price changes throughout the calendar year. Our statistics here exclude zero or unspecified APCs, although these are present in our underlying data (and available to our subscribers). This allows us to capture trends where publishers choose to charge APCs without skewing averages. We run separate analyses around APC-free models.

Headline Changes

Going into 2026, we see APC prices increasing, but the percentage increases continue to fall back to track long-term trends.

Fully OA APC list prices across our sample have risen by around 6.8% compared with 6.4% this time last year.
Hybrid APC list prices have risen by an average of 5.3% compared with 3% this time last year.
Maximum APCs for fully OA journals remain at $8,900.
Maximum APCs for hybrid journals now top out at $12,850 (up $160 from last year).
Average APC prices have increased more this year than last year. However, the increases remain lower than the highs of a couple of years ago.

Underlying trends continue.

Average APC price increases are getting larger each year.
There are approximately 2.4x more hybrid journals than fully OA ones, down from 2.6x last year, and 2.9x a year before that. The proportion of journals that are hybrid is slowly falling. However, because they are the majority, hybrid journals follow (or, rather, set) a similar pattern to the market overall.
On average, fully OA prices are around 67% of those of hybrids – consistent with long-term trends.
Around 24% of our sample of fully OA journals charge no APCs, compared with 22% last year. (We have separately analyzed the number of articles in OA journals.)
Price increases vary significantly by discipline. Fully OA Arts and Humanities journals saw larger than average increases; Multidisciplinary journals saw lower than average increases.

Price Distribution

Market-wide headline price changes mask important nuances. We have discussed previously that the most important nuance lies in the spread of prices within a given publisher’s portfolio. For example, if the bulk of a publisher’s journals lie towards the lower end of its APC pricing, with just a few journals priced at the higher end, the average (mean) price will be higher than most authors pay.

The following figures show how the spread of APC prices plays out in the market across our sample of publishers. The figures are outlines of histograms, showing how many titles sit in various price bands over the successive years of data we have curated. The red line shows the most recent year’s prices. The lines become more green as they go further back in time. Subscribers to Delta Think’s Data & Analytics Tool can see full details of the Number of Titles and Price Band axes.

Hybrid Prices

The spread of price bands for hybrid journals is shown in Figure 1 below.

The overall spread of prices has remained relatively constant over time.

In 2019, the most popular price band shifted slightly towards the lower end of the market and remained there for a few years. However, in 2022 it moved back up to its historic high and has remained there since.
The steepest price increases occurred in 2020-21, when high-impact journals began offering hybrid options. For clarity, the chart combines the very highest APCs into one band on the right-hand side.
Average prices paid are heavily influenced by the shape of the curves on either side of the peak. Notice how the curve on the right side of the peak is becoming shallower and wider over time. This suggests that increasing numbers of journals are priced higher than average, and so average prices paid will increase. The curve to the left of the peak was getting shallower, but it is now getting steeper. Thus, the moderating influence of lower-priced journals is now reducing. As the curve widens, the peak reduces to keep the area under the curve roughly the same. This reflects the relatively small change in the total number of journals compared with previous years. We are therefore seeing a movement in price bands of existing journals to increase average prices paid, as higher APCs are becoming more prevalent.

Fully OA Price

The fully OA landscape is shown in Figure 2.

The data suggest that both the number of fully OA journals and their average APC prices continue to increase.

The peak of the curve is getting higher and moving to the right, so we are seeing an increase in the most popular price band and in average prices. In earlier years, the secondary peak suggested the presence of a significant number of journals cheaper than the most popular price band, which moderated the increase in average prices. In more recent years, the secondary peak moved to the right as prices increased and more expensive journals became more common.
As with hybrids, average prices paid are heavily influenced by the shape of the curves on either side of the peak. Notice how the curve on the right side of the peak is becoming shallower and wider over time. This suggests that increasing numbers of journals are priced higher than average, and so average prices paid will increase.
The height of the curve has also increased, illustrating that we are seeing an increase in the total number of fully OA journals. This is due to a mix of more journals being launched or acquired, hybrid journals being switched to fully OA, and increasing numbers of journals falling under “Subscribe to Open” arrangements.

Conclusion

Last year we noted that annual price increases fell back towards long-term trends after the previous year’s large increases driven by a high-inflation environment. Going into 2026, prices increased more than the previous year. However, they remain on trend, as the trend appears to be one of growing price increases.

While outlying price changes are important general indicators, they do not necessarily shift the market on their own. Changes in the spread and emphasis of popular price bands play key roles too. The growing proportion of higher-priced journals continues to increase the average APC prices actually paid.

As we explored at length in our analysis “APC Price Changes – When does up mean down?” , average headline price increases can lead to falling overall spend or vice versa, depending on the numbers of papers published and the spread of price increases across a publisher’s portfolio.

One moderating influence is the high number of journals – usually fully OA titles – that don’t charge APCs . We have not analyzed these here, as we want to focus on patterns in APCs actually levied. Fully OA journals that do not charge APCs are typically funded by some other means: This may be a form of sponsorship or, increasingly, the use of “Subscribe to Open” arrangements.

Per-paper APC information is useful in a wider context too. Even where deals are calculated based on bundles, they are often set by discounting from list APCs – especially where publication activity exceeds agreed caps. It is likely that the high number of journals with no APCs may have their sponsorship prices set based on the per-paper revenues desired. Similarly, understanding revenues generated per paper is important to calculate thresholds for journal flips or for launching and sustaining a "Subscribe to Open" model.

APC pricing in 2026 continues to trend upward, but the more important story lies in how prices are shifting across portfolios—reshaping the real cost of publishing in ways that averages alone can’t capture. As higher-priced journals become more prevalent and pricing distribution widens, understanding the full market context is critical.

For libraries and consortia, this means gaining the insight needed to benchmark spend, evaluate agreements, and plan sustainable open access strategies. For publishers, it means positioning portfolios competitively, testing pricing strategies, and understanding where opportunities—and risks—are emerging.

Delta Think’s Data & Analytics Tool (DAT) brings together comprehensive, longitudinal APC data across more than 20,000 journals, helping both sides of the market move from assumptions to evidence-based decisions. Get in touch to learn how DAT can support your strategy.

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This article is © 2026 Delta Think, Inc. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . Please do get in touch if you want to use it in other contexts – we’re usually pretty accommodating.

TOP HEADLINES

SPARC Europe: Launch of the AEGIS-OA Project – April 1, 2026

"We are proud to announce the launch of AEGIS-OA, a two-year project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon Europe call 'Enhancing the European R&I system.' This initiative aims to build a high-quality, non-profit scholarly publishing ecosystem by expanding the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) to include books and instrumentalising the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS)."

British Academy urges national long-form OA strategy – March 31, 2026

"The UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences, the British Academy, has called for a joined-up strategy, a sustainable financial model and meaningful engagement with authors when it comes to developing long-form open access (OA)."

EMS Press announces Launch to Open – a transparent new approach to open access – March 29, 2026

"EMS Press is introducing Launch to Open (L2O), a new model designed to help established journals move toward open access with clear costs, shared responsibility and community support. Like other community-based open access models, L2O distributes responsibility across subscribing institutions. What distinguishes L2O is its financial transparency; disclosing the full costs, targets and allocation of subscription revenue for each title."

CERN to host next phase of Open Research Europe platform – March 27, 2026

"CERN has been selected to host a new phase of Open Research Europe (ORE), an initiative supported by the European Commission and a new funding consortium of European national funding agencies and research organisations. Aligned with the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (2022), the initiative is positioned as a community-led alternative to traditional academic publishing."

All the Seats at the Table: A Summary and Status Review of the NIH APC Caps Proposal – March 20, 2026

"In July 2025, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed to implement caps on the amount of grant funding that can be allotted to article processing charges (APCs), the fees some publishers levy to license articles as freely accessible...The proposal added to the turbulence and uncertainty of the academic and scientific community surrounding open access (OA) publishing."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

10 APS Journals Open Access in 2026 Through Subscribe to Open – March 20, 2026

"The American Physiological Society (APS) has achieved its Subscribe to Open (S2O) goal in 2026, making 10 of its primary research journals open to readers worldwide with no article processing charges (APCs) for authors."

Pensoft launches a new diamond open-access journal: Advances in Pollinator Research – February 20, 2026

"In collaboration with the European Union pollinator projects community...Pensoft launched Advances in Pollinator Research, a new multidisciplinary, community-driven peer-reviewed journal set to transform how pollinator science is shared and translated into real-world action."

What Our Newest Researcher Survey Reveals About a Global System Under Strain

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 22:49:53 GMT

In Spring 2025, approximately 13,000 researchers told Delta Think that they were bracing for disruption tied to potential U.S. funding cuts and policy changes. Now with the results of our Fall 2025 Global Author/Researcher Survey, we have a second data point and an early longitudinal view of what is changing, what is persisting, and what may be becoming structural.

Delta Think partnered with 40 scholarly organizations across both surveys, collecting more than 25,000 responses from researchers across disciplines, career stages, and 125 countries. This scale allows us to move beyond a snapshot of sentiment and begin identifying sustained patterns in how researchers are responding.

The findings are straightforward: while the initial shock has eased, underlying pressures remain.

From Initial Reaction to Sustained Constraint

Compared to earlier in 2025, researchers report a modest softening in how they perceive the impact of funding uncertainty. While there are variations across the disciplines, the sentiment is more measured and overall concerns remain high. Across both surveys, the same concerns persist, and, critically, researchers are beginning to adapt their behavior in response.

The joint findings point to a system that is not rebounding; it’s recalibrating under sustained pressure:

Funding concerns remain deeply embedded.
Researchers across both waves continue to highlight funding stability and long-term research viability as primary concerns, suggesting these are perceived as ongoing constraints rather than short-term disruptions.

Research capacity is being reallocated.
Researchers report shifting time and effort toward securing funding, often at the expense of publishing and peer review. This signals pressure on both research output and the systems that support it.

Global engagement is stabilizing at a lower baseline.
Some of the sharper reactions seen in Spring 2025, particularly internationally, have moderated. However, researchers continue to reassess publishing, collaboration, and conference participation decisions, with financial and geopolitical considerations still shaping behavior.

What This Means for the Research Ecosystem

Taken together, these patterns suggest the research community is not in acute crisis, but it is not returning to prior norms either. Instead, we see early evidence of a more constrained operating environment taking hold, one where funding uncertainty continues to influence attitudes as well as day-to-day decisions about publishing, participation, and collaboration.

For publishers, societies, and research organizations, this distinction matters. Temporary disruption can be managed tactically. Sustained constraint requires strategic adjustment across pricing, portfolio strategy, engagement models, and advocacy.

What’s Next: Evidence for Strategic Decision-Making

Delta Think focuses on turning evidence into strategy. Our work is designed to help organizations ground decisions in real market data and signals, supporting informed planning in rapidly evolving environments. Our Fall 2025 survey represents the second phase of an ongoing annual research initiative. By continuing to track these dynamics over time, we aim to provide Scholarly Communications with the evidence needed to understand where there are shifts, where change is accelerating or stabilizing, what patterns are beginning to emerge, and what changes are likely to persist.

The full findings from our surveys, including deeper analysis, segmentation, and exploration of the trends are available to participating organizations and through access to our full report. If you’d like to learn more, see the complete results, or participate in our next survey, please reach out at: info@deltathink.com .

From Research Integrity Expectations to Operational Reality: Unpacking the STM Research Integrity Report

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:39:31 GMT

Trust is what allows research to function. It enables collaboration, supports editorial decision-making, and underpins the credibility of the scholarly record. Today, that trust is increasingly being tested. Competitive pressures, new forms of manipulation, and rapidly evolving technologies are raising both the volume and complexity of integrity risks. And our community is responding with clearer standards, better training, smarter workflows, and responsible innovation, strengthening the systems that protect confidence in science and scholarly publishing.

The STM Research Integrity report makes clear that the community is fully engaged. Publishers have invested heavily in dedicated teams, screening technologies, and workflow integration, and are focused on proactive prevention. However, the report does highlight a persistent challenge: expectations around research integrity are rising faster than many organizations’ ability to define, implement, and operationalize them consistently

The gap between expectation and execution is where many publishers and societies are now focused.

Defining What “Good” Research Integrity Practice Looks Like

One of the report’s central insights is the diversity of approaches publishers have taken to building research integrity capacity. Team size, tool adoption, workflow design, and policy scope vary widely—often for good reasons related to scale, discipline, and business model.

However, this diversity also makes it difficult for organizations to answer basic questions internally: What does “good” look like for us? Which capabilities are essential now, and which can follow later? How do we know whether our current approach is proportionate to the risks we face?

The STM report shows that effective integrity practice is about ensuring that policies, processes, and systems are coherent and fit for purpose. Translating this into action requires clear frameworks that help organizations define integrity expectations in ways that are realistic and aligned with their publishing context.

Turning Policy into Day-to-Day Practice

Integrity infrastructure only works if it is deployed consistently across the publication lifecycle. Clear policies must be supported by screening checkpoints, escalation pathways, investigation protocols, and well-defined roles for editors, integrity teams, and external partners.

In practice, many organizations struggle at this stage. Policies may exist on paper but are unevenly applied. Screening tools may generate signals without clear guidance on interpretation. Editors may be unsure when and how to escalate concerns.

The report illustrates how publishers who have made the greatest progress have focused on integration—embedding integrity checks into submission, peer review, revision, and pre-acceptance workflows, and ensuring that staff and editors understand how these pieces fit together. Achieving this level of operational clarity requires deliberate design.

Investing in Technology Without Losing Human Judgement

Technology plays a central role as an enabler rather than a solution. Tools surface signals; people make decisions. Managing false positives, avoiding workflow bottlenecks, and maintaining editorial confidence remain ongoing challenges.

For publishers and societies, the practical questions are how to select, combine, and govern tools so that they best support existing processes.

The report underscores a foundational tenet of Delta Think’s consultancy: evidence-based decision-making is paramount in understanding what tools will deliver in practice, what processes will best interact with workflows, and where additional human expertise is required.

From Expectation to Implementation

Research integrity is an operational capability that publishers and societies are defining, building, and most importantly, need to continuously refine.

Research Integrity ‘success’ will depend on a combination of tools, services, processes, and training consistently refined and applied. This is where Delta Think’s focused, evidence-led approach can make a tangible difference. We work with publishers and societies to interpret sector expectations, assess current vs. best-in-class capabilities, and design innovative roadmaps. Reach out today to discuss how we can partner to ensure your research integrity practices and processes are performing at peak efficiency and effectiveness.

News & Views: How Open Is “Open” Over Time?

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:14:26 GMT

This edition of News & Views looks at the changing patterns of license use over time. Are licenses becoming more or less permissive and what are the implications for scholarly publishers?

Introduction

Last month we compared the patterns of license use as reported by the members of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) with those observed in the wider scholarly journals market. Our comparison looked at the aggregated total numbers of licenses during the years 2015-2024. This showed a useful snapshot of the complete 10-year period spanned by the data.

But how has the use of license types changed over that time? This month we dive into the temporal changes, focusing on the core scholarly journals market based on data in our Data and Analytics Tool (DAT). DAT allows for multiple comparisons and in-depth analysis, and, in this edition of News & Views, we highlight a couple of interesting examples of trends over time.

The different types of OA licenses

We start by focusing on only Open Access (OA) journal output. Many funders and institutions mandating OA also insist on certain OA license types, typically more permissive CC0 or CC BY licenses (to be consistent with the foundational Budapest Open Access Initiative ). However, more restricted licenses, such as those prohibiting commercial or derivative use, are also broadly used. For the purposes of our analysis, we define these as follows.

“Permissive” refers to articles published under CC0 or CC BY licenses. These are the ones defined as required by major OA advocates, such as Plan S , Wellcome , HHMI , etc.
“Restricted” refers to articles published under other licenses that allow limited reuse, such as CC BY-NC (non-commercial), CC BY-ND (no derivatives), or publisher-specific licenses. Although not conforming to the strictest OA mandates, such licenses are widely used and are consistent with many mandated OA requirements. Publishers sometimes charge lower APCs for these more restrictive licenses compared with their permissive counterparts.

Data comparing the use of permissive vs. restricted licenses in open access output is shown below.

The chart above shows the share of open access articles attributable to our two major OA license types.

The permissive licenses (bottom half of the bars, light yellow) account for around 55% of OA output.
The restricted licenses (top half of the bars, darker orange) account for the rest.

The permissive licenses account for a slight majority of OA output with a long-term average of 57%. This has shown signs of a slight decrease in recent years.

Your mileage may vary

As ever, the market-wide averages mask important nuances, as shown in the following chart.

The chart above is the same as the previous one but only includes OA physics journals. We can see a very different pattern, with permissive licenses accounting for more than 90% of share over the long term. This has dropped to just below 85% over the last couple of years. Here we take physics as an example. Subscribers to our Data and Analytics Tool can examine this data for more than 200 subjects.

Other access types

Comparing permissive with restricted licenses provides useful insights for setting and understanding open access policies and activities. Mandates such as Plan S focus on fully open (“gold”) journals. But what about the rest of the market?

The chart above drills into more details about specific license types, excluding fully OA journals.

The chart covers only hybrid OA journals and those with no OA options.
The bulk of licenses used where the OA options in hybrid are exercised are now Creative Commons ones.
The most common licenses – marked as “Rights reserved” and shown in the dark grey, top most share of each bar – are not open, and typically copyrighted by the publisher. Their share peaked at just over 79% in 2023, with a slight falling back in 2024.
Although not shown in the chart, if we were to add fully OA journals back into the figures, we could see the Creative Commons share increase to around 40%, Other open to around 10%, and Rights reserved to around 50% in 2024.

Conclusion

As the share of open access has grown over the years, so has the share of open access licenses. However, as our data and analysis shows, there are important patterns to be aware of below the headline information.

First, the dynamics specific to permissive OA licenses (CC BY or CC0) are important as they speak to mandates from large funders who play an important role in driving OA uptake. Funders may take different views on journal format – hybrid vs. fully open – but many insist on licenses consistent with OA’s foundational Budapest Open Access Initiative . By categorizing licenses the way we do, we can easily see how their adoption is changing. We can further see the differences between general averages and specific subjects. Much like open access adoption itself , these differences can be profound.

Second, we can see changing patterns in license usage overall. Publishers have moved away from using their own licenses and now mostly adopt Creative Commons ones. The attribution-only CC BY license is now the most commonly used OA license, although this was not always the case. However, licenses with greater restrictions – such as non-commercial or no derivatives – remain a significant subset of the market. Again, this varies – particularly by journal type.

These patterns have important implications for the costs and revenues of the scholarly publishing ecosystem. Publishers may charge less for these more restrictive licenses, as they are able to extract revenue from sources other than publication fees.

Subscribers to our DAT can explore details further, illuminating how these dynamics apply to their specific situation and organization. Please get in touch to learn more about subscribing or to set up a demonstration.

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This article is © 2025 Delta Think, Inc. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . Please do get in touch if you want to use it in other contexts – we’re usually pretty accommodating.

TOP HEADLINES

MDPI Open Access Publishing Agreement with 96 Institutions Across Sweden – February 4, 2026

"We're pleased to announce that MDPI has signed a comprehensive Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) agreement covering 96 institutions across Sweden. If you are a researcher affiliated with a participating Swedish university, university college, or government research institute, here's what this means for you..."

IReL members supporting Diamond Open Access – February 3, 2026

"Since 2025, IReL has been promoting and coordinating members’ supports for Diamond open access publishing. Diamond open access means OA without any barriers to participation: the content is freely available to anyone to read or reuse, and authors anywhere are free to publish their works without publication charges or needing to be eligible for OA publishing agreements."

EIFL renews agreement with Taylor & Francis – January 26, 2026

"EIFL has renewed an agreement with Taylor & Francis, for three years until 31 December 2028. The agreement includes discounted access to journals and waived and discounted Article Processing Charges (APCs)."

IGI Global Scientific Publishing Launches Flat-Fee Open Access Publishing Agreement – January 14, 2026

"IGI Global Scientific Publishing—dedicated to “Publishing Tomorrow’s Research Today” since 1988, announces the launch of its Flat-Fee Open Access Publishing Agreement, offering a sustainable open access option for libraries and their institutions’ aspiring researchers with unlimited open access publishing."

First 100 path to open books now available open access worldwide on JSTOR – January 12, 2026

"JSTOR, part of the nonprofit ITHAKA, today announced a major milestone for open scholarship: the first 100 books published through Path to Open are now openly available to readers around the world. Originally released in 2023 with early access for Path to Open participating libraries, these titles have officially “flipped” to open access..."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

New Journal Announcement: Circularity in Built Environments - January 19, 2026

"Canadian Science Publishing (CSP) is pleased to announce the launch of Circularity in Built Environments, a new open-access journal set to open for submissions in March 2026."

JAPMA Transitions to Open Access Through New Publishing Partnership with MDPI - January 14, 2026

"The American Podiatric Medical Association (APMA) announced today that the Journal of the American Podiatric Medical Association (JAPMA) will transition to an open-access publishing model through a new partnership with MDPI, effective January 1, 2026."

Analysis Is Underway: A First Look at our Second Author–Researcher Survey

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:42:15 GMT

Building on last Spring’s survey of authors and researchers, we are once again analyzing responses from a large, global community to understand how shifts in the funding and policy environment are affecting research activity, priorities, and outlook. Conducted in partnership with 32 organizations, the Second edition of our Author–Researcher Survey was designed explicitly as a continuation of the work conducted in Spring 2025, allowing us to again take the pulse of authors-researchers, track emerging trends, and identify early signals related to real and perceived changes in U.S. science policy and research funding.

With 12,122 completed responses from researchers in 125 countries , the Second survey again provides a robust and diverse dataset. Analysis is ongoing and the high-level structure of the respondent pool is already clear, closely mirroring, while subtly extending, what we observed in the Spring of 2025.

A Global Community, with the U.S. at the Center of the Conversation

The most recent respondent pool again reflects a truly global research community. Just over half of respondents are based in the United States, with others reporting from a broad range of countries worldwide. This near-even U.S./international split remains one of the defining features of the dataset and is particularly important given the survey’s focus on U.S. policy and funding dynamics. The results continue to underscore that changes originating in the U.S. research system are global in scope, closely watched and widely felt well beyond national borders.

Science-Heavy Participation Anchored in Physical, Life, and Health Research

Physical sciences represent the largest single area of engagement, alongside strong representation from the life sciences, health sciences, and engineering and technology. Social sciences and the arts and humanities account for a smaller share of responses, and as in prior responses, many participants report working across multiple fields. This pattern reflects both the interdisciplinary reality of modern research and the continuity needed to support meaningful year-over-year analysis.

Insights Shaped Largely by Mid- and Senior-Career Researchers

Mid- and senior-career respondents make up the majority of the sample, complemented by a substantial cohort of early-career researchers and representation from graduate and doctoral trainees. This reinforces that much of the insight emerging from the survey reflects the perspectives of researchers with long-term experience navigating funding cycles, institutional change, and strategic research planning.

That experience is also evident in respondents’ professional roles. Faculty members and principal investigators account for the largest share of participants, alongside researchers, analysts, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. Clinically active professionals—including physicians and other healthcare providers—are also represented. The overall role mix remains highly consistent as compared to the Spring group, strengthening confidence that shifts observed in attitudes or behavior are not driven by changes in who is responding.

Why This Continuity Matters

One of the most important features of this current dataset is how closely its underlying demographic structure aligns with the Spring survey results. This consistency strengthens our ability to interpret changes in sentiment, expectations, and reported actions as genuine signals rather than artifacts of sampling. The scale and international reach of the most recent responses allow us to surface new nuances, particularly around how researchers are adapting to evolving policy signals, funding uncertainty, and institutional responses.

What Comes Next

We are digging into the full results to explore how researchers’ outlooks have evolved, including:

Whether perceptions of funding stability and risk are shifting
How researchers are adjusting research scope, timelines, or collaboration strategies
Persistent signals related to mobility, field-level vulnerability, and longer-term confidence in the research enterprise

Decisions about research funding, policy, and scholarly communication increasingly require evidence, not assumptions. Delta Think’s research process is designed to provide the scholarly communication community with the rigor, scale, and transparency needed to build sustainable strategies in an uncertain environment.

From survey design through analysis and reporting, our approach emphasizes methodological consistency, careful segmentation, and openness about what the data can support. By maintaining continuity year over year, we aim to surface credible trendlines that stakeholders across the research ecosystem can trust.

The Delta Think team designed this initiative to gather data and to support our partners across the scholarly ecosystem. By combining rigorous research design with deep industry context, we help publishers, societies, and institutions make informed, strategic decisions during periods of significant change.

If you’re interested in learning more about the findings or discussing how they apply to your organization, we’d welcome the conversation. Please email Lori Carlin to get started.

News & Views: How Open Is “Open”? What OASPA’s License Data Reveals About the OA Market

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:27:27 GMT

Overview

This month we look at the changing mix of licenses in use among OASPA members and what these trends reveal for open access publishing more broadly.

Introduction

Each year OASPA surveys its member organizations to gather information about the volumes of output they publish in their fully OA and hybrid journals. These data provide a useful lens on how the most OA-committed publishers are approaching licensing and how that compares with the market as a whole. We’re delighted to be working with OASPA on its survey again this year. We process the raw data into consistent categories, normalize publisher names, and create visualizations of the data over time. We also produce a yearly blog post in cooperation with OASPA, outlining some of their results.

Because space constraints limit what can be covered in OASPA’s own post, we explore additional angles here, placing OASPA member behavior in the context of Delta Think’s wider, market-level analysis. Subscribers to our Data and Analytics Tool can investigate the data further still. Our work with OASPA provides a complementary view into our market-wide analysis.

Use of Licenses

We can examine which common open access licenses are in use, as follows.

The chart above shows the share of articles attributable to various license types, comparing different sources. The left two bars analyze open access articles – for OASPA members on the left and Delta Think estimates for the core market from OpenAlex in the center. The right-most bar adds non-OA content to the OpenAlex figures, for context. The most permissive licenses are at the bottom (CC BY), through to the least permissive at the top, except for the tiny amount of CC0, highlighting how much reuse freedom is actually being granted. The data cover articles published from 2015 to 2024.

CC BY ( Creative Commons , attribution only) is by far the most prevalent form of license in use. It accounts for almost 75% of OASPA output and 46% of OpenAlex OA market output.
CC BY-NC-ND (which adds non-commercial and non-derivative restrictions), accounts for approximately 15% of output in both cases.
When non-OA content is included, “all rights reserved” unsurprisingly accounts for a substantial share—reflecting the fact that open access still represents only around half of total output in 2024, as noted in our Annual Market Sizing Update .

When surveying its members, OASPA gathers data on OA license use other than Creative Commons. OpenAlex does likewise in generating its data. We show these as “Other open” in the charts, which accounts for 28% of OpenAlex market output. If we were to remove “Other open, ”OpenAlex’s use of CC BY would drop to 64% of the remaining output, while CC BY NC-ND would rise to 20%. This underscores how sensitive headline figures are to classification choices.

Hybrid is Different

License use looks markedly different once fully OA (“gold”) journals are removed from the analysis.

The chart above is the same as the previous one but only includes hybrid journals and those with no OA option.

The use of more restrictive open licenses is much higher.
CC BY-NC-ND now accounts for more than 30% of OASPA members’ output and 20% of OpenAlex market output (rising to 27% excluding the “Other open” content).
CC BY has fallen back to around 54% of OASPA output and 44% of OpenAlex output.
More strikingly, more than 85% of all content outside fully OA journals remains fully rights-reserved, highlighting the relatively modest uptake of OA options in hybrid titles. Our DAT subscribers can explore use of OA in hybrid journals in detail.

Changing Make-up of OASPA Membership

A challenge we met in recent years was some large publishers either joining or leaving OASPA. Could these affect patterns in output and licenses in use by OASPA members?

The chart above is the same as the first one, except it compares current OASPA members (left – same as the first chart) with an assumptive scenario in which membership had not changed. The changes don’t look significant, but the use of CC BY would have been more prevalent:

Elsevier joined OASPA in 2022 . As Elsevier makes less use of CC BY licenses than the OASPA average, excluding it raises CC BY’s share of OASPA output by around 10 percentage points.
Springer Nature is no longer a member of OASPA. Because Springer Nature makes slightly greater use of CC BY licenses, adding it back increases CC BY’s share by around 5 percentage points.

These effects are modest but underline an important point: association-level data like OASPA’s can shift due to the members included in the data set and/or due to actual changes in behavior.

Conclusion

Comparisons between OASPA survey data and Delta Think’s market data are not strictly like-for-like as each represents different samples and methods. However, they set a useful context.

We last ran this comparison in 2023 . Since that time, CC BY licenses remain by far the most prevalent licenses in use. CC BY share has declined by 5 percentage points since then, but this can largely be attributed to Springer Nature leaving OASPA. On a like for like basis, CC BY continues to be the dominant license in use.

More than 99% of content produced by OASPA members is governed by Creative Commons licenses. Creative Commons accounts for the lion’s share (more than 70%) of the wider market. The “Other open” licenses include government licenses (which may be copyrighted, but with permissive reuse options), public domain licenses, software-style licenses (which allow permissive reuse), or publisher-specific open licenses most commonly used more by smaller publishers (not shown in our charts above).

Space constraints have limited us to looking at total output over the last 10 years or so. We will examine how the use of licenses has changed over time in a future post. Meanwhile, subscribers to our DAT can explore details further, including looking at how permissive (CC BY) licenses compare with restricted ones (such as non-commercial use) when broken out by discipline and by publisher. Please get in touch to learn more about subscribing .

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TOP HEADLINES

EIFL renews agreement with World Scientific – January 5, 2026

"EIFL has renewed and expanded its agreement with World Scientific for one year, until the end of 2026. The renewed agreement provides waived or discounted Article Processing Charges (APCs) for authors to publish in 145 hybrid or gold (fully) open access journals in various fields."

Jisc secures landmark publishing agreements for UK universities – December 24, 2025

"Jisc today announces the successful conclusion of negotiations, led on behalf of the UK higher education sector, with all five leading academic publishers – Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Sage – conducted under its Next Generation Open Access programme."

The Company of Biologists: Read & Publish Open Access agreement with IReL renewed for a further three years – December 18, 2025

"The Company of Biologists is delighted to announce the renewal of its five-journal Read & Publish agreement with IReL. Building on the success of our previous partnerships, we have signed a new agreement that will run from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2028."

The MIT Press and Open Mind partner with Lyrasis to support diamond open access publishing through the Open Access Community Investment Program – December 11, 2025

"The MIT Press and cognitive science journal Open Mind are excited to announce a partnership with Lyrasis through the Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP), an innovative model that brings together libraries, scholarly communities, and nonprofit publishers to support diamond open access journals."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

American Physical Society launches APS Open Science to expand global participation in trusted physics research - December 3, 2025

"As the scientific community embraces open science principles, the American Physical Society is launching a new open access journal designed to meet the moment. With submissions opening in late February 2026, APS Open Science will publish a diverse range of research outputs while upholding the trusted, rigorous review processes that define APS standards."

Impelsys and Delta Think Join Forces to Expand Strategy and Technology Capabilities

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 12:40:43 GMT

Impelsys and Delta Think Join Forces to Expand Strategy and Technology Capabilities for Publishing, Scholarly Communications, Education, and Healthcare Communities

New York, NY — 04 December 2025

Impelsys, a global technology services company, today announced the acquisition of Delta Think, a leading consultancy in scholarly communications. Together, the two companies will offer clients a powerful combination of strategy and technology expertise across publishing, education, and healthcare.

Since 2005, Delta Think has partnered with publishers, associations, and service providers to navigate change, understand their markets, and develop strategies for growth. Impelsys has been a trusted technology partner for more than two decades, helping organizations manage digital transformation and the accelerating shift toward AI. The company was an early pioneer in digital publishing, and its AI-enabled mon’k platform supports adaptive learning and digital content delivery for clients worldwide.

Together, Impelsys and Delta Think form a full-stack partner that can advise on business strategy and deliver technology execution at scale. Both organizations have deep, trusted partnerships with the clients they serve, and that commitment remains central as they move forward together.

“This is our first acquisition and a meaningful step in shaping the next chapter of Impelsys,” said Sameer Shariff, CEO of Impelsys. “Bringing Delta Think into the Impelsys family expands our capabilities in ways that matter and reflects our commitment to investing, both organically and through future acquisitions, to help our clients advance their digital and AI ambitions.”

“Delta Think was built for guiding clients to a deeper understanding of their markets, developing solutions built on evidence, and moving forward with confidence grounded in insight,” said Bonnie Gruber, Managing Director. “Joining Impelsys allows us to continue that same dedication and commitment while offering even broader solutions, expanding our global scale, and ensuring we continue to provide the level of innovative results our clients have come to expect from us,” added Lori Carlin, Chief Commercial Officer.

Delta Think will continue to operate under its own brand, with its leadership and team in place, now complemented by the expanded expertise and reach of Impelsys.

About Impelsys

Impelsys is a global technology leader, and a trusted partner in helping organizations transform into digital-first enterprises. Backed by more than two decades of experience, we unite engineering strength with domain insight to drive client innovation and scale. Our culture of close collaboration ensures clients can navigate a fast-changing digital and AI landscape with clarity and confidence. Headquartered in New York, we operate engineering and innovation centers across India, Portugal, and Colombia.

Learn more at www.impelsys.com

About Delta Think, Inc.

Delta Think is a strategic consultancy that guides organizations focused on scholarly communications and education toward transformational growth. Since 2005, we have served nearly 200 organizations across the scholarly enterprise by bringing together fresh perspectives and data-driven insights to create smart, actionable strategies. Fueled by curiosity and a passion for our clients’ success, we partner closely to uncover opportunities, validate assumptions, and chart clear paths forward, even in uncertain times. At Delta Think, we transform data and ideas into strategies that make a meaningful impact.

Learn more at www.deltathink.com

For more information, please contact:

Lori Carlin
Chief Commercial Officer
Delta Think, Inc.
lori.carlin@deltathink.com

Uday Majithia
Vice President, Solutions & Platforms
Impelsys
umajithia@impelsys.com

News & Views: Market Sizing Supplement 2025 – Your Mileage May Vary

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:44:55 GMT

Overview

Each year, our scholarly market sizing update and analysis goes way beyond open access headlines. One consistent finding is that market share of open and subscription access is highly dependent on subject area. This month we look at how to best use our Delta Think Data and Analytics Tool (DAT) to understand and analyze these variations. With coverage of approximately 220 detailed subject areas, the data shows that headlines can sometimes mask important detail.

Background

Since we began our scholarly journal market analyses in 2017, one of our core objectives has been to enable deep analysis of our headline findings.

Our annual market share updates represent a summing of data – more than 200 detailed subject areas, 200 or so countries, also split by society vs. non-society journal ownership. This level of detail is clearly too much for our monthly short-form analyses, so we present the market-wide headlines in our annual updates.

However, by picking one subject area as an example, we can see how much nuance lies beneath the surface, and why these variations matter. Subscribers to DAT can use our interactive tools to quickly and easily see each level of detail and filter for just those relevant to their organization.

Market Share Variation by Subject Area

Our latest market headlines suggested that open access (OA) accounted for just under 50% of article output in 2024. However, this headline proportion varies considerably by subject area.

Sources: OpenAlex , The Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers , ANZSRC , Delta Think analysis.

The chart above compares share or total output and share of access types for major subject areas.

It shows one bar for each major subject area across our sample of total monetizable scholarly journal output.
The total length of each bar is proportional to the subject area’s share of all output. So, for example, Engineering & Technology accounted for 20% of global output in our sample. ¹
The coloring of the bar shows the proportions of open access within each subject area (pink, left-hand side) with non-open access (grey, right-hand side).

We can see that prevalence of open access is dependent on subject area. For example, open access comprises around 90% of Multidisciplinary journal output, but 40% of Physical Sciences output. However, Multidisciplinary journals account for a small proportion of total output (around 3%). There are five times more articles published in Physical Sciences, so its footprint has far more impact in the overall market.

The Devil is in the Detail

Further, DAT can break broad-brushstroke subject areas to fields to illuminate detail including the business models and variations within them. The figure below shows one such example.

Sources: OpenAlex , The Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers , ANZSRC , Delta Think analysis.

The chart above drills into one part of the Physical Sciences: Physics, which is shown in the top bar. (In our taxonomy, Physical Sciences also includes Chemistry, Earth Sciences, and Mathematics.) Physics in turn has several subjects within it, including the three bars in the rest of the chart. The color variations show the share of output attributable to access types for each subject.

Output in fully OA (gold) journals is shown in yellow (left-most), then OA output in hybrid journals in blue (second from left). Together these add up to total open access output (comparable to the pink, left-hand proportions of the bars in Figure 1 above).
Output that is public access – free of charge to read but not to reuse – is shown in brown (second from right portions of the bars). Articles requiring a subscription to access are shown in gray (right-most). Together these add up to the non-open access output (comparable to the gray, right-hand proportions of the bars in figure 1.

So, what we see here is how appetites for different types of access compare between different subjects. Across the whole of Physics, open access comprises just under 40% of output (yellow + blue proportions).

However, when we drill into the different subsets of Physics, we see different patterns emerge.

Astronomical Sciences has a much higher appetite for open access, which makes up around 75% of its output, split roughly equally between fully OA (gold) journals and hybrid open access.
Compare and contrast this with Condensed Matter Physics, where OA makes up just 20% of its output, split roughly one third fully OA to two thirds hybrid OA. Most output here (around 70%) is via subscription access.
Like Astronomical Sciences, Particle and High Energy Physics shows a high appetite for OA. But more than 90% is in fully OA journals, compared with the roughly equal split in Astronomical Sciences.

Conclusion

Variations between disciplines are probably not news to stakeholders in the scholarly journals ecosystem. However, the level of variation – even within closely related disciplines – certainly warrants attention.

The analysis shows two important dimensions: First is the uptake or use of difference access types. This indicates the likely appetite for different business models depending on discipline and subject area. There are clear and sometimes significant variations between disciplines, and a specialty publisher or librarian should be aware of these when making plans, from editorial to collection management strategy and budgeting. However, variations within subjects in each discipline are even more marked. So even for a speciality operator, one size cannot fit all. There may be compelling cases for subscription journals in some instances and equally compelling cases for open access journals in others.

Secondly, scale is important. If a discipline produces only small proportions of overall output, then its appetite for one business model over another will make little or modest differences as part of a bigger whole. This can be an important guide to setting priorities.

It’s not possible to show the depth and diversity of this data in a thousand-word blog post, so we chose one subject area, field, and subjects as an example. But the principles behind this analysis apply across the board. With around 220 subjects in our data set, DAT offers key insights and actionable levels of detail. Subscribers to the Data and Analytics Tool have access to the full data set and analysis, combined with tools to dig deeper into specific subject areas, publishers, models, and more. Not a subscriber? Please reach out to get started.

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¹ The chart analyses article numbers, but we classify them by the subjects of their parent journals. Around 5.7% of the 77,251 journals in our sample have no subject information. For clarify, these “Unclassified” journals are not shown on the chart, so total bar lengths will add up to 93.3%.

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TOP HEADLINES

Diamond Open Access on the rise in the U.S., thanks to Gates Foundation grant – November 26, 2025

"A $206,886 grant from the Gates Foundation awarded to Lyrasis, in collaboration with the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s Center for Library Programs and the California Digital Library (CDL), will support the new project Mapping U.S. Diamond Open Access Journals — an initiative to advance community-governed scholarly publishing in the United States."

Big Ten Open Books: An Interview with Kate McCready (BTAA) and Charles Watkinson (UM) – November 20, 2025

"One of the most exciting initiatives working on OA for backlist books is the Big Ten Open Books program. This post is based on a set of questions we posed to Kate McCready (Program Director for Open Publishing, Center for Library Programs at the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and Charles Watkinson (Director of University of Michigan Press and Associate University Librarian for Publishing at the University of Michigan) about what the program is and how it works."

cOAlition S reinforces Open Access commitment while advancing next strategic phase – November 19, 2025

"cOAlition S today reaffirmed its commitment to the foundational mission of accelerating full and immediate Open Access while expanding its vision to encompass the broader goal of rapid, open, transparent, and equitable sharing of trustworthy scientific knowledge. Seven years after the launch of Plan S, the international coalition of research funding and support organisations has defined a new strategic plan to advance their joint efforts on open access forward (2026-2030)."

Elsevier Expands Geographical Pricing for Open Access to support greater participation in global research – October 22, 2025

"Elsevier, a global leader in advanced information and decision support in science and healthcare, is expanding its Geographical Pricing for Open Access (GPOA) initiative to an additional 150 gold open access journals, following the success of its 2024 pilot. This expansion means around 300 journals will offer pricing based on geography to help authors in low- and middle-income countries publish their research open access."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

ASBMB launches Insights in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology – November 20, 2025

"The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is expanding ways to share emerging research across the breadth of the molecular life sciences by adding Insights in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, or IBMB, to its family of journals...Like all ASBMB journals, IBMB will be gold open access."

American Physical Society to launch new open access journal on AI and machine learning in scientific research – November 19, 2025

"The American Physical Society is launching PRX Intelligence, a highly selective open access journal that will welcome manuscripts on AI and machine learning methods and their application to advance scientific understanding. The journal will accept submissions starting in February 2026."

PLOS launches two journals to address critical real-world challenges – November 13, 2025

"The Public Library of Science (PLOS) today announced the launch of two journals, PLOS Aging and Health and PLOS Ecosystems. Both journals are grounded in our commitment to rigor and research integrity of the highest standard and our open science principles..."

AIP Publishing Announces New Journal Partnership with Hebei University of Technology: Harmonics and Scattering to Launch in 2026 – November 10, 2025

"AIP Publishing (AIPP) is pleased to announce a new publishing partnership with Hebei University of Technology to develop Harmonics and Scattering (HAS), an international, peer-reviewed diamond open access journal dedicated to advancing cutting-edge research in harmonics and scattering technologies."

Charleston Conference 2025 Reflections

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:01:56 GMT

Navigating Uncertainty, Innovation, and the Winds of Change

As the Charleston Conference 2025 wrapped up, one thing was clear: scholarly communication continues to evolve against a backdrop of uncertainty: economic, technological, and policy-driven. Yet amid the turbulence, conversations throughout the week pointed toward resilience, adaptability, and even optimism. As Tony Hobbs observed during the Shifting Tides policy session, “the good news for scholarly communication is that due to technology advances, it is now possible to sail into the wind.”

The Elephant in the Room: Doing More with Less

Heather Staines

Every conversation I had in Charleston seemed to circle back to one thing: budgetary uncertainty. Whether the concern was policy changes like potential caps on overhead or shifting grant funding or the ripple effects of declining enrollment, both domestic and international, everyone was asking how to do more with fewer resources. This theme ran through the plenary Leading in a Time of Crisis, Reclaiming the Library Narrative, and even the lightning sessions, a shared recognition that we’re all trying to redefine what “enough” looks like.

What stood out was how data-driven decision-making has become essential. Libraries, publishers, and service providers are not just analyzing what to add, but what to let go of, all in an effort to find a new balance.

And then there’s AI. We have moved beyond “sessions about AI” to “AI everywhere.” I will admit that I once thought AI was a solution in search of a problem, but now it’s woven through nearly every conversation. Librarians are leading the way on AI literacy, while publishers and service providers are using AI to innovate to meet changing research needs. The uncertainty is real but so is the shared determination to adapt, learn, and move forward together.

The Long Arm of the Law and Its Reach into Scholarly Communication

Meg White

One of the things I love about Charleston is that there is always a moment that challenges me to reframe how I think about the work we do. This year’s Long Arm of the Law session did exactly that. It was a vivid reminder that the legal and policy currents swirling around us are not abstractions; they shape our ecosystem in ways we can’t afford to ignore.

Paul Rosenzweig set the stage with a fascinating and lively walk through the history of executive orders. Hearing that Washington issued just eight while later presidents relied on them more frequently primarily to advance political agendas made the evolution very real. What stood out was the fine line between legitimate executive authority and overreach, and how easily those boundaries can blur.

Nancy Weiss then brought the conversation directly into our lane with her analysis of an Executive Order directing the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to reduce its activities to the bare legal minimum. Her experience as former General Counsel gave us an inside view of what such a directive could mean for libraries, museums, and cultural programs, all places where so much of our community’s work takes root.

Sessions like this are why Charleston continues to be invaluable to me. They stretch my understanding, give me new context, and remind me that staying informed is part of how we navigate change together.

Data-Driven Insights: The 2025 Author and Researcher Survey

Lori Carlin

My week was cut unusually short (for me) by other meetings I had to fly off to, but I still managed to squeeze in 2.5 days of interesting sessions, discussions, and ‘business casual’ gatherings.

The first two events I attended this year were definite highlights, both of which were the brainchild of and brilliantly orchestrated by my colleague, Heather Staines – the Vendor Meetup on Monday evening and the Leadership Breakfast on Tuesday morning. Both were jam packed and filled with lively conversation. If you’re not familiar, the Vendor Meetup is an open, casual gathering (sponsored this year by Get FTR) designed to give vendor representatives, especially early career attendees, who attend only for Vendor Day a chance to socialize and network, something they often miss when they’re in and out in a single day, but all are welcome to attend! The Leadership Breakfast, a smaller invitation-only event designed to give a more intimate networking experience within the larger Charleston Conference, is always a thoughtful session centered on a pressing issue of the day, and this year was no exception. The discussion focused on sustainability across the entire scholarly communication ecosystem—from funders to libraries to publishers. Frankly, no one can unhear the words of one of the panelists (a library director) when he commented that his budget has dropped from ~$7M to ~$5.4M in the last 24 months … with more to come.

Finally, I’m a little biased, but I dare say I and my panelists were very pleased with the session I moderated focused on the impact of US research funding changes, which highlighted info from Delta Think’s Spring 2025 Author and Researcher Survey, along with how publishers who participated used the data to inform their strategies. We also had a librarian on the panel who informed the audience about the impact of these changes on universities overall and libraries in particular.

As you may know, the survey data showed rising concern about institutional support, with many researchers rethinking how they publish and participate in conferences. Respondents also described how tightening budgets are straining peer review and research dissemination, while responses varied sharply between U.S.-based and international authors, reflecting distinct policy and institutional pressures, it also showed that the impact is being felt globally.

In the tradition of Charleston, what made the session so powerful was the discussion. Colleagues from societies, publishers, and libraries focused on how they are using these insights to understand the challenges and to act on them. From adjusting publishing strategies to helping researchers to growing relationships in other markets, to shaping advocacy and outreach activities, organizations are using these insights to inform resource and budget direction in innovative ways. For me, that was the real takeaway: turning evidence into collaboration, and progress. Even in uncertain times.

We’re running the survey again now with plans to compare results to the Spring version. If you’re interested, there is still time to sign up!

End of An Era (Two, in Fact!)

This year’s conference marked a pivotal moment: the first without the in-person presence of founder, Katina Strauch (though we were grateful for her virtual participation), and the well-earned retirement of longtime Conference Director Anthony Watkinson, who rang his iconic bell one last time. We would not be here without them and their visionary colleagues who built this community from the ground up. Thank you, Katina and Anthony.

Charting What Comes Next

If there was one metaphor that captured Charleston 2025, it was motion; not adrift, but deliberate progress in the face of resistance. From policy updates to AI integration to the enduring strength of the scholarly community, the week’s sessions affirmed that innovation often takes root during uncertainty.

As Tony Hobbs reminded us, even headwinds can propel us forward — if we learn how to adjust our sails.

News & Views Webinar: Market Sizing Update 2025

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 15:14:59 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our October News & Views companion online discussion forum!

Join us for our annual update on the volume and revenue associated with Open Access publishing.

If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

News & Views: Market Sizing Update 2025 – Has OA recovered its mojo?

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 13:07:10 GMT

Overview

After a rocky couple of years, the open access (OA) market may be finding its footing again. Each year, Delta Think's Market Sizing analyzes the value of the OA scholarly journals market—that is, the revenue generated by providers or the costs incurred by buyers of content.

Our analysis estimates that the OA segment expanded to just under $2.4bn in 2024. Although growth has improved compared with last year’s deceleration, it continues to lag behind the broader historical trend for OA.

The proportion of articles published as OA has declined slightly, likely driven by continued reduction in the output from the large OA publishers. This trend has benefited established publishers, who saw growth in OA activity and revenue as they continued to consolidate their positions.

Looking ahead, OA could soon begin outpacing the broader journals market once again—but likely through different growth drivers than in the past.

Read on to see what those shifts might look like.

Headline findings

Our models suggest the following headlines for the 2024 open access market:

Market size: We estimate that the OA market grew to just under $2.4bn in 2024, an increase of 6.8% over the previous year. Although an improvement on the low growth the year before, this is still only one quarter of its historic growth rates.
Overall journals market: We estimate the total scholarly journals market to have increased by 2.3% in 2024, compared with its long-term low single-digit growth around 5%.
OA share of output and value: Just under 50% of all scholarly articles were published as paid-for open access, accounting for slightly over 20% of corresponding market value.
Fully OA publishers: Large, fully open access publishers saw a significant drop in their article output in 2024. The share of fully OA articles shrank slightly, but fully OA share of revenue ticked up. We anticipate both volume and value may begin to recover next year.
Hybrid OA: Hybrid continues to make up for some of the shrinkage in fully OA output with both hybrid article and revenue growth remaining strong. Slightly higher-priced fully OA options have also likely contributed to fully OA’s increasing revenue.
Currency effects: Without currency effects, OA market value would have grown by nearly 11%, and the overall journals market by 7.3%. This suggests that underlying growth in the OA market value has recovered since last year, and the overall market grew above long-term trends.
Future outlook: OA publishing has once again outpaced the broader journals market. From 2024 to 2027, we anticipate a CAGR (average growth each year) of 7.7% in OA output and 12% in OA market value-- roughly double last year’s projections, though still just below long-term averages.

 A note about our method

As ever, we are very grateful to the organizations that participate in our annual survey, which we anonymize and aggregate to inform our estimates. We will soon send our usual detailed market update and analysis to participants, which breaks out fully OA and hybrid details.

Our market estimates focus on research publications for which money is likely to be paid, either to read or to publish. Our definition of open access excludes “bronze” (public access) and “green” (repository-only) articles.

Rather than simply looking at annual figures, we extract underlying trends and leverage historical data to identify trends and inform strategic decision-making. Each year our underlying data may change as data sources improve and evolve their methods. We continue to refine our view on resulting trends as more information becomes available. Therefore, each year we restate historic figures as needed to keep them up to date.

 Trends

OA’s share of output has leveled off – and may stay that way for the next year or two. However, even with that flat output, OA’s share of revenues continues to rise. Authors appear to be choosing slightly higher-priced OA options compared with a few years ago. Hybrid OA is capturing more of the OA mix, yet long-term growth still depends on trends in fully OA output.

Delisting fallout stabilizes

The delisting of journals from Web of Science in 2023 had a knock-on effect across OA-only publishers’ portfolios. Quality concerns centered on special issues, which had been a major driver of OA growth. It seemed unlikely that (many of) these articles would find other outlets. Last year, we noted that this disruption stalled fully OA growth. This year’s data suggest that the bleeding has largely stopped, with fully OA articles output down only slightly in 2024.

OA output has plateaued

OA’s total share of output has hovered around 50% (± one percentage point) since 2022. Last year we asked whether OA had peaked. The evidence points to a plateau, at least for now. While a major driver of (fully) OA growth has been removed – or at least reduced – publishers are adapting and beginning to recover. We anticipate that fully OA output will begin growing again next year, outpacing the broader market, though not returning to its “glory days” of a few years ago.

Revenue growth continues—slower but steadier

After a pause in progress last year, OA continues to take share of total publishing revenue, albeit at a slower pace. Authors have shifted towards established publishers, who saw strong increases in both OA volume and revenue, even as the overall OA market has softened.

Authors appear to be paying slightly higher publication fees, likely for two reasons:

Fully OA APCs charged by the big corporates are often (though not always) higher than those from OA-only publishers.
Hybrid OA APCs are higher still – and hybrid’s share is growing.

Subscription output still matters

Subscription (non-OA) publishing output and revenue continue to grow, even though its market share is slowly shrinking.

The value gap narrows

Since 2022, around 50% of published output has been OA, accounting for about 20% of total market value. By 2027, we anticipate OA’s value share could reach 25%, even if output remains stable. OA articles still generate less revenue per paper than subscription articles, but that gap is likely to keep narrowing as publication fees increase —a trend we project will continue.

Mixed-model deals remain a wildcard

The impact of transformative and mixed-model deals on pricing dynamics is not yet clear. Consolidation enables large publishers to grow OA revenues, but if read-and-publish deals have price caps, some OA output moving from smaller OA publishers to larger ones might not translate into higher OA revenue overall.

Policy and funding shifts may reshape the field

It is too soon to tell how recent changes in US policy and funding may influence market valuations, but these shifts could alter both pricing and output patterns in coming years.

Early indications from Delta Think’s Researcher Survey suggest that a significant portion of researchers expect to publish fewer articles, including some who specify fewer OA articles. A follow up survey underway now will delve into the reasons behind this anticipated change.

Conclusion

At this time last year, we identified 2023 as a potential inflection point for open access (OA) and asked whether its explosive growth had peaked. The data from 2024 suggest otherwise: OA output has not peaked, but it has plateaued, holding steady around the 50% mark. The surge driven by special issues has subsided, but the worst effects of journal delisting now appear to be behind us. Fully OA publishing is stabilizing and poised for renewed - albeit more modest - growth in 2025.

Meanwhile, as fully OA steadies, hybrid OA and large corporate publishers are consolidating their positions. Hybrid output and revenue continue to rise, outpacing the broader market and poised to represent a sizeable portion of OA revenues within the next two years. We estimate that by 2027, hybrid could make up one-third of OA output and account for nearly half of OA market value-- a reflection of higher prices and a shift in author preference toward more established publishing venues.

Looking ahead, we expect the OA market to continue its recovery, with value growth outstripping output growth. OA’s share of total market value is projected to rise to 25% by 2027, even if the overall output stays roughly the same. This suggests a steady increase in publication fees and the normalization of higher-value OA publishing models.

The underlying demand for OA remains strong. The market has effectively self-corrected, with established players capitalizing on shifts in author behavior. The hypergrowth era may be over, but OA appears ready to reclaim its position as the fastest-growing segment of scholarly publishing--this time driven by consolidation, strategic pricing, and evolving business models.

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Our industry does not systematically report comprehensive data about market volumes or value. So, any market sizing is an approximation, and figures should be taken as approximate. Subscribers to our Data & Analytics Tool can drill into the numbers in much greater depth, including analyzing fully OA vs. hybrid OA details, society-specific output and subscription output. Please get in touch if you want to know more.

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TOP HEADLINES

NERL Partners with OA Switchboard to Advance Transparency in Open Access – October 15, 2025

"NERL is pleased to announce that it has signed a 3-year agreement with OA Switchboard, an intermediary that facilitates the transmission of standardized OA publication data between institutions, publishers, and funders. By joining in this collaborative effort...NERL members will be supporting global OA infrastructure with metadata that is authoritative, transparent, and timely."

De Gruyter Brill to Add 66 More Journals to its Subscribe to Open (S2O) Program in 2026 – October 1, 2025

"In 2026, De Gruyter Brill will significantly expand its Subscribe to Open (S2O) program, DG2O, by transitioning 66 additional De Gruyter journals to open access. This brings the total number of titles in the program to 124, marking a major milestone in the publisher’s ongoing commitment to making high-quality research accessible worldwide."

AAAS: Response on NIH public access policy – September 24, 2025

"AAAS has responded to the National Institutes of Health’s request for input on its plan for “Maximizing Research Funds by Limiting Allowable Publishing Costs,” as released in July 2025. AAAS’ response applauds NIH for addressing the rising Article Processing Charges that scientific journal publishers are increasingly charging NIH-supported scientists to publish their findings."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

American Society of Anesthesiologists Launches New Journal Anesthesiology Open – October 1, 2025

"The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) today announced the launch of Anesthesiology Open, a new online, peer-reviewed, open access journal published by Wolters Kluwer. Anesthesiology Open’s website and manuscript submission site are now live."

Join the Fall 2025 Author/Researcher Survey

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 15:19:37 GMT

Collaborate with Delta Think to uncover how funding and policy uncertainty continue to reshape the research ecosystem — and gain tailored insights for your community.

Tracking Change: The Next Chapter in Delta Think’s Researcher and Author Survey

Earlier this year, Delta Think embarked on a global effort to understand how potential U.S. funding and policy changes are reshaping the research landscape . Together with 27 scholarly societies, associations, and publishers, we launched our first Global Author/Researcher Survey to capture how researchers were responding to uncertainty — and how those responses might alter the fabric of scholarly communication. More than 13,000 researchers across 135 countries participated, offering a powerful, data-driven view of shifting priorities, pressures, and behaviors.

From Snapshot to Trend

This fall, Delta Think is expanding the effort. Our Follow-Up Author/Researcher Survey — launching in late October 2025 — will track how these sentiments and behaviors continue to evolve. By comparing results with the spring dataset, we’ll move from a single snapshot to a dynamic trendline, documenting the ongoing effects of U.S. funding uncertainty on research, publishing, and scholarly participation worldwide.

Why Participate?

As with the first survey, participating organizations will receive customized analysis of their community’s data — benchmarking their cohort against the overall sample and highlighting shifts specific to their researchers, disciplines, or regions. These insights can inform publishing plans, advocacy, and engagement strategies , helping societies and publishers better support their stakeholders amid evolving funding realities.

Participation is not limited to those involved in the first round. New organizations are encouraged to join this next phase and gain access to comparative data that reveal how attitudes and actions are changing across the scholarly ecosystem. Whether your community represents a specific discipline, geographic region, or type of institution, your inclusion strengthens both the depth of the analysis and the collective understanding of how funding policy ripples through the research enterprise.

Putting Ideas into Action

Delta Think’s mission has always been to translate evidence into insight — and insight into action. By pairing rigorous market research methods with deep sector expertise, we aim to provide partners with the intelligence they need to plan strategically and act decisively. The Author/Researcher Survey exemplifies that approach: it transforms community concerns into quantifiable data, then delivers that data back to participants as practical guidance for navigating change.

If your organization would like to participate in the Fall 2025 Author/Researcher Survey and receive customized insights for your community, we’d love to connect. Please reach out to Lori Carlin to learn more about partnership opportunities and data deliverables.

Smart AI, Smarter Scholarship

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 13:19:18 GMT

Introduction: One question, two paths

A recent essay in The Conversation posed the question, “Is ChatGPT making us stupid?” The author examined emerging research suggesting that over-reliance on AI tools for writing can dull critical thinking, originality, and even memory retention.

But as the author points out, AI has the potential to augment human intelligence when used well , acting as a catalyst for deeper thinking rather than a shortcut around it. We agree and seek to guide our clients in determining how to use AI to strengthen research and scholarship.

From concern to opportunity

When AI is approached as a collaborator, it sparks creativity, deepens inquiry, accelerates problem-solving, and amplifies creativity. It can strengthen teams, enhance services, and improve efficiencies across the publishing enterprise.

Turning Ideas into Action

Here’s how Delta Think can help you transform smart AI potential into purposeful, strategic action:

Strategy and Market Research

Focus: Identify where AI can deliver the most value for your organization, grounded in community needs and behaviors.
Delta Think Approach: Gather and analyze evidence through quantitative and qualitative methods to uncover how your community – your researchers, authors, reviewers, and readers – are using AI now or, better yet, where and how they could be using it in the future. Marrying their unmet needs with your strategic goals creates your roadmap to future success.

2. Build vs. Buy Decisions for AI-Powered Products

Focus: Develop proprietary AI solutions, partner with trusted vendors, or combine the best of both approaches to suit your needs.
Delta Think Approach: Assess your current state and future needs, design decision frameworks that weigh cost, capability, risk, speed-to-market, and long-term scalability, and build the approach that will work best to support your business goals and community needs.

3. AI Policy and Governance

Focus: Ensure responsible, transparent, and ethical AI use that safeguards scholarly integrity.
Delta Think Approach: Facilitate the development of your AI governance with the creation of important guardrails and policies, working to mitigate bias and hallucination risks, safeguarding research integrity while enabling innovation.

4. UX/UI Testing for AI Products and Features

Focus: Design AI experiences that enhance human engagement.
Delta Think Approach: Test results, interfaces, prompts, and transparency signals to keep users informed, empowered, and confident in your products and tools.

5. Licensing and Partnership Strategy

Focus: Leverage commercial arrangements to unlock AI potential while aligning with your mission and values.
Delta Think Approach: Guide you through licensing agreements, proprietary data partnerships, and collaborations that create sustainable competitive advantage and strategic revenue streams.

Turning Ideas into Impact

By reframing the conversation from Can AI substitute scholarship? to How does AI amplify scholarship? , publishers can lead the next wave of innovation. Delta Think’s collaborative approach ensures that your organization’s adoption of AI enhances creativity, critical thinking, and trust.

We can help you map out your bespoke AI-strategy roadmap, develop new products and services, test prototypes, and design governance guidelines. Reach out today or schedule some time at the Frankfurt Book Fair (10/14-16) to discuss how Delta Think’s expertise and proven methodologies can help your organization unlock key insights and drive innovation.

News & Views: How much will cuts to NSF funding affect the future of scholarly publishing?

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 12:40:06 GMT

How might planned cuts to funding of the US National Science Foundation affect scholarly output? In our last News & Views we analyzed how the headline cuts might apply to relevant activities. This month we examine how journals may be impacted and model some scenarios quantifying the impact on global scholarly output.

Background

The US National Science Foundation is an independent US federal agency that supports science and engineering across the US and its territories. In its 2024 financial year (FY) ¹ , it spent around $9.4 billion, funding approximately 25% of all federally supported research conducted by US colleges and universities.

In July we looked at how reported funding cuts and NSF budget cuts proposed by the US Government might affect the NSF’s output of research papers. We found that in the near term the effects would be limited, as the cuts focus on NSF activites that produce low volumes of papers. However, cuts proposed over the coming year may have a more profound effect as they are deep and affect research activities.

We have also previously analyzed proposed cuts to funding of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). We noted how cuts to the world’s largest producer of biomedical research could have a profound effect on publication outputs.

So how do cuts to the NSF stack up?

The effects on journals

As ever, the headlines and averages are unevenly distributed, so we looked at how individual journals might be affected.

Sources: OpenAlex , Research Organization Registry (ROR) , NSF , Delta Think analysis.

The charts above show the impact of funding on individual journals. They show the share of journal output attributable to some key funders, relating it to overall size of the journal. Each point represents one journal. The vertical axis shows the share of journal output attributable to the funder. The horizontal axis shows the journal size measured in the number of papers. The point of the charts is to show the overall patterns, not to highlight details of specific journals.

The left-hand chart focuses on papers arising from NSF-funded research.

On average, 10% of papers in journals are attributable to NSF-funded research.
Where the NSF affects a larger share of papers, the journals tend to be small (top left of the chart).
For larger journals, the NSF accounts for smaller shares of output (bottom right of the chart). Note: so we can better see the clustering of small- and mid-sized journals, the very largest journals are not shown.
Very few journals are reliant almost exclusively on NSF-funded research (top left of the chart).

The right-hand chart puts the NSF figures in context. It compares the NSF-funded articles (green squares) with NIH-funded ones (orange triangles).

To keep the data manageable, the chart shows only journals with more than 2% of their papers funded by the funders in question. We can therefore focus on journals that may have a significant proportion of papers affected.
Overall, the shape of the NIH clustering is similar to the NSF, but the NIH points are hidden behind the NSF ones. So, broadly, larger journals have a lower dependence on papers from an individual funder compared with smaller ones.
However, the NSF funds a larger share of some larger journals, as indicated by the thick horizontal line of green dots around the 10,000 / 9% part of the chart.
The NIH accounts for a higher share of papers in smaller journals, as indicated by the vertical cluster of orange dots to the right of the green ones from 20% upwards.
On average, the NIH funds roughly 20% of journal papers and the NSF funds 10%.

So, while very large journals have a relatively low share of their papers arising from NSF and NIH funding, many smaller ones are heavily reliant on papers from these two funders.

The effects on publication output

By taking a view on likely best- and worst-case scenarios and adding these to our previous analysis of the NIH , we estimate effects on scholarly output as follows.

Source: Delta Think analysis.

The charts above show ranges of drops in submissions. We projected funding cuts onto estimates of the share of output resulting from NIH and NSF funding. We then put this in the context of the total output from the US and globally. Given that projects have lead times before publication, we also needed to take a view on when cuts would work their way through to submissions.

Each bar compares the estimated percentage reductions in submissions compared with numbers at the start of 2025. So, 0% means no change from a nominal steady state.
The top of each bar shows the best case: Minimum cuts to numbers of grants or funding, excluding FY 2026 proposals.
The bottom of each bar shows the worst case: Maximum cuts to grant funding, including FY 2026 proposals.
The left-hand chart estimates effects of known cuts in 2025, pro-rated across the average grant length of 3.7 years for the NIH or 3 years for the NSF. The figures suggest a fall in submissions from the US of between 0.7% in 2025 (best case; top of leftmost bar) and 5.5% (worst case; bottom of leftmost bar). This would represent falls of between 0.1% and 0.9% in worldwide output (second-left bar).
The right-hand chart shows the cumulative effects of cuts over the average grant timescale (taking us nominally to mid – late 2029). Here, we see much greater falls: The worst case sees US submissions falling by 38%, corresponding to a 6.2% drop in worldwide output.
For the sake of analysis, we made assumptions about steady output of papers and that funding or grants (depending on the scenario) scale linearly with submissions. To compare like-for-like, we have assumed no other changes – such as to other areas of the world, to other US funding institutions, and no further cuts to NIH or NSF funding beyond those currently announced.

Conclusion

As we have previously noted, cuts to NIH funding have a profound effect on output because of the NIH’s sheer scale. Although smaller, the NSF is still a large funder, so how might cuts to it affect scholarly output?

In the near term, cuts to the NSF are unlikely to have much effect. This is because they largely focus on activities that don’t produce large volumes of papers (such as STEM education).

However, in the mid to longer term, the deep cuts to NSF funding directly affect its research activities and so add significant downward pressures on submissions – and by extension to publications. In the worst case scenarios, we previously estimated cuts to the NIH could lead to a 30% reduction in US output and a 5% reduction in global output. Add NSF cuts, and these effects rise to 38% and 6.2% respectively.

As before, we need to caveat that our analysis relies on assumptions – for example, that submissions scale linearly with funding and published papers scale linearly with submissions. These are reasonable, as rising submissions are cited as key drivers of scholarly output and revenue in the public financial reporting of major publishers.

Whatever the caveats, the effects of deep cuts to funding of large research institutions will inevitably have profound effects – particularly for those journals and publishers heavily reliant on those institutions’ supported research. Meanwhile, the larger publishers are in positions to weather things well. Direct US government funding only accounts for small proportion of their revenues, and government funding cycles have always come and gone over many years .

The future may already be here, but, as we are fond of saying, it remains unevenly distributed.

¹ Financial years run October to September. E.g. the 2024 financial year ran from 1 October 2023 through 30 September 2024. This is the same as most US federal agencies, including the others we have analyzed (CDC, NIH, HHS).

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TOP HEADLINES

EIFL agreements increase publishing in open access – August 27, 2025

"Britt-Marie Wideberg, Manager of the EIFL Licensing Programme, analyzes the amount of research published in open access in 2024 by authors from EIFL partner countries to find out how EIFL-negotiated open access agreements are making a difference."

IReL Reaches Milestone of 10,000 Open Access Publications – August 20, 2025

"IReL has reached a major milestone in its commitment to open research and publishing transparency in enabling over 10,000 Irish research articles to be published open access, and in contributing data on them to OpenAPC."

eContent Pro International Press Debuts as First U.S.-Based Open Access-Only Book Publisher – August 5, 2025

"In a historic shift in the publishing industry, eContent Pro International Press has officially launched as the first U.S.-based book publisher to operate exclusively under a platinum open access publishing model."

SPARC – Intersection of Public Engagement and Open Access Presents Opportunities – July 30, 2025

"To solve many of the world’s most pressing problems, open access advocates believe knowledge needs to be shared widely. Those who support publicly engaged or community-engaged research emphasize the benefit of science being broadly accessible and informed by the contributions of multiple partners and/or interest holders to amplify impact..."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

Royal Society sets out plan to move journals to full open access in 2026 through Subscribe to Open – August 6, 2025

"The Royal Society has agreed plans that would make its journals fully open access in 2026 by adopting the ‘Subscribe to Open’ model. Under plans agreed in July 2025, libraries subscribed to Royal Society journals will now be asked to support Subscribe to Open in 2026 through their subscriptions."

News & Views: Will cuts to National Science Foundation funding affect scholarly publishing activity?

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 12:00:04 GMT

The US Government has planned cuts to funding of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2025 and 2026. Before we can undertake a full analysis of how these cuts might affect publishers, we must unpack some data. This month we put the cuts in context, looking at how the cuts impact research and the scale of NSF output. And we find they may not affect research in the ways the headlines suggest. We will follow up with a future analysis modelling specific scenarios of impacts on publisher submissions.

Background

In May 2025, the New York Times (NYT) published an article analyzing proposed cuts to NSF funding by the current US Government. The NYT’s analysis suggested a 51% cut in funding from 1 January through 21 May 2025, with a further 56% reduction proposed for next year ² .

We have previously analyzed effects of proposed cuts to funding of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The proposed cuts to the NSF are deeper, so might they have an even greater negative effect on publication volumes?

Understanding what the cuts apply to

The 51% cut in 2025 covers 140 days, equivalent to a 20% annualized cut. So could we see the same level of reduction in papers this year? And could this be followed be a 56% drop next year, as the 2026 cuts cover a full year?

As with our analysis of the NIH, we need to understand how the changes in funding translate into research activities, and thence into corresponding volumes and timing of publication output. We therefore analyzed the NSF’s own budgetary figures to put the cuts into context.

Sources: OpenAlex, Research Organization Registry, NSF, New York Times, Delta Think Analysis.

The figure above compares distributions of papers with budgetary activity between key NSF activities.

The left-most bar (“Papers”) shows that over 98% of papers arising from NSF activities result from its research grants (which it terms Research and Related Activities or R&RA). The papers arising from the STEM Education program account for around 1.7% of output (the thin orange slice at the top).
Compare these proportions with share of budget (second-left bar, “Budget”, spanning a like-for-like period ³ ). Around 80% of the NSF’s budget has been spent on research activites and just over 12% on STEM programs.
The “2025 Cuts” bar shows the relative proportions of the NYT’s headlines for the 2025 cuts. The lion’s share of these affects the STEM Education program.
The “2026 Cuts” bar analyzes the NSF’s own 2026 budget proposals , which show even deeper cuts that those suggested by the NYT's analysis. Their split between research and other activities roughly matches the historic budget proportions ⁴ .

The key takeway is that cuts do not necessarily relate to research activity and therefore to resulting publications. For example, we can see that a large cut in STEM budget in 2025 will likely have a small effect on output of papers, because STEM Education accounts for such a low share of output. Even if STEM Education were cut by 100%, it would affect no more than the 1.7% or so of related papers produced. Conversely, the proposed 2026 cuts are deep, mostly affect research ouput, and so could lead to a significant reduction in papers.

How much does the NSF influence global publications?

We can add the NSF data to our previous analysis of key US federal funders of research as follows.

Sources: US Federal Budgets, OpenAlex, Research Organization Registry, NSF, New York Times, Delta Think Analysis.

The charts above show the output funded by the NSF and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as a share of global output (left) and US output (right).

The US accounted for around 15% of global output.
The NSF accounted for just under 2% of global output, and just over 13% of US output.
The HHS, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), accounted for just under 6% of global output, around 40% of US output. The NIH accounted for 95% of HHS output (not shown above).
Note: the data span the previous 5 years, and the samples are based on OpenAlex data, where papers are indicated to have the funders as classified above, or by one of their subsidiaries (as best we can estimate).

The NSF produces around one third of the papers compared to the HHS. Together they account just under 8% of global output – and just over 10% if other US Government output is added. Significant reductions in output from these agencies would therefore be noticeable globally, but more a drag on performance than a catastrophic collapse. However, the effects for journals and publishers relying heavily on US-authored papers could be profound. Referring to the right-hand chart above, these latter constitute over 53% of output from the two major agencies, or 69% if the rest of US Governement-funded papers are included.

Conclusion

As ever, headline numbers need unpacking to get to a meaningful analysis of impact. The big cuts to NSF in 2025 funding fall largely on departments that produce few publications, and so publishers will likely remain unaffected by them. The NSF alone accounts for just under 2% of global publications, so again, the effects of cuts on publications will likely be minor.

However, for publishers and journals heavily reliant on US researchers, things are different. Although not as big as the HHS (and NIH), the NSF is still a significant funder of papers from the US. The effects will be even more profound for specific journals and also will be reliant on the cuts in grants. In the second part of this analysis, planned for later this summer, we will look at how many journals may be significantly impacted, and model some scenarios quantifying impact on publishers in more depth.

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² The NYT did not specify which year the 56% cuts to “next year” applied to. Given the NYT article was written just past mid-way through the FY 2025, it seems reasonable to assume the 56% cuts “next year” apply to the FY 2026 (starting from 1st October 2025).

³ To compare like for like we averaged data spanning 5 years from 2019. This avoids recent changes and rearrangements of budgets reported by the NSF.

⁴ For FY 2026, the NSF moved STEM to be part of research, so we separated it back out to compare like-for-like historically.

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TOP HEADLINES

NIH to crack down on excessive publisher fees for publicly funded research – July 16, 2025

"As part of its ongoing commitment to scientific transparency and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced plans to implement a new policy that will cap how much publishers can charge NIH-supported scientists to make their research findings publicly accessible."

MDPI Signs First North American Agreement with Canadian Consortium – July 14, 2025

"The Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) has signed its first consortium agreement in North America, marking a significant milestone for the fully Open Access publisher. The agreement is with the Federal Science Libraries Network (FSLN) and will last for two years."

B17 conference outcomes released – July 8, 2025

"Earlier this year, the 17th Berlin Open Access Conference (B17) brought together national delegations of research institutions and their libraries from around the world to assess progress in their transformation strategies, collectively advancing a more open scholarly publishing system and addressing emerging challenges in the increasingly complex research communication ecosystem."

DIAMAS results will change the face of Diamond OA – July 2, 2025

"The DIAMAS final conference celebrated the 9 project outputs that have been integrated into the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) in Brussels on 3 June 2025. It shone a light on how DIAMAS outputs will support the community to implement and sustain the Diamond OA model in Europe and beyond."

Knowledge Unlatched Finds a New Home with Annual Reviews – June 26, 2025

"Annual Reviews today announced that it has signed an agreement with Wiley that enables Knowledge Unlatched (KU) – most recently owned and operated by Wiley – to move to a new home within the Annual Reviews organization. The move supports one of the most recognized initiatives in open access publishing and marks KU’s return to nonprofit stewardship."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

New open-access journal AI for Science aims to revolutionize scientific discovery – July 2, 2025

"IOP Publishing has partnered with the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory in China to launch a new diamond open-access journal to showcase how artificial intelligence (AI) is driving scientific innovation. AI for Science (AI4S) will publish high-impact original research, reviews, and perspectives to highlight the transformative applications and impact of AI."

Delta Think’s Survey Results: What 13,000 Researchers Revealed About the Fallout from US Funding Cuts

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 03:45:20 GMT

This spring, Delta Think collaborated with 27 professional societies and associations to launch a Global Author/Researcher Survey to understand the ripple effect of US government research funding cuts. Our goal was to explore how researchers are navigating a rapidly evolving landscape, especially as US federal funding and policy decisions cast long shadows over the global research community.

More than 13,000 researchers across every major discipline and 135 countries shared their voices through our survey. While the detailed findings are deep and wide-ranging, one thing is clear: the ground is shifting.

Uncertainty Is Driving Change in Research Behavior

Delta Think deeply analyzed the data by six major disciplines: Health Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering & Technology, Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities. Nuances vary by each main field, but some factors were universal.

US-based researchers are signaling deep concern – and they’re bracing for change. Many anticipate reductions across publishing output, participation in peer review, and conference attendance.

For example, 62% of US authors across all disciplines expect to publish fewer articles in the next 1–2 years, citing policy and funding challenges .

“My research progress is now in ‘conservative mode’ in case funding is pulled from us with no notice. We cannot plan further out and have lost our trust in the federal government.”
Primary Investigator (PI) at a US Academic Medical Center

But the concerning news isn’t limited to the US. International researchers indicated their intention to pull away from US-based journals, threatening to reshape the global flow of research.

In fact, a full 50% of international authors across all disciplines indicated that it is now important to them to submit their manuscripts to non-US journals.

“We're doing everything we can to reduce our connections to the US, including looking for journals to publish in that are not based in the US.”
Mid-Career PI, Biological Sciences, Canada

Top Concerns: What Keeps Researchers Up at Night?

One of the clearest patterns that emerged is the contrast in what researchers view as their most urgent challenges:

For US researchers , the top concern is straightforward: elimination of research funding . This fear extends beyond specific grants—it reflects a deep anxiety about career stability, institutional viability, and the future of scientific advancement.
For international researchers , the primary worry is academic freedom and collaboration , with many expressing concerns about losing access to US research infrastructure, data, and professional networks if international cooperation is reduced.

While these represent the top concerns, the survey results reveal many others by discipline, career stage, and other factors, including specific community details for each of the 27 participating societies and organizations upon which to develop their future strategies.

Looking Ahead: Tracking Trends with Fall 2025 Survey

This spring’s survey was just the beginning. Delta Think will conduct a follow-up survey in October/November 2025 to track how attitudes and behaviors continue to shift. This next phase will allow us and the participating organizations to move from snapshot to trend — providing deeper insight into the lasting impact of funding and policy uncertainty.

Joining in for Survey 2 is NOT limited to Survey 1 participating organizations. All are welcome to participate in this next round and have access to the deep data behind these high-level insights and much more.

Turning Ideas into Action

The Delta Think team designed this initiative not just to gather data, but also to support our partners across the scholarly ecosystem. By combining rigorous research design with deep industry context, we’re helping publishers, societies, and institutions make informed, strategic decisions in uncertain times.

If you're interested in learning more about the findings, discussing how they apply to your organization, or joining the Fall 2025 survey, we’d love to connect. Please email Lori Carlin to start the conversation.

News & Views: How much will cuts to NIH funding affect scholarly publishing activity?

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 13:08:24 GMT

Overview

As the extent of proposed cuts to the US Government’s funding of US Federal research becomes apparent, we ask how this might affect scholarly publishers. US bodies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) produce significant volumes of research. A fall in their funding could lead to significant drops in research and may have negative implications for scholarly publishers around the world.

Background

The NIH is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. We have previously noted that the NIH accounts for a significant share of papers published.

At the time of writing (early June 2025), some notable reports about cuts to NIH funding have emerged:

An open letter ( “The Bethesda Declaration” ) dated June 9, 2025, to the current head of the NIH, in which signatories (who are NIH staff) note that: Since January 20, 2025, the NIH has “terminated 2,100 research grants totaling around $9.5 billion and an additional $2.6 billion in contracts through end of April”.
An analysis published by the New York Times in early June 2025 of the grants ended or delayed: From the January 20 Inauguration through April 2025, the administration ended 1,389 awards and delayed sending funding to more than 1,000 additional projects. The agency awarded $1.6 billion (20%) less compared with the same period last year.
A proposal from the White House dated May 2, 2025, reduces the CDC’s budget by $3.6 billion and the NIH’s total budget by about $18 billion (a cut of almost 40%, according to the NYT ).
Analysis from JAMA Network notes that Congress proposed cuts of 43% to NIH, or $20bn per year. “Assuming that some efficiencies are possible … a 40% cut in NIH spending will translate into a smaller change in effective distributions, we can … estimate that a 33% reduction in NIH funding would be associated with a 15.3% reduction in patents associated with new drugs…”

Could these cuts to NIH funding have a noticeable effect on publication volumes? To answer this, we need to understand how the changes in funding translate into corresponding publication output.

How deep do the cuts go?

The first stage of our analysis puts the reports into the context of the parent funding, so we can estimate the best- and worst-case scenarios of the cuts.

Sources: as stated, NIH ( budgets , RePORT , glossary , financial year dates )

We gathered information on total funding and numbers of grants from the NIH’s own data. We then worked out how to compare it like-for-like with the reported or proposed cuts. We could therefore check and estimate the proportions of change the cuts represent, as shown in the table above.

The data suggest a big difference between reductions in funding and the corresponding reductions in the number of research grants. Grants are of different sizes, so cutting funding to larger ones will lead to a disproportionately lower cut in project numbers. We therefore see different effects of cuts depending on whether we measure monetary value or numbers of grants.

What is the effect on publication output?

Taking best- and worst-case ratios from above, we can project these onto scholarly output as follows:

Sources: Delta Think Analysis.

The charts above show ranges of drops in scholarly submissions. We projected cuts onto our previous estimates of the share of output the NIH produces. We then put this in the context of the total output from the US and globally. Given that projects have lead times before publication, we also needed to take a view on when cuts would work their way through to submissions.

Each bar compares the estimated percentage reductions in submissions compared with numbers at the start of 2025. So, 0% means no change from a nominal steady state.
The top of each bar shows the best case: Minimum cuts to grants numbers, excluding the FY 2026 proposals, assuming grant numbers pro-rate to submissions.
The bottom of each bar shows the worst case: Maximum cuts to grant funding, including FY 2026 proposals, assuming funding pro-rates to publications.
The left-hand chart estimates effects of known cuts in 2025, pro-rated across the average grant length of 3.7 years. The figures suggest a fall in submissions from the US of between 0.7% in 2025 (best case; top of leftmost bar) and 5.1% (worst case; bottom of bar). This would represent falls of between 0.1% and 0.8% in global output (second-left bar).
The right-hand chart shows the cumulative effects of cuts over the 3.7-year average grant timescale (taking us nominally to mid – late 2029). Here, we see much greater falls: The worst case sees US submissions falling by over 30%, corresponding to a 5% drop in global output.
For the sake of analysis, we made assumptions about steady output of papers, and that funding or grants (depending on the scenario) scale linearly with submissions. To compare like-for-like, we have assumed no other changes – such as to other areas of the world, to other US institutions, and no further cuts in funding beyond those currently announced.

Conclusion

Given the scale of NIH-funded research, it is no surprise that reductions in its funding could lead to a noticeable reduction in publication output. However, the degree of change depends on the assumptions made. Specifically, it depends on what is taken to be the leading indicator of publications.

If numbers of grants are used, then changes in publication activity are relatively small. Single-digit percent changes could likely be absorbed easily by most publishers.

However, not all grants are created equal. As the cuts to funding are proportionately larger than the cuts to grant numbers, the data suggests that larger grants are bearing the brunt of cuts. As larger grants lead to greater publication output, cuts in funding to larger grants will have profound effects.

Any analysis like this relies on assumptions, which can be argued different ways. For example, submissions may not scale linearly with grants or funding, and published papers may not scale linearly with submissions. (Reports from some of the publicly listed corporate publishers often cite higher rates of submission growth compared with publication growth, for example.) So, drops in publication output may be less than drops in funding. Conversely, cuts to existing projects may have a disproportionate effect on submissions, which are likely to arise towards the end of a project.

The best-case scenarios in our analysis may seem mild, but we caution against false hope. The larger ones, based on funding cuts, are likely a more realistic dynamic. Our estimates only focus on biomedical research. We have not analyzed cuts to the other large US federal research agencies. (At the time of writing, cuts to NSF funding had made headlines. We will produce further analysis into this in due course.) And, government cuts may undermine other philanthropic efforts.

If funding cuts to the NIH are implemented as planned, even allowing for efficiencies, then a 15% - 20% drop in submissions from the US is not beyond the bounds of possibility. Of course, actual effects will vary by publisher. If you want to look into what this means for you, please contact us.

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TOP HEADLINES

The Open Access Journals Toolkit: new languages, new editorial board members, new horizons – June 5, 2025

"The Toolkit was launched in June 2023 in English and French by DOAJ, OASPA and an international independent board of editors. It is now also available in Arabic, Portuguese and Spanish. Usage of the Toolkit continues to grow and the number of downloads at Zenodo is high. The Editorial Board is reviewing and updating the content. New content is being created."

Big Ten Academic Alliance and Springer Nature Announce First-Ever Unlimited Open Access Publishing Agreement in the Americas – May 29, 2025

"The Big Ten Academic Alliance has signed a two-year Open Publishing Agreement with Springer Nature, making it the publisher’s first truly unlimited and uncapped open access agreement in the Americas. This is the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s fifth Open Publishing Agreement or OPA, and its most expansive to date."

OASPA’s ‘Next 50%’ project: Your Voice Matters at a Critical Moment for Open Access – May 22, 2025

"[OASPA has] now launched our Next 50% project, with a primer document that frames a fresh conversation about the future of open access...This is not something OASPA will do in a vacuum: we are seeking inputs about our primer via an open survey which will accept responses until 11 July."

Oxford University Press: Experimentation, sustainability, and equity: reflecting on 20 years of open access publishing – May 13, 2025

"2025 marks 20 years since we, at OUP, launched our open access (OA) publishing by ‘flipping’ Nucleic Acids Research, one of our biggest journals...Since then, our commitment to open access has remained constant, and we have continually expanded our OA offering. The anniversary gives us a good opportunity to reflect on the progress we’ve made, and think about the exciting initiatives we have ahead of us."

More than 100 institutions and funders confirm recognition of eLife papers, signalling support for open science – May 7, 2025

"More than 100 institutions and funders worldwide have confirmed that research published in eLife continues to be considered in hiring, promotion, and funding decisions, following the journal’s bold move to forgo its Journal Impact Factor. This confirmation offers reassurance to researchers and highlights growing momentum behind fairer, more transparent models of academic publishing and assessment."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

New British Psychological Society journal focuses on future of environmental psychology - June 12, 2025

"The British Psychological Society, in partnership with Wiley, will introduce a new open access journal, called Environmental Psychology Research, publishing exciting updates from a psychological perspective on the complex interactions between human activities and the environment."

Reflections from SSP 2025: Communicating Our Value and Our Values

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 21:39:44 GMT

The Society for Scholarly Publishing’s (SSP) 47th Annual Meeting , themed “Reimagining the Future: Scholarly Publishing at the Intersection of Value and Values,” challenged the scholarly community to think beyond the content that we produce and the structures and systems we build—and to focus on how we communicate their purpose and impact .

As proud SSP volunteers, Annual Meeting sponsors, and Contributor level supporters of the Generations Fund , Delta Think was honored to support this dynamic event, which continues to elevate the conversation around diversity, integrity, innovation, and sustainability .

The opening keynote from marine conservation biologist Dr. David Shiffman set the tone: publishing research is necessary—but not sufficient . To drive change, he argued, we must tell our story , connect with audiences beyond the academy, and make the case for scholarship, science, and research in an increasingly skeptical world.

Inspired by that message, here are our team's key reflections from the conference:

Engagement and Mentorship: The Power of Community

Heather Staines

One of my favorite moments was participating in the President’s Early Career Roundtable . These emerging professionals—thoughtful, passionate, and diverse—reminded me that engagement is a two-way street. We’re not just telling our story—we’re empowering others to tell theirs.

As SSP President, I’ve had the privilege of contributing to the organization’s new strategic plan, the launch of the EPIC Awards, and the success of the Generations Fund. But nothing compares to the energy and optimism I saw in that room. The future of scholarly publishing is in good hands.

Innovation: AI Is Here (and Evolving Fast)

Diane Harnish

AI has officially graduated from theoretical to practical. We saw publishers showcasing real-life integrations—tools in production, monetization pilots, and governance frameworks taking shape.

From my panel on AI and copyright to collaborative case studies across the conference, the narrative has shifted. We're not asking if AI belongs—we're asking how to align it with our mission. Like the keynote’s call to combine research with action, AI’s value will depend on whether we use it to advance transparency, engagement, and ethical progress .

Output vs. Outcomes: Data as Storytelling

Bonnie Gruber

From predictive analytics to workflow tools, data and analytics were everywhere at SSP 2025. But more importantly, we saw them being used to support narratives—about trust, about quality, about community needs.

Sessions from Jennifer Regala, Lettie Conrad, and others highlighted the power of metadata, usage metrics, and audience segmentation to help publishers move beyond reporting to driving real-world results . As Dr. Shiffman illustrated through shark science, impact only matters when people understand it. That’s where analytics come in.

Impact: From Evidence to Advocacy

Lori Carlin

First, Dr. Shiffman’s message about articulating value hit a chord with me, as I’ve been concerned about how we move beyond the ‘four walls’ of scholarly publishing and our own community to ensure the public at large understands the great value and immense importance of research, and why they can TRUST science.

Also, I am always personally grateful and humbled by the vast network of friends and colleagues I have managed to build across the industry over the many years I’ve been involved with SSP. I remember back in my work ‘youth’ attending a Frankfurt Book Fair with a colleague who is now a good friend (and whom I won’t call out and embarrass) and being unable to walk 2 feet through Hall 4.2 without stopping to talk to someone he knew. I thought “I hope I reach that level of connection and comfort someday”…and SSP always makes me feel like I have ‘arrived’ in that sense. The number of folks I know as I walk through the meeting is astonishing to me, and I’m always grateful for the many opportunities to make new connections throughout the meeting as well.

And then there was the tone, the mood, the vibe in the air this year. Yes, most/many of us are concerned about the current funding landscape and policy changes, and certainly attendees showed and voiced their concern. But there was hope too – a sense of community, we are in this together, and the coming together of largely like minds with like concerns. And not to gripe or just share fears, but to think about solutions and ways to address current challenges; ways to work together to identify opportunities and positive pathways to address change.

Finally, there was Heather’s President’s Address during the awards luncheon, which brought much of the room to tears … an apt end to an equally challenging and rewarding year in scholarly publishing.

Ideas into Action: How Delta Think Can Help

Dr. Shiffman’s keynote was about bridging the gap between knowledge and change. Publishing alone isn’t enough. We must communicate why our work matters, engage audiences inside and outside academia, and ensure that scholarly publishing not only reflects but drives societal progress.

At Delta Think, we help publishers do just that— by grounding strategy in data, aligning with values, and building frameworks that support sustainable, evidence-based storytelling. Whether you're navigating AI, open access, research integrity, or the next wave of policy change, we’re here to help you turn insights into action. Let’s shape a stronger, clearer narrative—together.

Let’s turn your SSP takeaways into action.
�� Contact us at info@deltathink.com

RESULTS COMING SOON: Researcher/Author Survey + Part II

Analysis is nearly complete on the more than 13,000 responses to our Researcher/Author Survey, conducted in partnership with 27 professional societies and organizations. This data will generate systematic, quantitative insights from the market, and the accompanying analysis will support evidence-based strategy development and scenario planning within a rapidly evolving funding landscape and policy framework. Participants will receive detailed findings, but we are looking forward to sharing high-level insights with the wider community along the way.

Based on the overwhelming response to this project and the extraordinary and ongoing shifts in US federal policy, we expect to conduct this survey again in the fourth quarter of this year to start to document trends. If you need more information, please don’t hesitate to reach out by emailing us at info@deltathink.com .

News & Views: Falling Dollar, Rising Prices

Tue, 20 May 2025 12:10:17 GMT

After our previous analysis of the effects of inflation on APCs, we received a question about the effects of currency exchange rates. At a time when the dollar’s exchange rate is changing rapidly, what effect might that have for organizations buying services from abroad?

Background

Each year we survey the list Article Processing Charges (APCs) of more than 30 major and significant publishers. Going back to 2015, the dataset includes more than 20,000 unique titles and 150,000 title per year combinations. We have previously seen how headline prices typically increase each year, but mostly fall in real terms , once inflation is accounted for.

After our most recent analysis, we were asked by a US-based institution whether our inflation numbers included currency effects. With the US dollar (USD) having weakened over the last few months, the institution found buying services priced in non-USD currencies to be significantly more expensive by the end of April 2025 compared with the start of the year.

We take a snapshot of APCs at the same time each year. To compare like-for-like across our global market, we normalize prices to USD. This practice is commonly used by economists when analyzing global data and happens to be the most commonly used currency in our sample. Many non-US publishers – especially larger ones – offer an option of USD prices alongside their native currencies (and perhaps others). So, we sample USD prices where quoted, which cover on average around 94% of our annual samples of around 15,000 journals. Otherwise, we convert the prices cited in the publisher’s native currency into USD using the average exchange rate the most recent full year available.

Effects of changing exchange rates

Our analysis of price changes includes the effects of annual changes in exchange rates for the subset of around 6% of non-USD journals in our sample. It also includes any changes made by non-US publishers to their USD prices. However, it does not include the effects of significant and quick changes to exchange rates. Given the volatility in the US dollar over the last few months, we can dig deeper to explore the impact of these changes. And are there winners and losers depending on who’s buying or selling?

The figure above shows the effects of changing foreign exchange (FX) rates on purchases for different combinations of currencies.

The rows show the currency in which prices are set, representing the seller. The columns show the currency of the buyer. The data show how exchange rates have changed between January 6, 2025, and April 22, 2025.
For example, a US-based organization using USD (right-most column) to buy services priced in CHF (Swiss Francs, first row), will have seen the cost of fees increase by 11% between the two dates. The weaker dollar means more dollars are needed for the same price in CHF.
Of course, the reverse is true. So, a Switzerland-based organization using CHF (left-most column of data) to buy services priced in USD (bottom row) will find things to be cheaper by 9.9%.
Our color-coding takes the perspective of buyers (red/up-arrows more expensive, green/down cheaper), reflecting the original question we were asked.
Note how things have become significantly more expense for those buying using USD over the 15 weeks spanned by the table.
To put the numbers in context, going into 2025, average APCs rose by 3% across our annual sample, which translated to a fall of 2.7% in real terms.
The table represents a snapshot in time, to illustrate how profoundly costs might be affected by changes in exchange rates. As exchange rates fluctuate throughout the year, so will the costs.

Long term effects

We have looked at the last few months, but how does the picture look over the longer term?

The figure above compares the annual changes in average APCs when expressed in different currencies.

The baseline is the USD (grey) line, which shows our headline changes as we normally depict them.
The other lines show what happens if we convert our average USD APCs to other currencies using the average exchange rates for each year. We use the averages for the most recent full year just ended. So, e.g. the 2025 changes are based on average FX rates for 2024.
Note how the prices may shrink or grow at significantly different rates depending on the currency. For example, going into 2023 average prices increased if priced in USD, but fell if priced in other currencies.
The chart analyzes changes in prices and so is affected by changes in exchange rates. For example, just before and after Brexit in 2016, the Pound’s (GBP) value fell. As it then stabilized to a less volatile range, its annual changes moved more in line with other currencies.
Although not shown on the chart, our analysis suggests that, as a rough guide, if the strength of the dollar falls, average APCs in non-USD currencies increase, and vice versa.

Conclusion

To the question of whether our inflation analysis incorporates currency effects, the answer is “partly”. Our annual sampling method does not resolve short-term changes, which are not included. Annual averages in exchange rates only affect a few percent of prices in our long-term tracking and thus are included in our headline changes. If exchange rates impact the Consumer Price Index (CPI), then they would form part of inflation and impact our real-terms benchmarks.

Whatever the methodology, the real world is moving quickly. Recent rapid and significant changes in the value of the dollar have made it more expensive for US institutions to buy from outside the US. Our analysis shows the profound effects of a weaker dollar on APCs over a period of just 15 weeks.

Where publishers offer prices only in their local currencies, costs for US-based institutions have increased by more than 10% in some cases. These costs don’t directly translate into higher margins for publishers and vendors – they are just an increased cost of doing business. Of course, non-US buyers benefit from cheaper prices (which may feed through to margins). Meanwhile, non-US vendors offering US prices may see less value coming into their organizations when USD purchases are converted to balance sheets in local currencies (which may also affect margins). Larger organizations may have hedging strategies in place, but these can only go so far in highly volatile markets.

Scholarly publishing is a highly global and widely distributed industry, so volatile currency effects are nothing new. We have previously explored how exchange rates can profoundly affect market values . Many large corporate organizations report their finances both with and without currency effects so investors can see what changes in the currency markets mean. Our long-term analysis here shows how changes in currency rates regularly affect price swings – both for better and worse. Global disruption has been the new normal, with Brexit, COVID, and the war in Ukraine as just a few of many examples.

We don’t yet know how far the dollar will fall, or whether it will bounce back. Crises seem to be unfolding in real time – for example, the India/Pakistan escalated and de-escalated during the preparation of this piece of analysis. For those wrestling with budgets, we can only suggest baking in some contingency for exchange rates. Things may get worse before they get better.

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TOP HEADLINES

Duke University Press to publish open access monographs through MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D2O) – May 6, 2025

"The MIT Press is proud to announce that beginning in 2026, Duke University Press will join our Direct to Open (D2O) program. This collaboration marks the first such partnership with another university press for the D2O program, and reaffirms our shared commitment to open access publishing that is ethical, equitable, and sustainable."

COS Launches Call for Developers to Enhance Open Science Framework with Support from NSF – May 1, 2025

"The Center for Open Science (COS) has issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) inviting open-source development teams and independent developers to collaboratively enhance the Open Science Framework (OSF) as part of the National Science Foundation's Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program."

Notice of Updated Effective Date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy – April 30, 2025

"NIH’s default position is maximum transparency regarding research and research findings. This Notice updates the Effective Date of the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy, NOT-OD-25-047, to July 1, 2025 at which time it will replace the 2008 Public Access Policy. All other aspects of the Policy remain the same."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

Journals in Taylor & Francis collective funding pilot reach target for full open access publishing - April 28, 2025

"Taylor & Francis has confirmed both journals in its innovative pilot, Collective Pathway to Open Publishing (CPOP), will be converted to open access (OA) for 2025. Announced in November 2024, CPOP has been devised as an alternative OA model for Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) journals, particularly those focused on regions with a high uptake of OA agreements."

Analysis is Underway: Preliminary Data from our Researcher/Author Survey on the Impact of Potential Funding Reductions

Thu, 15 May 2025 05:57:49 GMT

Background: Anticipating Change

Earlier this year, the Delta Think team began reflecting on what potential decreases in United States federal funding could mean for research and scholarship both nationally and internationally. We knew our industry and clients also shared these uncertainties, so we embarked on an effort to capture market data for a more grounded understanding of trends. With analytics in hand, we could help our community begin to measure the impact of changes in the times to come and make informed decisions and plans.

Methods: Transparency and Rigor

Delta Think designed a researcher/author survey that explored topics such as potential research and publication output, peer review availability, conference attendance, society support, research concerns and sentiments, and more.

Twenty-seven organizations, associations, and societies participated with us across fields in the health sciences, life sciences, physical sciences, engineering & technology, social sciences, and arts & humanities. A unique survey link was distributed to each participating organization who then shared it with their constituents between March 25th and May 4th.

This outreach gave us unprecedented and comprehensive access to the scholarly community, enabling immense confidence in the data. The data generated will deliver systematic, quantitative insights from the market, and the accompanying analysis will support evidence-based strategy development and scenario planning within a rapidly evolving funding landscape and policy framework.

Results: Initial Demographics

Full results and analysis are in process, but we can share an overview of the response counts by segment:

We received 13,246 total responses from 138 countries; 60% of responses were from the US.
All fields were well represented with Health Sciences and Life Sciences leading the way with more than 50% of responses. Physical Sciences and Engineering & Technology followed with 35% of responses, and those in the Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences saw close to 15%.
Career stage also saw a good balance with about 34% identifying as Grad Students/Residents or in their Early Career, 31% in Mid-Career, and 30% Senior.
Respondents worked across many different roles including 33% who selected Professor/Faculty/Educator, 12% who selected Healthcare Provider or Physician/Surgeon, and 10% who selected Researcher/Analyst.

Conclusions: Stay Tuned and Sign Up

Based on the large number of responses, we have a high degree of confidence in the data, and we know it will provide meaningful, evidence-based, and actionable intelligence not only for the 27 participating organizations, but also for the larger scholarly communications industry. Participants will receive the detailed findings, but we will share high-level insights along the way with the wider community.

Based on the overwhelming response to this project and the extraordinary and ongoing shifts in US federal policy, we expect to conduct this survey again in the fourth quarter of this year to start to document trends.

Current survey partners as well as new societies, associations, and organizations are encouraged to participate, so please contact us at info@deltathink.com for more information or to ensure you are included.

This Author/Researcher Survey is a logical and natural extension of our work. Delta Think consultants specialize in uncovering evidence for our clients, discovering what that evidence means for them, and using the knowledge gained to build customer-driven, actionable business and publishing strategies. Through the expert utilization of innovative and creative market research techniques and analysis, we are committed to doing our part in support of the scholarly communication community, putting our ideas into action.

We will also be attending the upcoming SSP Annual Meeting, so please reach out to set up a meeting with one of the team to hear more in Baltimore.

Contextual Inquiry: The Science Behind User Behavior

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 02:46:57 GMT

“I had a wonderful teacher about animal behavior.” – Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall was renowned for her ability to understand chimpanzees in the wild simply by observing their day-to-day behaviors. Her subjects were her teachers. She immersed herself in their natural environment, which allowed her to gather authentic insights into her subjects’ social structures, tool use, communication, and cultural behaviors. This ethnographic style of research has now been adopted by the business world to gain deeper insights into customer needs, workflows, and challenges.

What is Contextual Inquiry?

Contextual Inquiry, as it’s frequently called in the commercial world, is a user-centered research method. Like Dr. Goodall in the field in Tanzania, Contextual Inquiry involves observing and interviewing users in their natural environments while they perform routine tasks, allowing market researchers to understand user behaviors, goals, motivations, and pain points in real-world contexts. The methodology is guided by four key principles:

Context: Observations and interviews occur in the user’s actual environment.
Partnership: Researchers collaborate with users to understand their processes.
Interpretation: Insights are shared with users during the interview for clarification.
Focus: The interaction is steered toward topics relevant to the research scope.

Why Contextual Inquiry?

Contextual Inquiry illuminates user behavior and workflows and can be used to inform solutions including product development, processes, and policies.

1. Deep Understanding of User Needs

By observing users in their natural environment, contextual inquiry uncovers hidden needs, pain points, and behaviors that users may not articulate in surveys or traditional interviews. This identifies solutions that address real user challenges rather than assumed ones.

2. Authentic Data Collection

Unlike lab-based studies or self-reported methods, Contextual Inquiry captures authentic behaviors as they occur. This helps reveal workarounds, unconscious habits, and environmental factors that influence user behavior.

3. User-Centered Design and Focus

The method places users at the center, ensuring solutions are tailored to their needs and preferences.

4. Reduced Risk and Costs

By identifying real-world user behaviors and challenges, Contextual Inquiry increases the likelihood that resulting solutions, products, processes, and policies meet user needs.

5. Informed Strategy

Insights from contextual inquiry help prioritize users’ needs and challenges, identify new opportunities, and ensure alignment of product and strategy roadmaps with market demands.

6. Empathy Building

Direct observation helps teams develop empathy for users by experiencing and understanding their challenges firsthand.

Use Cases and an Idea

Delta Think uses a Contextual Inquiry methodology to apply the principles above in several different types of projects:

Understanding specialized work processes and designing complex systems or workflows
Exploring new product opportunities
Redesigning existing products
Informing processes and policies

One way Delta Think can use Contextual Inquiry to help publishers is around the use of AI by researchers and authors. For example, before developing any guidelines, it is critical that publishers first understand how these tools are being used. Using Contextual Inquiry to observe how researchers and authors are currently using AI allows you to build policies that address specific use cases and provide meaningful guidelines based on actual behaviors.

At Delta Think, we know how powerful a tool Contextual Inquiry can be for creating a user-centered culture grounded in decisions based on real-world insights and observations. We specialize in uncovering evidence for our clients, discovering what that evidence means for them, and using the knowledge gained to build customer-driven products, policies, and actionable business and publishing strategies.

Ready to start the conversation? Please reach out today to discuss how our market research expertise, including Contextual Inquiry, can help your organization unlock key insights to support development and growth.

News & Views: The Impact of Inflation on APC Costs

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 12:44:15 GMT

In March 2025, we looked at the latest Article Processing Charges (APCs) . This month we focus on how prices have risen relative to inflation. As APC price increases fall back to trend, what does this mean in real terms?

Background

Each year we survey the list Article Processing Charges (APCs) of more than 30 major and significant publishers. Going back to 2015, the dataset includes more than 20,000 unique titles and 150,000 title per year combinations. Going into 2025, we saw price increases fall back to long-term trends from their unusually high increases in 2024. Fully OA (“gold”) journal list prices across our sample rose by around 6.5%, compared with a 9.5% increase this time last year. Hybrid list prices rose by an average of 3%, compared with 4.2%.

Last year’s price rises were above long term trends, but overall we found they were rising below inflation. How does this hold for this year’s price increases?

We again use the global Consumer Price Index (CPI) as our inflation index, as we consider it to represent the most realistic view of our marketplace. Prices exclude zero APCs, so we can see the effects for instances when publishers choose to charge APCs.

Are APCs becoming cheaper or more expensive?

The chart below shows how increases in all list APCs work out in real terms for both hybrid and fully OA journals.

The figure above compares the average annual changes in APCs as stated (top, blue line) with those adjusted for inflation (bottom, red line).

Positive numbers mean prices are increasing; negative ones mean they are falling.
For most years, APCs have fallen in real terms. In other words, they are increasing more slowly than inflation.
The exception is in 2021, when we saw large increases but a modest rate of inflation.
To put the numbers in context, inflation (we use the global CPI) averages around 4%, but we saw it spiking to just over 8% in 2022. It is forecasted by the IMF to be 4.5% in 2025.
Because of the large number of hybrid journals, the averages across all OA journals are similar to those for hybrid journals.

Fully OA Prices

How does the picture look for the higher rates of increase in just fully OA journal prices? The fully OA landscape is shown in Figure 2.

The figure above compares the average annual changes in APCs of fully OA journals as stated (top, blue line) with those adjusted for inflation (bottom, red line).

As before, positive numbers mean prices are increasing; negative ones mean they are falling.
Here, the picture is different. Fully OA APCs have risen in real terms as least as often as they have fallen in real terms.
The above-inflationary price rises were especially noticeable going into 2021 and going into 2024. They remain slightly above inflation going into 2025.

Conclusion

Overall, OA prices are increasing below inflation. The data suggest that authors continue to get (modestly) increasing value for money for their OA fees.

However, the headlines are skewed by the large number of hybrid journals. When looking only at fully OA (“gold”) journals, prices are rising slightly faster than inflation. Our market sizing data suggest that significantly more articles are published in fully OA journals than in hybrid, so the inflationary effects will be more prevalent than the real-terms cost savings for hybrid. Although it’s worth noting that fully OA prices are cheaper than those for hybrid, so they are growing from a lower base.

As discussions continue about the increasing cost and affordability of OA, it’s important to keep an eye on the nuances of real terms effects.

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TOP HEADLINES

Springer Nature Says It Has Reached 50 Percent Open Access – April 14, 2025

"In the sometimes seemingly endless march to open access—and the steady blizzard of announcements of transformative agreements, etc.—we have today (April 14) an announcement from Springer Nature that it has reached a goal to publish 50 percent of its primary research in open-access formats, a target that had been set in 2021 for the end of 2024."

Announcing OASPA’s ‘Next 50%’ project: a different conversation about the open access transition – April 10, 2025

"OASPA is launching a major new project for 2025, bringing together publishing organisations with those who pay for, fund and invest in scholarly communications...This project will build on OASPA’s research and outputs of the past few years, most notably following over 3,000 downloads of OASPA’s recommendations on financial and workflow barriers."

Academic libraries cannot afford to carry on with transformative agreements – March 31, 2025

"The funding crisis in UK higher education is forcing academic libraries to make difficult financial decisions. Caroline Edwards argues agreements with commercial publishers now represent an unreasonable expense and introduces the Open Journals Collective as an alternative model for scaling open access to journal publications."

cOAlition S provides feedback on the Canadian Tri-Agency Open Access policy – March 27, 2025

"cOAlition S...has responded to the consultation on the draft, revised Open Access policy on publications announced by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)."

Collaboration and inclusivity key to shaping next-generation open access – March 18, 2025

"This month marks the beginning of the negotiations, led by Jisc on behalf of the higher education sector, to discuss how UK universities continue to access and publish in open access journals."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

Despite Challenges, Mathematics Journals Remain Open Access through Subscribe to Open in 2025 – April 16, 2025

"EDP Sciences and the Société de Mathématiques Appliquées et Industrielles (SMAI) are pleased to confirm that all six mathematics journals will remain open access in 2025 under the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model."

Taylor & Francis journals convert to open access through Subscribe to Open pilot – April 2, 2025

"Every article published in the 2025 volume of three Taylor & Francis journals will be made open access (OA), following a successful launch of the publisher’s Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot."

Elsevier and American Accounting Association announce launch of new journal – April 1, 2025

"The American Accounting Association (AAA) announced today their affiliation with Accounting Open, a newly launched journal published by Elsevier."

APS Achieves Open Access Goals with Subscribe to Open for 2025 – March 24, 2025

"The American Physiological Society (APS) is proud to announce the successful implementation of Subscribe to Open (S2O), achieving its goal of making 10 of its primary research journals fully open access in 2025 through S2O."

Journal of Applied Physics, Physics of Plasmas Open Access in 2025 Under Subscribe to Open Pilot – March 19, 2025

"AIP Publishing is pleased to announce two of its flagship scholarly journals, Journal of Applied Physics and Physics of Plasmas, will be open access in 2025 as part of our Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot program."

News & Views Webinar: Open Access Charges 2025

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 16:52:48 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our March News & Views companion online discussion forum!

Join us to hear the latest trends around APC data, including APCs for both fully OA and hybrid journals. We'll talk about what we're seeing in relation to recent years and discuss the broader context for the APC market.

If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

Author/Researcher Survey: Impact of Potential Funding Reductions on Research, Publishing, and Conference Attendance

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 13:10:10 GMT

Delta Think is currently spearheading an industry market research survey to authors and researchers across the scholarly community designed to provide insight into the impact of potential US federal funding reductions on their research. The survey addresses topics such as publication volume, their ability/allowance for peer review, conference participation and attendance, influence on their research scope and topics, and more.

Working in collaboration with nearly 25 scholarly societies, we are launching this initiative to capture the real-world impact of these potential changes in order to help societies better plan and support their members, researchers, and authors. The results of the survey will provide scholarly publishers with systematic, quantitative voice-of-market data to inform evidenced-based strategy development and scenario planning in a rapidly changing funding landscape and policy environment.

The survey opens this week, with each participating society distributing the link to their own communities. All participating societies will receive an in-depth analysis of the full survey results, filtered by various demographics such as country, career stage, and discipline, as well as options for Delta Think to analyze their specific community data or the raw data from their specific community so they can analyze it themselves. Delta Think has designed the survey and will conduct all the analysis of the results.

Are you participating? It’s not too late! There’s still time to include additional societies, so please contact us at info@deltathink.com asap if you would like to discuss your organization’s participation.

The Value of Market and Customer Insight

News & Views: Open Access Charges – Price Increases Back on Trend

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 12:56:56 GMT

This month we look at our latest data about Article Processing Charges (APCs). Per article pricing is a fundamental building block for all paid publishing models, so our review provides an invaluable insight into how costs of open access continue to evolve. APC prices in general continue to increase, but at a slower rate compared with this time last year. Important nuances in the distribution of prices continue to affect the value and cost of paid publishing models.

Background

Each year we survey the list Article Processing Charges (APCs) of a sample of major and significant publishers. Covering more than 20,000 titles going back to 2016, our dataset represents one of the most comprehensive reviews of open access pricing.

To compare like for like, we consistently analyze non-discounted, CC BY charges. We take a snapshot at the end of every January, so we can track yearly changes while controlling for the different times of year that publishers may update prices. Our statistics exclude zero or unspecified APCs, although these are included in our underlying data. This allows us to understand trends where publishers choose to charge APCs without skewing averages. We run separate analyses around APC-free models.

Headline Changes

Going into 2025, we have seen APC pricing increasing but falling back to long-term trends.

Fully OA APC list prices across our sample have risen by around 6.5% compared with 9.5% this time last year.
Hybrid APC list prices have risen by an average of 3% compared with 4.2% this time last year.
Maximum APCs for fully OA journals remain at $8,900.
Maximum APCs for hybrid journals now top out at $12,690 (up $400 from last year).
Big jumps in prices happened last year, driven by high inflation. In 2020-2021 prices were driven up when high-impact journals began offering OA options for the first time. In both cases, increases subsequently fell back to averages.

Underlying trends continue.

There are around 2.6x more hybrid journals than fully OA ones, down from 2.9x a year ago. Hybrid journals follow (or, rather, set) a similar pattern to the market overall.
On average, fully OA prices are around 64% of those of hybrids. This is a couple of percentage points higher than long term trends.
Around 31% of our sample of fully OA journals charge no APCs. (We have separately analyzed the number of articles in OA journals.)
Price rises vary significantly by discipline. Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences have seen particularly large average increases, especially in fully OA journal prices.

Price Distribution

Market-wide headline price changes mask important nuances. We have discussed previously that the most important nuance lies in the spread of prices within a given publisher’s portfolio. For example, if the bulk of a publisher’s journals lie toward the lower end of its pricing, with just a few journals priced at the high end, the average (mean) price will be higher than most authors pay.

The following figures show how the spread of prices plays out in the market across our sample of publishers. The figures are outlines of histograms, showing how many titles sit in various price bands over the successive years of data we have curated. The red line shows the most recent year’s prices. The lines become greener as they go further back in time. Subscribers to Delta Think’s Data and Analytics Tool can see full details of axes.

Hybrid Prices

The spread of price bands for hybrid journals is shown in Figure 1 below.

The overall spread of prices has remained relatively constant over time.

In 2019-20, the most popular price band shifted slightly towards the lower end of the market and remained there for a few years. However, in 2021-22 it moved back up to its historic high and has remained there since.
The steepest prices increases occurred in 2020-21, when high-impact journals began offering hybrid options. For clarity, the chart combines the very highest APCs into one band on the right-hand side.
Average prices paid are heavily influenced by the shape of the curves on either side of the peak. Notice how the curve on the right side of the peak is becoming shallower and wider over time. This suggests that increasing numbers of journals are priced higher than average, and so average prices paid will increase. The curve to the left of the peak was getting shallower, but it is now getting steeper. So, the moderating influence of lower-priced journals is now reducing. As the curve widens, the peak reduces to keep the area under the curve roughly the same. This reflects the relatively small change in the total number of journals compared with previous years. We are therefore seeing a movement in price bands of existing journals to increase average prices paid, as higher APCs are becoming more prevalent.

Fully OA Prices

The fully OA landscape is shown in Figure 2 below.

The data suggest that both the number of fully OA journals and their average APC prices continue to increase.

The peak of the curve is getting higher and moving to the right, so we are seeing an increase in the most popular price band and in average prices.
In earlier years, the secondary peak suggested the presence of a significant number of journals cheaper than the most popular price band, which moderated the increase in average prices.
In more recent years, the secondary peak moved to the right as prices increased, and more expensive journals became more common.
However, as with hybrids, the right-hand side of the curve is becoming shallower. The increasing number of more expensive journals will increase average prices paid. The flattening of the curve on the right-hand side is likely a coincidence as the market continues to evolve. This is likely due to a mix of some hybrid journals moving to fully OA and taking their higher prices with them, and simply by chance that some fully OA price increases have moved into a slightly higher band. Next year, we may see this smooth out, or we may be seeing the emergence of third peak in the chart.
The height of the curve has also increased at the same time, illustrating that we are seeing an increase in total number of fully OA journals. This is due to a mix of more journals being launched or acquired, and hybrid journals being switched to fully OA.

Conclusion

Last year we noted that inflation drove above-average price increases. Going into 2025, as inflation has come down, increases have fallen back towards long-term trends.

While outlying price changes are important general indicators, they do not necessarily shift the market on their own. Changes in the spread and emphasis of popular price bands play key roles too. The increasing proportion of higher-priced journals continues to increase the average prices actually paid.

One moderating influence is the high number of journals – usually fully OA titles – that don’t charge APCs . We have not analyzed these here, as we want to focus on patterns in APCs actually charged. Fully OA journals that do not charge APCs are typically funded by some other means.

Per-APC information is useful in a wider context too. Even where deals are calculated based on bundles, they are often set by discounting from list APCs – especially where publication activity exceeds agreed caps. The high number of journals with no APCs will most likely have their sponsorship prices set based on per-paper revenues desired. Similarly, understanding revenues generated per paper is important to calculate thresholds for journal flips or for launching and sustaining a Subscribe to Open model.

Studying individual journal list APCs remains foundational for understanding pricing across all OA business models. Here we have covered average prices across the market. The averages can vary based on discipline. If you are curious how your APC pricing compares to the market, please contact us for a customized review.

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TOP HEADLINES

Open Monograph Press (OMP) Review In Progress – March 5, 2025

"The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is investing in the future of open book publishing by undertaking a review of Open Monograph Press (OMP)...As part of Open Book Futures (OBF), and with our recent move to join the Open Book Collective (OBC) Supporter Program, we are committed to ensuring that our path forward is grounded in the community’s needs and reflects the evolution of the open book ecosystem over the years since OMP launched in 2013."

UPLOpen expands open access library to 10,000 titles supporting global research – February 24, 2025

"UPLOpen, the open-access eBook platform managed by the De Gruyter eBound Foundation, has reached a milestone of 10,000 open access titles from more than 50 academic publishers...Since its launch in April 2024, the platform has expanded its collection with works from more than 50 academic publishers, focusing on making scholarly research widely accessible."

EIFL OA publishing agreements cover 2,927 journals – February 17, 2025

"We have updated the lists of journals in which corresponding authors from our partner countries can publish in open access for free or at discounted Article Processing Charges (APCs)...We start 2025 with agreements with 15 publishers allowing authors from EIFL partner countries to publish in open access at waived or discounted APCs in 2,927 journals (379 more journals than in 2024), across a wide array of disciplines."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

Biochemical Society journals S2O decision 2025 - March 3, 2025

"Five leading journals published by the Biochemical Society, by and for molecular bioscientists, will be published open access (OA) during 2025."

Subscribe to Open threshold met: Journal of General Virology and Journal of Medical Microbiology now Open Access - February 14, 2025

"The Microbiology Society is pleased to announce that, thanks to the support of subscribing institutions, we have successfully met our sustainability target for the Journal of General Virology and the Journal of Medical Microbiology under the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model for 2025."

Books: The Hidden Goldmine in Your 2025 Content Strategy

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:53:57 GMT

User information needs as well as funding models are evolving rapidly, as evidenced by Clarivate’s recent move to phase out perpetual access purchases for print, eBooks, and digital collections by the end of 2025. Taking a hard look at how these assets contribute to your portfolio and overall organizational strategy has never been more critical. A holistic books program assessment can help you think intentionally about how books and book-based content can help meet customer and market needs.

Publishing and Product Strategy

A market-driven publishing and product strategy begins with an understanding of customer information needs.

What markets, segments, information needs, and challenges are present?
How can customer information needs be addressed? What role can our book content play?
How can we differentiate our solutions? Can our book content contribute to a unique value proposition?

Thinking creatively about how your content meets market needs is critical; think solutions, not printed pages and chapters.

Commercial Strategy

A detailed commercial strategy, supported by proper resources, is fundamental to success. Leveraging a clear understanding of customer preferences and delivering messaging that resonates with your specific market segments and use cases is essential.

What are the best methods to generate market awareness? When and how should we communicate with key audiences? What messages resonate best?
What sales and marketing capabilities do we have internally? Where do we need to partner to reach core audiences? How do we meet global needs?
Do we have the appropriate access, pricing, and distribution models in place to meet customer expectations? What do we need to do directly? Where should we cultivate successful channel partnerships?

And you don’t have to go it alone; a commercial strategy is best formulated and executed by a combination of internal and external resources.

Technology Infrastructure

Is your technology optimized to support your book program? From agile content management systems to product platforms to customer relationship management tools, the right tools enable your content and commercial strategy.

What systems do we need to ensure efficiency in our publishing processes and quality and integrity in our content?
What technologies and platforms do we need to build market-responsive products?
What systems do we need to communicate effectively and meaningfully with our customers, including authors?
Are we best served by building these systems or partnering?

Successfully integrating and leveraging new technologies, such as AI, requires a fundamental understanding of markets and customer information needs .

The Numbers

Financial metrics are a key measure of the health of any program. An in-depth assessment of a program’s recent performance is a vital tool to help identify strengths, weaknesses, and gaps, and help to surface areas for improvement and corrective action. A financial analysis will clarify:

What is our book and content annual output? Is it sufficient to support our strategy and meet customer and market needs?
What is our cost structure? Our pricing strategy? Do they align with industry and market norms and expectations?
Do we have the appropriate mix of internal and external resources in place to support our strategy?
How can we best align our financial performance to contribute to the organization’s larger strategy?

Beyond red ink or black ink, financial analysis will provide answers to these questions.

Assessing Your Book Program

Delta Think partners with publishers to do the foundational analysis necessary to understand how your book and book-based content can be a vital part of your content portfolio and support your organization’s goals and objectives. Our processes, including program benchmarking, stakeholder interviews, surveys, and workshops, combined with expert landscape research and analysis ensure you are building a content strategy that is market-focused and customer-driven. Contact Delta Think at info@deltathink.com to set up a time for a video call to learn more. We will also be attending the London Book Fair, March 11-13, 2025, if you’d like to schedule an in-person chat.

News & Views: What proportion of OA is Diamond OA? Can AI help us find out?

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 13:59:56 GMT

Overview

A recent post on the Open Café listserv posed a question about the true extent of fee-free open access publishing, but it noted the incomplete coverage of the data cited. We have more comprehensive data, but just as we started our analysis, DeepSeek’s release sent markets into turmoil. The stage was set for a timely experiment. We first answer the question using our data. Then we see how the AI did.

Background

What proportion of open access is not paid for by APCs? In discussing this, a recent Open Café listserv post cited studies by Walt Crawford – a librarian, well-known in the academic library and OA communities for his analysis of open access. He has paid particular attention to “diamond” OA journals, which charge neither readers nor authors. His studies are based on data from the Directory of Open Access journals ( DOAJ ). Excellent though both sources may be – and, full disclosure, we contribute to the DOAJ – the DOAJ’s remit covers only fully OA (“gold”) journals.

As listserv founder Rick Anderson noted, “By counting only articles published in DOAJ-listed journals, Crawford’s studies radically _undercount_ the number of APC-funded OA articles published – because DOAJ does not list hybrid journals, which always charge an APC for OA and which produce a lot of genuinely OA articles (though exactly how many, no one knows).”

Using our data

Actually, we do know … or at least have some fair estimates of hybrid OA. Our data allows us to determine the share of open access output in APC-free journals, as follows.

The charts analyze shares of open access articles published in both fully OA and hybrid journals.

They show the split between output in APC-free journals (“No APC” in the orange) and in journals where APCs were charged (“APC” in the grey).
Journals count as APC-free if they were free of APCs in the year of publication.
The data cover the five years 2018-2023 (consistent with the Open Café post).
Around 13% of all OA output in our sample is APC-free (left-hand pie).
As we often discuss, individual publisher’s experiences may vary. The right-hand pie shows the subset of output for Physics. Note how the APC-free share rises to almost 47% in this case.
If we choose a slightly earlier timeframe – which will become relevant below – we see very little change. Over 2018-2022, there was very little change in the numbers.
Our data allows further analysis, for example by over 200 subjects, or comparing society titles with others. Please get in touch to find out more.

Our estimate of a 13% APC-free share of the total market compares with around 33% noted in the Open Café post, citing Walt Crawford’s data.

What about AI?

If we wanted to use public sources, we would consider this to be a classic web research problem. This should suit generative AI (GenAI). ChatGPT is arguably the most well-known example of this technology. With disruptor DeepSeek grabbing headlines recently, it seemed opportune to compare both with the benchmarks from our own data. We can also test DeepSeek’s claims to deliver an equivalent level of performance to ChatGPT.

The actual question

Users of GenAI tools rapidly discover that the phraseology and nuances of questions asked – aka the prompt – are vital. The more detail and direction you give them, the better. We used:

what proportion of open access is diamond open access? list numbers of articles

and share for each of the last 5 years

Some prompts can run to paragraphs. But we wanted to test the AI’s ability to process a natural sounding and simple question, to interpret the term Diamond, and to see if it would spot the inclusion of fully OA and hybrid. We needed to direct it to the specifics of our required results. The 5-year period was mentioned in the Open Café post. We chose a “one shot” prompt (not asking the model to refine its first answer), as we wanted to see how our virtual research assistant would perform without further direction.

The answer

The table below shows the results.

^* ChatGPT 4o did not give the answer directly. Instead, it gave Diamond OA & APC-funded OA as separate shares of all output, so we needed to calculate Diamond share of OA.

^† ChatGPT 4-turbo with “Reasoning” switched on.

The table above summarizes the AIs’ answers.

The technology continues to evolve, so there are different versions of it – different models – available. We see this for ChatGPT, where different versions of the same AI give different responses.
A particular model may give different replies if you ask the same question more than once. ChatGPT seemed stable, but DeepSeek exhibited this behavior, as indicated in the “Attempt” row.
ChatGPT 4-turbo has a “Reason” feature. When enabled, this shows its method (reasoning) and then appears to return more verbose results. The annual figures we cited result from the “Reason” mode. Without it, it returned similar numbers to ChatGPT 4o.
Looking at share of OA output, there’s a big variation between ChatGPT and DeepSeek. There’s a smaller variation between the two DeepSeek attempts. DeepSeek did very well and got close to our estimates.
The DeepSeek attempts showed big variations in the article numbers. DeepSeek attempt 2 returned similar article numbers to ChatGPT 4-turbo, but the respective shares were roughly 2.5x different.
The models were only able to show figures up to 2022.

A research assistant’s ability to explain their results is important, and so we assessed the models on their communication ability. In practice both research assistants and AI can be asked to refine their work. But for the purposes of this analysis, we used a one-shot prompt.

The word count of replies varied. Chat GPT-4o had single-paragraph, single-number brevity. The others mixed bullets, prose, and tables.
Only one model added a hyperlink to its source(s), noted as follows.
ChatGPT-4o cited encyclo.ouvrirlascience.fr. It was the one model to include a link.
ChatGPT 4-turbo volunteered sections describing definitions, included headline numbers from some sources, tabulated yearly estimates, discussions comparing results from different sources, caveats on data limitations, and a summary. It cited Wikipedia as its source. It noted that its 5 years of estimates were based on data from 2017-2019, but it’s unclear whether it calculated them or was citing some language it found.
DeepSeek volunteered brief discussions about definitions, trends, annual estimates, and key sources. The sources seemed to be directions for further reading, including the OA Diamond Journals Study (2021) by cOAlition S and OPERAS, which it considered to provide the most comprehensive view, the DOAJ, and Web of Science/Scopus (noting they underrepresent Diamond OA journals, as many are smaller or regionally focused).
The verbose models attached general caveats to the data, but none picked up on the subtleties of defining Diamond. If a journal has only one APC-free year, say as an introductory discount, does it really count as a true Diamond or sponsored journal?

Conclusion

In working with and assessing GenAI models, it is important to set expectations correctly. They are more like an inexperienced intern than a seasoned researcher. Prompts need to be refined, several attempts made, and human judgement exercised over the results.

DeepSeek’s results were surprisingly good. It undershot our estimate by a few percentage points. ChatGPT overestimated considerably – perhaps reflecting its use of the problematic sources noted in the original listserv post. The additional material selected by the models was useful in explaining the concepts and drivers behind that data. The differences between our samples and those the models cite explain some of the variance in the data. But this doesn’t explain some of the big differences – e.g. same #s articles, but different shares or vice versa, with 2.5x variance.

Perhaps the GenAI models, in their current forms, are not ideally suited this sort of numerically focused research. However, they appear to be progressing in the right direction. (Note: We did not attempt this query on either of the Deep Research models, currently offered by OpenAI and Google Gemini.)

For fun, we tail-ended our assessment by asking each of our AIs “what's the answer to life, the universe and everything?” ChatGPT went to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy answer of 42. DeepSeek was more expansive, noting how the question encompassed broader philosophic endeavors. However, a light-weight offline version of DeepSeek that we experimented with gave perhaps the best reply. It concluded that, while 42 is a clever punchline,

“…it also reflects on the human tendency to search for significance where there might not be one.”

Fair point.

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TOP HEADLINES

What Gets Missed in the Discourse on Transformative Agreements – February 12, 2025

"Transformative agreements have a crucial role to play in the transition to open access, and while they may not fix structural problems, they are a reflection of the dynamic publishing landscape and the diverse needs of the academic community."

Serbia Adopts Open Science Platform 2.0 – February 4, 2025

"The Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovation of Serbia has adopted a new national open science (OS) policy – the Open Science Platform 2.0 – that applies to all Serbian publicly-funded research projects and programmes. EIFL welcomes the adoption of the policy, which significantly expands the scope of OS efforts in Serbia, and updates the country’s first national OS policy, which was adopted in 2018."

cOAlition S to sunset the Journal Comparison Service in April 2025 – February 3, 2025

"cOAlition S announces it will discontinue the Journal Comparison Service (JCS), effective from 30th April 2025...The JCS was launched in September 2022 to support the Plan S principle that Open Access fees should be transparent and commensurate with the publishers’ services. It was developed following detailed consultations with librarians, publishers, legal experts, and software developers with the aim to shed light on open access publishing fees and services."

Announcing a New Report on Open Educational Resources – January 22, 2025

"In the fall of 2023 we announced the launch of a new research project, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, designed to assess the impact and implementation of open educational resource (OER) initiatives at public institutions of higher education. Today, we are publishing the resulting report, based on an initial literature review and interviews with OER leaders in four US states."

European Diamond Capacity Hub launched to strengthen Diamond Open Access publishing in Europe – January 21, 2025

"The European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH), a pioneering initiative to advance Diamond Open Access publishing across Europe, was officially launched on 15th January 2025, in Madrid. OPERAS, the research infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities, will serve as the fiscal host of the European Diamond Capacity Hub."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

All EMS Press journals open access in 2025 following another successful Subscribe To Open round - February 5, 2025

"EMS Press publishes all journals open access in 2025 for the second consecutive year, following a successful Subscribe To Open (S2O) round...all 22 journals in our Subscribe To Open (S2O) programme will be published as open access for the 2025 subscription period."

News & Views Special Edition: How much scholarly publishing is affected by US Presidential Executive Orders?

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 13:51:21 GMT

Overview

Following the 2024 US election, the new US administration has instructed employees in some key federal agencies to retract publications arising from federally funded research. This is to allow representatives of the administration to review the language used, to ensure it is consistent with the administration’s political ideology. In this special edition of News & Views, we quantify how many papers might be affected and estimate their share of scholarly publishers’ output. The initial numbers may be small, but we suggest the effects on scholarly publishing could be profound.

Background

On 20 January 2025, Donald J. Trump took office as the 47th President of the United States. Within hours he signed an Executive Order ¹ (EO) 14168 proclaiming that the US government would only recognize two sexes, and ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs inside federal agencies. The following day, his administration instructed federal health agencies to pause all external communications – “such as health advisories, weekly scientific reports, updates to websites and social media posts” – pending their review by presidential appointees. These instructions were delivered to staff at agencies inside the Department of Health and Human Services (DHSS), including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The events that followed are important, as they directly affect scholarly papers and our analysis.

A memo on 29 January instructed agencies to “end all agency programs that … promote or reflect gender ideology” as defined in the EO. Department heads were instructed to immediately review and terminate any “programs, contracts, and grants” that “promote or inculcate gender ideology.” Among other things, they were to remove any public-facing documents or policies that are trans-affirming and replace the term “gender” with “sex” on official documents.

By the start of February, more than 8000 web pages across more than a dozen US government websites were taken down . These included over 3000 pages from the CDC (including 1000 research articles filed under preventing chronic disease, STD treatment guidelines , information about Alzheimer’s warning signs, overdose prevention training , and vaccine guidelines for pregnancy). Other departments affected included the FDA (some clinical trials), the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (the OSTP, removing papers in optics, chemistry and experimental medicine), the Health Resources and Services Administration (covering care for women with opioid addictions, and an FAQ about the Mpox vaccine).

Around this time, it further emerged that CDC staff were sent an email directing them to withdraw manuscripts that had been accepted, but not yet published, that did not comply with the EO. Agency staff members were given a list of about 20 forbidden terms, including gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female, and he/she/they/them. All references to DEI and inclusion are also to be removed.

The effects of the EO

Commenting on the merits of policy and ideology lies beyond our remit. However, when these matters affect the scholarly record – as they clearly do here – then they are of interest for our analyses. Specifically, what might the effects of the EO be on the publication of papers, and what effects might accrue from withdrawal of research funding?

If federal agencies are being instructed to withhold or withdraw submissions, then, to quantify what this might mean to publishers, we have estimated the volume of output from a few key federal agencies. It is summarized in the following chart.

Sources: OpenAlex , Research Organization Registry (ROR) , Delta Think analysis.

The charts above show the output funded by a few key US federal agencies as a share of global output (left) and US output (right).

The data span the previous 5 years.
The US accounted for around 15% of global output.
The CDC accounted for a tiny share: 0.1% of global output and 0.6% of US output.
The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), of which the CDC is a part, accounted for just under 6% of global output, but just over 40% of US output.
The NIH produces around 95% of DHHS output.
Note, that these samples are based on OpenAlex data, where papers are indicated to have the funders as classified above, or by one of their subsidiaries (as best we can estimate).

The proportion of CDC-authored papers is tiny, and so their suppression is unlikely to lead to a drop in publishing output. However, should the orders spread to other areas of health research, then the effects could be profound – especially for journals and publishers relying heavily on US-authored papers. As we saw in our last market sizing update , significant authors moving away from publishing venues can have profound effects on publishers’ output and revenues.

As ever, the averages are unevenly distributed, so we looked at how individual journals might be affected.

Sources: OpenAlex , Research Organization Registry (ROR) , Delta Think analysis.

The left-hand chart focuses on papers arising from CDC-funded research.

On average, only 5% of papers in journals are attributable to CDC-funded research.
However, the chart’s sample is small. Only 10% of journals receive these submissions.
Where the CDC affects a larger share of papers, the journals tend to be small.
For larger journals, the CDC accounts for smaller shares of output.
A very few journals are heavily reliant on CDC-funded research. (The outlying journals at 100% published just the CDC paper that year; they could either be CDC journals, or a shortcoming in the underlying data.)

The right-hand chart puts the CDC figures in context.

It compares the CDC (green dots, clustered bottom left) with all the NIH (orange crosses, which includes the CDC) and all US-funded papers (blue plus signs). The point of the charts is to show the overall patterns, not to highlight details of specific journals.
To keep the data manageable, it shows only journals with more than 0.5% of their papers funded by the funders in question. We can therefore focus on journals that may have a significant proportion of papers affected.
The small cluster of dark green CDC dots bottom left shows how small the numbers of journals with CDC-funded submissions are relative to the wider market.
The NIH and US federal agencies can account for significant proportions of journal output for even modestly sized journals, across many more journals. Many journals are wholly reliant on papers from these funders.

So, while a few journals may be affected by CDC submissions, and a very few of those significantly so, the effects are mostly small. Only a few percent of journals would see any significant drop in their overall submissions due to the suppression of CDC papers.

Conclusion

It’s not unheard of for an incoming US administration to ask for a pause to review information before it’s publicly released. However, the scope of the current orders appears to be unusually broad and aggressive. There were no similar restrictions on communications issued at the beginning of the last two administrations.

From one perspective, the effects of the orders to the CDC are small. They affect a relatively small volume of papers, which will not make much difference to most journals. If like-for-like language can be found that doesn’t affect the science, then the issues blocking the papers may be fixed easily.

However, grants are being withheld and reviewed across the much larger agencies such as the NIH and NSF. Even if orders are later rescinded , or moves reversed , their chilling effect is already taking hold . Pauses in funding may disrupt a project’s cashflow, causing it to shut down even if the funding is later reinstated. It already appears that there could be a significant drop in funding for future research, and the NSF is vetting existing projects. Some publishers are already witnessing a drop in submissions. As the footprint of reduced funding increases, we may see a much greater drop in submissions.

We have examined the effects of submissions here, as they are directly under the control of federal agencies. But, as a further EO ( 14173 ) explicitly targets the private sector , might publishers be sanctioned for publishing unacceptable papers?

We are on a journey, as the new administration pushes ahead and worries about course correction later. En route to whatever the steady state is, publishers may be required to make a choice between the fantasy of the ideology and the reality of the science. E pur si muove . ²

1 " Executive Orders (EOs) are official documents … through which the President of the United States manages the operations of the Federal Government.” The directives cite the President’s authority under the Constitution and statute (sometimes specified). EOs are published in the Federal Register, and they may be revoked by the President at any time. Although executive orders have historically related to routine administrative matters and the internal operations of federal agencies, recent Presidents have used Executive Orders more broadly to carry out policies and programs." – US Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the US Department of Justice. Refer to the US Federal Register for a full list.

2 "And yet it moves" is attributed to Galileo Galilei after he was forced to recant his statements that the Earth moves around the Sun rather than the other way around.

New Year – New Technology: What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 14:59:19 GMT

Emerging technologies are reshaping how we create, distribute, and consume content. Publishers face the critical task of making smart technology investments to stay competitive and enable strategic objectives. How do you ensure that your next tech purchase aligns with your organization's needs and goals?

Enter the needs assessment process – your roadmap to making informed, strategic technology decisions. From defining clear objectives to creating a comprehensive RFP, these best practices will help you navigate the decision-making process with confidence and ensure that your investments deliver value for your organization and your customers.

Technology is not a solution; it is a tool. The temptation to adopt technology without a clear definition of what you are trying to achieve is an all too common (and usually very costly) mistake. Does your strategy include delivering a more personalized experience for your users? A customer data platform may be the right technology. Interested in using AI to build research integrity into your editorial process? Perhaps it’s time to revisit the capabilities of your editorial management system. Looking to support education and learning for students, faculty, and professional learners? Maybe it is time to evaluate formal learning management systems.

Once you are confident about what you are seeking to achieve, the real work begins. Here are the key components that will help lay the foundation for a successful process from inception to deployment:

Analyze Current State: Audit existing systems and processes to understand current capabilities and limitations.
Conduct a Gap Analysis: Identify gaps between current capabilities and desired future state.
Collect and Analyze Data: Gather qualitative and quantitative data from staff, users, customers, industry benchmarks, and about existing systems.
Consider Resources and Constraints: Assess available resources, including budget, skills, and time.
Research Solutions: Investigate potential technologies and/or types of solutions that could address identified gaps.
Prioritize Needs: Work with stakeholders to prioritize needs based on impact and feasibility.
Create RFP: After identifying prioritized needs and potential solutions, develop an RFP that clearly outlines project objectives, specific requirements, evaluation criteria, budget, and timelines.
Distribute the RFP: Identify vendors with fit for purpose solutions and capabilities and distribute.
Evaluate Proposals: Review vendor responses against established criteria and prioritize them based on how well they meet your needs.
Plan for Adoption and Training: Consider the change management aspects of introducing new technology and processes. Be sure to develop a plan for user adoption, training, and ongoing support in your new systems.

Technology as a Strategic Ally

A methodical needs assessment is not just a procurement exercise – it is a strategic opportunity to reimagine how technology can transform your organization. The most successful technology investments are those that solve real problems, align with organizational goals, and empower your team to work more efficiently and creatively.

Don’t fall into the trap of just moving what you are currently doing over to a new system. This is an ideal occasion to think about how you would design workflows and processes if you were to start from scratch and use that framework to evaluate the new capabilities available. You don’t want to duplicate what you are doing today; you want to step back and take the opportunity to build something better whenever possible.

Customer Data Platform? Editorial Management System? Learning Management System? Something Else?

Delta Think partners with publishers to do the foundational and implementation work required to ensure that technology decisions match the organization’s capabilities, fit the budget, and are grounded in voice-of-customer data. Our processes, including stakeholder interviews, surveys, and workshops, combined with expert landscape research, analysis, and assessments, underpin technology decision-making that is market-focused and customer-driven. If your 2025 objectives depend on or are enabled by technology, we’d welcome the opportunity to help you learn, plan, achieve. Please contact us today to start the conversation.

News & Views: How reliable are the headlines you read in reports?

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 17:38:54 GMT

A number of sources provide information about patterns in the overall scholarly journals market. However, as we so often mention in our analyses, important nuances lie beneath the headlines. This month we explore just how much variation exists and highlight the importance of specificity.

Background

As part of our annual market updates, we estimate the proportions of open vs. subscription access content each year. Over the last few years, we have observed how OA has approached 50% of output, but we note that it has yet to punch through that number. However, this headline varies greatly depending on your area of publishing.

An example from physics

The chart below shows the nuances across just a few of the 200+ subjects that we track.

Sources: OpenAlex , The Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers , ANZSRC , Delta Think analysis.

The chart above shows share of output across all physics output, compared with two disciplines within physics:

Each bar shows proportions of open access (pink, left) compared with subscription access (grey, right) within each corresponding subject.

The whole of physics showed a 38% uptake of open access, compared with the slightly over 50% uptake total across the entire market.

Particle and High Energy Physics (HEP) saw an 82% uptake of OA.

Condensed Matter Physics saw an OA uptake of 17%.

Clearly, large variations exist compared with market-wide averages, and even within the one discipline of physics.

The chart above shows how the uptake of OA is composed: share of output as before, but breaking out the open access share:

As before, each bar shows proportions of uptake within each corresponding subject listed. Reading left to right, the leftmost (yellow) share shows the proportion of output in fully OA (“Gold”) journals, the middle (blue) shows the share of output that is OA in hybrid journals, and the rightmost (grey) shows the share that is not OA (subscription).

About 75% of all physics OA is in fully OA journals (compared with around 78% for all subjects, not shown above).

But 90% of HEP is fully OA, while the fully OA is split 50:50 within Condensed Matter Physics.

So, we clearly see that the make-up of open access also varies significantly depending on discipline.

Conclusion

Overall market headlines give a useful sense of trends and evolution. They are simple and lend themselves well to the limited space available in static industry reports.

However, as we can see, the figures for a publisher or journal can differ wildly. Even within specialty publishing, there are wide variations.

We track over 200 subjects, a number which won’t conveniently fit into most reports. Interactive tools address this limit and allow us easily to drill into specifics. Here we covered subjects within physics. The same principles apply from medical sub-specialties, through to other sciences, and to AHSS.

To find out how the changing patterns in business models affect your organization or journal, it’s therefore vital to drill into the specifics, and move beyond the simple headlines.

Please get in touch to find out more.

Sources: OpenAlex , The Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers , ANZSRC , Delta Think analysis.

News and Views: How much content can AI legally exploit?

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 19:57:18 GMT

This month’s topic: How much content can AI legally exploit? Scroll down to read about this topic, along with the latest headlines and announcements. Delta Think publishes this News & Views mailing in conjunction with its Data & Analytics Tool .

Please forward News & Views to colleagues and friends, who can register to receive News & Views for free each month.

Delta Think will be attending several upcoming conferences, including APE (Jan 14-15), NISO Plus (Feb 10-12), and Researcher to Reader (Feb 20-21). We would love to see you there – please get in touch or visit our Events page to see all the meetings we will be attending.

How much content can AI legally exploit?

O verview

During the recent PubsTech conference , we were asked how much content could be legitimately used to train artificial intelligence systems without being specifically secured through a licensing agreement. In considering this question, we find some counterintuitive results.

Background

Generative AI (genAI) is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content—text, images, music, and more – by analyzing patterns in massive datasets. These models are typically trained on publicly available data scraped from the web. In the US, developers often invoke the “Fair Use” copyright doctrine to justify this training, claiming it is limited to specific purposes (training) and transformative in nature (different from the original use).

In reality, the legal position is complex and evolving , with many rights holders and their representatives – unsurprisingly – taking the opposite view. Even if legal clarity emerges, different geographies and jurisdictions will likely reach different conclusions.

The legal complexities of AI and copyright law are beyond our scope. However, for scholarly publishers, particular issues apply. Half of our output is open access , and open access content is designed to be reusable. Open or not, content has varying restrictions on onward use – for example, non-commercial use is often allowed with attribution.

How much scholarly content is exploitable?

For the purposes of analysis, we will assume that the license under which content is published will have a material bearing on the legitimacy of its use to train AI systems. Therefore, looking at share of licenses, we might be able to answer our question.

Sources: OpenAlex , Delta Think analysis.

The chart above shows the share of total scholarly journals output in 2023 attributable to various license types:

Just under 50% has no open license or has no license specified. We deem this to be copyrighted content, with rights resting with the publisher. This includes public access (aka Bronze OA) output which, although available outside a paywall, does not have onward usage rights.

Just under 28% is Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY). This allows unrestricted reuse if the work is attributed as specified by the licensor. It is the license often mandated by OA advocates.

The remaining 22% has more restricted Creative Commons licenses. As well as requiring attribution, these licenses impose further limits, such as in commercial use (13%), or use in derivative products (9%).

Only tiny amounts of content have no restrictions at all (e.g. CC0), or other restrictions (such as “Share Alike” licenses). The bulk of our analysis is covered by the items listed above.

The Open Access Paradox

Open access was envisioned as a way to make scholarly content more portable and adaptable in the digital age. Yet, its application in AI training faces practical challenges.

Most OA licenses, even permissive ones like CC BY, require attribution. However, generative AI models inherently strip attribution from the data they process, making compliance nearly impossible. Specialist AIs might be trained to circumvent this, but the bulk of big-name gen AI tools don’t. Compliance with the most basic OA requirement of attribution is unworkable.

Additionally, while traditional licenses clearly delineate permissible use, OA licenses often depend on interpretations of “non-commercial” or “derivative” use that may vary by jurisdiction.

In contrast, traditional copyright-protected works – often controlled by publishers – can be directly licensed for AI use. Publishers and AI companies are already striking deals, bypassing the complexities of OA compliance.

Conclusion

The claim of legitimate fair use in the context of AI is to be determined by the courts and legislators. Definitions and exemptions will vary between jurisdictions. For example, the UK has a much narrower definition of “fair dealing” than the US’s fair use, allowing text and data mining under certain conditions. The EU has no fair use doctrine in its copyright law; its nascent AI Act instead looks at requirements for transparency, accountability, and data governance. Further, even where the training of systems may be allowed, the application of the results might be infringing. ( An analogy is the difference between making fake money for a movie and trying to buy a car with it.)

Whatever the legal details, can AI companies simply license content from publishers?

For copyrighted content where the publisher holds the copyright, yes. Reuse is in the gift of the license holder, and licensing deals are an established part of publishing. Scholarly publishers are now licensing content to tech companies. Once agreed, the licensee can push on with the agreed use. The only challenge here is one of optics, in cases where authors do not support their work being used to train AI.

But the rise of generative AI exposes a digital irony: the very openness that defines open access may hinder its use in one of the most transformative technologies of our time. Meanwhile, traditional “closed” licensing remains a smoother path for AI developers, albeit at a cost. The challenge for publishers and authors is to navigate this paradox, ensuring their work is both protected and impactful in the AI-driven future.

Charleston Conference 2024 Reflections

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 20:53:18 GMT

Welcome to the next issue of Delta Think's Ideas in Action - ideas that spark your imagination and encourage creativity...information that makes you stop and THINK! Want to know more about partnering with Delta Think? Contact Delta Think at info@deltathink.com to set up a time to meet and learn more.

Charleston Conference 2024 Reflections

November always marks several noteworthy activities and events both personally and professionally, including one of our favorites – the Charleston Conference – where stakeholders from all areas of our industry – librarians, service providers, and publishers alike, get the opportunity to debate, collaborate, and share insights. Richard Charkin, OBE, described the Conference this way in his 2024 opening keynote remarks:

“This meeting is incredibly important. Serious people debating serious issues.”

We agree and add that the spirit of Charleston is also grounded in engagement – with colleagues and friends and making time for a bit of fun. Karaoke optional!

Whether you were able to attend or not, here are some reflections on the 2024 Conference from the Delta Think Team.

Libraries as Leaders – Lori Carlin

The first thing that hit me was the energy of the conference overall; it was invigorating. Walking into the exhibit area on Vendor Day, you could sense a heightened level of interest from attendees eager to see and hear about new and interesting developments. Is it AI that is fostering this renewed energy? AI is certainly a hot topic, as stakeholders wonder how to best incorporate AI into their products, services, and workflows. Or perhaps the spotlight on Research Integrity and the various products that can help the scholarly community address these issues. Whatever the reason, I have always appreciated Charleston’s approach to exhibits, with a single dedicated day for vendors to showcase their wares, and the packed ballroom left no doubt that this concentrated attendee/vendor time was appreciated by all.

As for sessions, the Opening Keynote featuring Katina Strauch and Richard Charkin was interesting – both bringing their own sense of wit to their description of their different but equally circuitous paths to scholarly publishing and their eventual role as community leaders. I also have to call out a session I moderated – “Keeping Libraries as Central Players in an Evolving Teaching and Learning Space,” and not because I moderated it! It was the librarian panelists as well as the interaction from the audience that made this session lively and interesting. What it reinforced for me is the leadership role librarians now play as not only information resource agents and gatekeepers in their communities, but data analysts, policy drivers, and educators, ensuring that advancements in teaching and learning are recognized and implemented.

Books and eBooks in the Spotlight – Diane Harnish

There was a noticeable “buzz” at Charleston around eBooks and book-based content. Whether for teaching and learning or research usage occasions, the value of book collections, or exploration of evolving funding models and roles, books were top-of-mind for librarians and publishers.

For example, “Whose Future Is It? Practical Strategies for Supporting Community-led Open Access Book Publishing” focused on how libraries can take a leadership role in open access book publishing. The concurrent session was full of practical insights into how libraries develop effective strategies to support community-led and academy-owned OA book publishing, with an emphasis on equity.

On a more macro-scale, Niels Stern, Managing Director, DOAB & OAPEN Foundation led a Neapolitan discussion entitled “Open Access Policies for Books: Librarian Roles in Nudging Institutional and National Change” which explored the work of the recently concluded PALOMERA Project, an initiative to examine and analyze the research policies and strategies for open-access books in 39 countries in the European research area. The project generated evidenced-based, actionable recommendations to “help ensure that books don't get ‘left behind’” in a global move toward open research. I found this session ideal for any stakeholder – library, funder, or publisher – interested in ensuring sustainable infrastructure for eBook, especially scholarly monographs.

After more than 30 years in scholarly communication, this was my first Charleston and I will definitely be back!

Research Integrity + AI and Copyright – Heather Staines

Working closely with Dr. Elisabeth Bik and Dr. Ivan Oransky to explore research integrity issues was timely and enlightening. While there are many new tools to detect misconduct, both agreed that focusing on the human factor will be key—seeking change in research assessment and the kinds of publications that count. Their Neapolitan, “Challenges and Opportunities Around Research Integrity: A Conversation” session provided an informative overview of some of the most biggest challenges to research integrity (image manipulation, paper mills) and how Retraction Watch, COPE Guidelines, and other tools can be used by all stakeholders to raise awareness and help ensure the integrity of the scientific record.

The other session which kept my interest was the “Long Arm of the Law” moderated by Ann Okerson. Copyright Clearance Center’s Roy Kaufman helped scope out the legal issues related to AI companies using copyrighted content to train their LLMs and shed some light on cases related to copyright and LLM training currently winding their way through the courts. ITHAKA’s Nancy Kopans followed JSTOR’s perspective as an aggregator working to balance the rights of copyright holders and publishers with the needs of students, faculty, and researchers. Definitely an area to watch!

Katina’s Legacy – Meg White

Charleston founder and convener Katina Strauch has passed the torch, but her legacy is a reminder that there is always more to discover, learn, and tackle. She never slows down and in many ways, defines what it means to always be evolving, embodying a true growth mindset. Katina and Richard Charkin kicked off the conference with a “Fireside Chat” Keynote moderated by Richard Gallagher, President and Editor-in-Chief of Annual Reviews (and the new owner of the Charleston Hub). As Lori mentioned, these two trailblazers were meeting for the first time, but they reflected on shared pivotal moments in their professional lives, including the intersection of publishing and librarianship, as we have moved from the internet to digitization of content and collections, and now to AI.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Katina as part of the Charleston Leadership Interviews and the ATG Podcast, so watch for that conversation coming soon at the Charleston Hub. Her passion certainly informs many of the key values we strive for here at Delta Think as we work with the scholarly communications community to LEARN, PLAN, ACHIEVE.

Bravo!

Finally, we offer our congratulations to writer, director, producer, and star Heather Staines and her merry band of players. Thank you for an entertaining look at libraries, publishing, education, research, academia, and more in “Schmetadata: The Musical” a light-hearted start to the Conference’s final day.

Next Steps

What were your “aha moments” at Charleston 2024? What are your organization’s biggest priorities and challenges for 2025 and beyond? At Delta Think, we believe in the power of collaboration and innovation to drive progress. We can help you embrace change and unlock your potential. Reach out today to start the conversation and we look forward to hearing more.

More Ideas

News & Views: Market Sizing Update 2024: Has OA Hit A Peak? (Oct 2024) –Each year, Delta Think’s Market Sizing analyzes the value of the open access (OA) scholarly journals market. This is the revenue generated by providers or the costs incurred by buyers of content. We estimate the OA segment of the market to have grown to just over $2.2bn in 2023. This is only a marginal growth over the previous year… ( read more )

Content Licensing Do’s and Don’ts in the Age of AI (Oct 2024) – Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) seemingly endless capabilities and applications present great opportunities (and some challenges too) for publishers and societies across the publishing enterprise. One of the main areas of both growth and reason for caution to emerge is the potential to license scholarly content to AI providers—primarily to be used… ( read more )

Exploring AI (Sept 2024) – AI technologies have already sparked profound changes across our industry, enabling machines to perform tasks that previously required an abundance of human intelligence. AI algorithms can analyze vast datasets to uncover patterns, LLMs can generate coherent text, and genAI can simulate human-like creativity. Here we explore some of… ( read more )

Events

We’ll be attending the following events. Please contact us at info@deltathink.com if you’d like to set up a time to chat.

APE, January 14-15
Researcher to Reader, February 20-21
ER&L, March 3-6
London Book Fair, March 11-13
2025 NAS Journal Summit, March 19-20

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O ur insatiable curiosity, coupled with our expertise in data-driven, evidence-based analysis, and strategy development – TOGETHER – we will discover your best path forward.

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News & Views Webinar: Market Sizing Update 2024

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 20:19:05 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our October News & Views companion online discussion forum!

Join us for our annual update of the market size and revenue share of Open Access and a lively conversation around the trends and the wider issues that may be informing the overall market in scholarly communications.

If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

News & Views: Market Sizing Update 2024: Has OA Hit A Peak?

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 19:25:58 GMT

Overview

Each year, Delta Think’s Market Sizing analyzes the value of the open access (OA) scholarly journals market. This is the revenue generated by providers or the costs incurred by buyers of content.

We estimate the OA segment of the market to have grown to just over $2.2bn in 2023. This is only a marginal growth over the previous year. It is a small fraction of the long-term historical growth of the OA segment.

A reduction in the output of the large OA-only publishers has had a profound effect on the market. It has benefited established publishers, who are seeing a growth in OA, even while the overall market softens. We expect this pattern to continue in 2024.

Have we reached peak open access? Have the underlying drivers of OA changed? And are we now in an era of lower OA growth?

Headline findings

Our models suggest the following headlines for open access market sizing:

We estimate that the OA market grew to just over $2.2bn in 2023.

2023’s OA market grew by just under 1.7% from 2022. This less than one tenth of its historic growth.

We estimate the total scholarly journals market to have increased by 1.2% in 2023, compared with its long-term low single-digit growth around 5%.

Around 50% of all scholarly articles were published as paid-for open access in 2023, accounting for just over 20% of corresponding market value.

The large fully open access publishers saw a significant drop in their output in 2023. We are likely also seeing the tail-end of the correction from the very high OA growth during COVID. This has led to a collapse in growth of fully OA output and revenue.

Hybrid OA has taken up some of the shrinkage in fully OA. Growth in hybrid output and hybrid revenues continues to be strong.

Without currency effects, growth would be even slower than the headline numbers suggest. Total OA value would have shrunk by 0.2%, and the overall journals market would have grown at 0.3%. This suggests that underlying growth in the OA market has stalled and that of the overall market grew at around one tenth of long-term trends.

Growth in OA has shrunk to that of the underlying scholarly journals market.

We anticipate a 2023-2026 CAGR (average growth each year) of 4.9% in OA output and 6.3% in OA market value. This is significantly lower than historical averages.

A note about our method

As ever, we are very grateful to the organizations that participate in our annual survey, which we anonymize and aggregate to inform our estimates. We will shortly send our usual detailed market update and analysis to participants, which breaks out fully OA and hybrid details.

Rather than simply looking at annual figures, we extract underlying trends to inform strategic decision-making. Each year our source data improves, and we can refine our view on resulting trends as more information becomes available. Therefore, each year we restate historic figures as needed to keep them up to date.

Trends

We have seen a stalling of OA growth in 2023, particularly in fully OA output. We are likely seeing a systemic shift to slower long-term growth as the underlying drivers of the market change.

The large OA-only publishers saw a significant drop in their output in 2023, and this has had a profound effect on the market.

Clarivate’s delisting of journals from Web of Science had a knock-on effect across OA-only publishers’ portfolios and was likely the major driver of their decline in output, as authors chose other publication venues. OA publishers’ reduction in the use of special issues greatly reduces a major driver of their growth. Taken together, these two factors suggest we will see a much lower growth rate of fully OA output in future.

Established publishers saw an increase in OA volume and value, even if the overall OA market has stalled. They have benefited from authors’ move away from the OA-only publishers. Hybrid OA has increased for the same reasons, and we anticipate that it will continue to grow strongly. Non-OA publishing is also seeing a slight uptick.

Given the quality concerns around special issues, it seems unlikely that (many of) their articles would find other outlets, and so overall we are seeing growth in fully OA output stalling.

We are likely also seeing the tail-end of the correction from the very high OA growth during COVID.

The data suggest that OA’s share of output has likely peaked in 2023.

Our earlier sneak peek at the market suggested it peaked at 49% of output in 2022, falling to 48% in 2023. Our latest data here suggests OA just peaked at 50% share in 2022-2023 and may fall a few percentage points in the coming years.

Results from our survey and anecdotal feedback suggest more of the same for 2024: large OA-only publishers are likely to see continued declines, while established publishers will see continued growth.

The market will consolidate further. Long-term OA growth is likely to be less that it has been – perhaps mid-to-high single digits – but with increasing shares going to the larger publishers.

In 2023, around 50% of output was OA, accounting for around 20% of its value. This means that on average less money changes hands for OA articles than for non-OA ones.

The gap between shares of value and volume has been closing historically but has remained roughly the same over the last couple of years.

If the large OA-only publishers can recapture their early growth, then the gap will start narrowing again. However, it seems that established publishers are seeing a greater proportion of income from OA at the expense of others. This suggests the market-wide ratios will remain the same, but the specifics will vary depending on the publisher.

Prices have increased, and we anticipate that this will continue, although the effects of mixed-model deals on pricing dynamics have yet to become clear. Hybrid revenues realized per article published remain higher than those published in fully OA journals, and we expect this trend to continue.

OA is increasingly delivered as part of mixed-model deals, combining read and publish elements. If deals have price caps, it is possible that some of the OA output moving from OA publishers to larger publisher does not translate into higher OA revenues.

Conclusion

It’s difficult to make predictions – especially about the future. That said, we think that 2023 could prove to be a pivotal year for open access.

The challenges facing the big OA-only publishers in 2023 have been well-rehearsed. Delisting from Web of Science has led to an exodus of authors from across their portfolios. In 2022, we estimated that the big OA publishers – MDPI, Frontiers and Hindawi – together accounted for over 30% of OA market volume. It’s not surprising, then, that a decline in output from these publishers had a profound effect on the marketplace.

The results have been a mix of cannibalization and leakage. Established publishers and other access models have captured some of the publishing demand. Some content may have been subsumed into fixed-price deals, and so has not led to an increase in overall revenue. Then, given the quality concerns of special issues, it’s likely that a good proportion has simply disappeared. The signal to noise ratio has improved, and special issues are no longer fueling the growth that they once did.

The fundamental driver of OA used to be the policies of funder organizations. Now it appears to be those of Clarivate.

We have therefore seen a flatlining of OA growth, and OA share of output is struggling to get beyond 50%. Our models suggest it may pick up in the long term. But for now, at least, we estimate that its share has peaked.

Our industry does not systematically report comprehensive data about market volumes or value. So, any market sizing is an approximation, and figures should be taken as approximate. Subscribers to our Data & Analytics Tool can drill into the numbers in much greater depth, including analyzing fully OA vs. Hybrid OA details, society-specific output and subscription output. Please get in touch if you want to know more.

This article is © 2024 Delta Think, Inc. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . Please do get in touch if you want to use it in other contexts – we’re usually pretty accommodating.

TOP HEADLINES

Open Access Partnerships Key to Increasing the Global Impact of African Research – October 16, 2024

“The work of researchers in Africa is experiencing increased international reach, supported by new open access (OA) partnerships between research libraries and publishers. Recent forums in South Africa have highlighted the importance of this cooperation for the continued growth and impact of Africa’s rich research output.”

cOAlition S announces the release of an independent study on the impact of Plan S – October 15, 2024

“cOAlition S is pleased to announce the release of an independent, comprehensive study assessing the impact of Plan S on the scholarly communication landscape. Conducted by scidecode science consulting, following a tender process, this study provides the first assessment of the impact of Plan S five years after its launch.”

Over 50 Independent Publishers Commit to BioOne Subscribe to Open Pilot – October 8, 2024

“BioOne, the leading nonprofit aggregator in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences, today announced that 71 titles from 54 global societies, museums, and research organizations will participate in its Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot beginning in January 2026. This represents the largest number of independent publishers under a single S2O offer to date.”

Taylor & Francis Announces Subscribe to Open Journals Pilot – October 1, 2024

“Taylor & Francis has today announced its first Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot, one of several innovative options it is trialing to accelerate open access (OA) publishing. S2O enables a journal’s subscribers to support its conversion to OA, making new articles available to readers everywhere.”

Update on UKRI’s journey to open access – September 16, 2024

“UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is working collaboratively with stakeholders to support implementation of its open access policy. The policy applied since April 2022 for research articles and since January 2024 for monographs, book chapters and edited collections.”

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

October 17, 2024

EULAR Launches New Open-access Journal – EULAR Rheumatology Open (ERO)

“The European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology (EULAR) proudly announces the launch of its new open-access journal, a pioneering platform dedicated to advancing research and knowledge in the field of rheumatology.”

October 7, 2024

Penn State University Libraries Open Publishing launches Stroke Clinician journal

“Penn State University Libraries’ Open Publishing program has partnered with the Association of Neurovascular Clinicians (ANVC) to launch a new open access clinical journal, Stroke Clinician.”

October 3, 2024

AIP Publishing to Launch New Open Access Journal, APL Computational Physics

“AIP Publishing announced today the latest addition in its open access portfolio, APL Computational Physics. The new journal is slated to open for submissions in early 2025.”

September 24, 2024

ESE expands journal portfolio with the launch of Environmental Endocrinology and Obesity and Endocrinology

“The European Society of Endocrinology (ESE) is delighted to announce the launch of two new multidisciplinary, open-access journals, Environmental Endocrinology and Obesity and Endocrinology. The Journals will be published by Oxford University Press, with the launch issues scheduled for Q2 2025.”

September 17, 2024

IOP Publishing expands its open access environmental portfolio with Environmental Research: Water

“IOP Publishing (IOPP) is launching Environmental Research: Water a new open access (OA) journal which offers an interdisciplinary forum for researchers working to achieve water sustainability globally.”

Content Licensing Do’s and Don’ts in the Age of AI

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 15:39:40 GMT

Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) seemingly endless capabilities and applications present great opportunities (and some challenges too) for publishers and societies across the publishing enterprise. One of the main areas of both growth and reason for caution to emerge is the potential to license scholarly content to AI providers—primarily to be used to “train” large language models (LLMs). While this type of licensing opportunity may be compelling, it requires thoughtful integration into the organization’s overall content portfolio management and revenue strategy.

Recently announced licensing agreements between scholarly and academic publishers and technology companies highlight AI’s insatiable demand for primary, verified, reliable information. AI developers rely on this high-quality, vetted content to train models, refine algorithms, and enhance natural language processing capabilities. This demand can present a lucrative opportunity for publishers to license content – aka the knowledge needed for training. It also raises important strategic questions about ownership, sustainability, and long-term business models that should not be ignored in the process.

Opportunity vs. Risk: Licensing Content Do’s and Don’ts

If a partnership with an AI company seems intriguing, it is…as long as you proceed with an understanding of how this opportunity may play out for your organization and where on the classic innovation adoption curve you are comfortable. Here is a handy checklist to help you evaluate the opportunities and risks of licensing content to AI providers. Keep in mind, YMMV, as will your priorities.

Do:

Integrate Licensing into Overall Content Strategy – View AI licensing as part of a broader content portfolio management plan to align with business objectives and sustain long-term value.

Prioritize Content Based on Value – Categorize content by demand and monetization potential to tailor licensing strategies for different segments (e.g., niche vs. broad appeal).

Introduce Strategic Pricing Models – Experiment with flexible pricing strategies like volume-based, usage-based, or hybrid models to reflect content value and accommodate AI providers’ diverse needs.

Complement and Enhance Existing Revenue Streams – Ensure that AI licensing supports rather than undermines other revenue channels (subscriptions, APCs, institutional licensing, etc.). Consider tiered access or differentiated pricing for recent vs. older content.

Collaborate with AI Companies Ethically – Build partnerships that ensure responsible content usage. Establish guidelines for ethical AI content generation, labeling, and attribution.

Protect Author Rights – Ensure that licensing agreements comply with existing contracts and protect authors’ rights. Proactively manage relationships with scholars to maintain trust and uphold their interests.

Be Prepared for Market Shifts – Experimentation is the order of the day but the market and innovation is moving fast. Adopt flexible frameworks to quickly adjust to technological changes or shifts in demand for licensed content.

Maintain Transparency and Communication – Keep authors, research communities, and internal stakeholders informed about how the organization’s content is licensed and used by AI firms.

Consider Partnering with Other Content Providers – Strategically partner with publishing peers to offer a broader range of niche content. Collectively negotiate through a ‘power in numbers’ approach.

Don’t:

Rely Solely on AI-Driven Revenue – Avoid becoming over-reliant on revenue from AI licensing, as market shifts could jeopardize financial stability if demand for licensed content declines.

Undermine Content Value – Be cautious of pricing models that risk devaluing content over time, especially as AI-generated content becomes more sophisticated.

Ignore Unintended Consequences – Don’t overlook the potential for content devaluation or the blurring of lines between original research and AI-generated outputs.

Neglect Author Concerns – Don’t disregard the potential for author questions, dissatisfaction, or misuse of their work. Always respect contractual obligations and maintain productive relationships with the academic community.

Overlook Ethical Concerns – Avoid participating in licensing agreements without ensuring ethical guidelines for the use of AI-generated content, including issues like data privacy and security.

Ignore the Long-Term Impact on Scholarly Publishing – Don’t assume AI-driven licensing won’t affect traditional publication models. Proactively assess how AI might impact and change peer review, publication demand, and researcher incentives.

Final Thoughts

Licensing content to AI providers is certainly a potential opportunity for publishers. That opportunity also comes with possible risks and the need for some caution. These Do’s and Don’ts serve as a starting point to help you begin to frame out how partnerships with AI providers may or may not “fit” with your strategy, mission, and organizational goals, while acknowledging the need to consider safeguards to protect the integrity of your content, author relationships, and long-term sustainability.

Delta Think can help your organization understand the unique opportunities and challenges of integrating AI licensing into a comprehensive content portfolio management strategy. Ready to start the conversation? Contact us today.

As Ideas in Action went to press, Ithaka S&R announced a Generative AI Licensing Agreement Tracker to help capture the details, impact, and strategy of these deals.

News & Views: Register now for Delta Think’s 2024 Market Sizing Update Webinar

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 13:24:00 GMT

In July, we shared a sneak peek at the 2023 market size, based on our annual publisher survey, and we’re currently heads down finalizing our analysis of the trends, along the corresponding revenue for both fully OA and hybrid content. Look for this important update News & Views in mid-October.

We’ll also hold our annual free webinar discussing the numbers and the contextual factors that impact the market on Wednesday, October 30, at 10:00 am US Eastern Time. Register now to hold your place and receive the recording of the session!

Now, back to work!

Exploring AI

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 12:42:00 GMT

AI technologies have already sparked profound changes across our industry, enabling machines to perform tasks that previously required an abundance of human intelligence. AI algorithms can analyze vast datasets to uncover patterns, LLMs can generate coherent text, and genAI can simulate human-like creativity. Here we explore some of the current use-cases to see how far along your organization is in your AI exploration.

AI Policy

Trust and integrity are paramount in scholarly communication. Researchers and readers express enthusiasm about the technology but apprehension about AI’s potential for misinformation and its potential to undermine scholarly integrity. Defining your organization’s standards for AI use and implementation should consider the following:

Transparency and disclosure in how AI is used throughout the publishing process, from manuscript submission and peer review to editorial decisions and post-publication processes.
Issues related to mitigating bias in the editorial process, privacy and data protection, including government regulations.
Inclusivity and accessibility leveraging AI to support diverse authorship and ensure accessibility for users with disabilities.
Ethical review and oversight, defining a framework for AI applications ensures that potential risks and benefits are evaluated.

Defining your AI policy and stating these policies in an open and transparent manner ensures that everyone is playing by the same rules to govern and safeguard the integrity of your processes and content. Transparency builds trust and promotes awareness with your stakeholders – researchers, reviewers, readers, and funders.

This should be the first step in your AI journey – understanding what is and is not acceptable for your organization…but be ready to adjust accordingly as the technology develops. Being open to review and changing these policies as the technology evolves is equally important to ensure you keep pace with fast-moving developments.

AI to Support Revenue Generation

AI is only as good as the content and data on which it is trained, creating a demand for the type of evidenced-based, peer reviewed content scholarly publishers produce. AI-enabled content licensing solutions and partnerships between publishers and AI companies are an example of the potential new revenue streams AI can create. The question is how to capitalize on these opportunities while keeping control of your intellectual property and your brand. For example, Perplexity now offers a revenue-sharing program for content-providers, Perplexity Publishers’ Program , and Copyright Clearance Center has made AI re-use rights available within its Annual Copyright License . Recent high-profile licensing deals by Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and even Oxford University Press , with major technology companies have gotten attention for their revenue generation, as well as drawn criticism from authors who have concerns about copyright and context.

Our community is in the best position to provide reliable and trustworthy content. Understanding the best way to do that for your organization without adversely impacting other areas of your operation while maintaining trust and integrity will be key.

AI in Support of Editorial Workflow

Integrating AI into editorial workflows can enhance efficiency and address challenges across submission, peer review, and post-acceptance processes. Tools such as AIRA (Artificial Intelligence Research Assist) for integrity checks and Stat Reviewer

for peer review streamline operations and support research integrity, while AI-powered language services support multilingual authors, promoting inclusivity and accessibility in scholarly publishing. Copyright traps are a new tool designed to help authors and publishers identify whether their content has been scraped without their permission, underscoring the growing importance of managing copyright issues in the context of AI and machine learning advancements.

Despite clear potential benefits in quality, efficiency, and integrity, challenges related to technology implementation must be explored and quantified. Cost-benefit analysis as well as clear and compelling business cases must inform any initiative to integrate AI-powered tools into the development and production workflow. Careful evaluation and selection of tools based on business needs and defined metrics for success ensure that any investment delivers on its objectives.

AI in Product Development

AI offers publishers opportunities to innovate by enhancing and optimizing the user experience. Leveraging LLMs and AI algorithms, publishers have the potential to turn data and information into knowledge. For researchers, this can mean developing new products that provide deeper insights and personalized content recommendations such as Elsevier’s SCOPUS AI. For healthcare professionals this can mean products that deliver clinical decision-making tools seamlessly at the bedside, such as Dyna AI and DynaMedex. For learners, this can mean tools that support personalized learning and improved efficacy and learning outcomes, such as jane AI from HealthStream.

But beware of the temptation to introduce an AI feature that is not customer centric. Adding AI capabilities that are not squarely targeted to meet defined customer expectations is risky at best. What problem are your customers trying to solve? Starting with a deep understanding of customer needs by talking to them and assessing AI as a potential solution ensures that products and services effectively meet those needs.

AI as a Strategy Enabler

Identify and prioritize areas where AI could have business impact , supporting and enabling your strategic objectives: speeding product development, adding effectiveness to market intelligence, driving operational efficiencies and cost savings. Where can AI help your organization grow? How can AI help your organization innovate? Market research in the form of surveys, interviews with your key internal and external stakeholders about their priorities, challenges, gaps, hesitations, and the opportunities they see ahead can help illuminate opportunities. AI can be used as a tool to support strategy; from adding operational efficiency to helping remove barriers to product innovation. Spending the time to dig in and determine how AI can be used to help your organization achieve its strategic goals should be a priority.

Making AI Work for You

AI is a technological leap, bringing with it fundamental changes in how scholarly information is created, vetted, disseminated, and consumed. However, leveraging AI as a tool to enable your goals requires a deep understanding of your current state and the needs and challenges of your community. From research integrity to operations to customer intimacy, embedding AI into your organization successfully requires alignment with your strategy. To understand HOW to use AI, it is critical to first define WHY to use AI.

Delta Think can help you navigate the evolving AI landscape and determine how to best leverage it to enhance productivity, foster innovation, and maintain trust. Contact us today to discuss all the ways we can support your organization and help you manage to change.

News & Views: Open Access Loses Share – Market Sizing 2024 Sneak Peek

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 13:55:00 GMT

Each year, Delta Think analyzes the volume and value of the scholarly journals market. This month, we present preliminary results about volumes of journal output ahead of our full sizing results later in the year. Total publication volumes continue to increase across the whole market, and for Open Access. However, Open Access (OA) lost share for the first time in 2023 likely because of problems experienced by the OA publishers in 2022 and 2023. The pace of growth of overall output is falling back to long-term trends after the post-COVID spike.

Headline findings

Our preliminary results for full year 2023 are as follows. Subscribers to our Publishing Data & Analytics Tool can explore these in greater detail, including separating out fully OA and hybrid numbers.

Volumes of articles continue to increase, but 2023 saw some important underlying changes.

Total article output grew by 3.4% compared to the previous year.
OA article output grew by 2.1%.
Based on underlying trends, we estimate a 2023-2025 CAGR (average growth each year) in OA output of around 10%.
For the first time, growth in OA fell below that of the underlying scholarly journals market.
It is too soon to tell for sure if growth will recover. However, as discussed below, we anticipate growth in OA will pick up again this year, albeit at slightly lower rates than we have seen over the last few years.

Even though total OA output grew in 2023, it lost share as total output grew faster.

OA has historically taken share. We estimate around 45% of paid-for scholarly articles were published OA in 2021, growing to just around 49% in 2022.
In 2023, this fell back to around 48%.
Although the decline in share is small, it’s significant. Normally OA gains share by a few percentage points per year. For the first time, preliminary data analysis results show it has lost share. This represents a reversal of long-term observations.
We should note, however, that the underlying long-term trend is that of continuing growth in OA share. It is too soon to tell if the reversal is permanent, or whether it will pick up again.
Last year we anticipated that OA would pass the 50% mark in 2023. This turned out not to be the case, so it does not yet account for the majority of monetizable output.

A note about our method

Each year we survey major publishers. We do not yet have all the results for this year’s survey, but, as ever, we are very grateful to the organizations that participate. We anonymize and aggregate the survey data to inform our estimates. At the time of writing, we have enough results to estimate volumes of output. Our yearly update about market value will follow soon.

Our market estimates focus on the subset of research publications for which money is likely to be paid, either to read or to publish. We focus on underlying trends to inform strategic decision-making, and remove short-term fluctuations which make for interesting headlines, but offer little strategic insight. Our definition of “Open Access” excludes public access (“Bronze”) and repository-only (“Green”) content.

Trends

Last year, we anticipated a slow-down in growth in 2023 as the industry corrected to long-term trends. Events since have exacerbated the slow-down. For the first time, underlying drivers of the market may be showing signs of weakness.

COVID-19 led to a significant increase in publishing activity, resulting in above-average volumes and growth rates in 2020 and 2021. 2022 saw lower growth in output of all types compared with the previous year. Our anecdotal evidence at the time suggested a strong 2023.
The problems experienced by OA publishers in 2023 – perceived quality problems, special editions, shifts and uncertainty around funder mandates, and loss of Journal Impact Factors – led to a significant decline in their output in 2023. We expect this may continue into 2024.
Large and more established publishers have seen their OA output continue to grow. They have likely benefited from authors moving away from fully OA publishers. The data suggest a mix of authors changing their choice of publisher for OA content and moving away from OA entirely. Thus, we see the total output growing while OA loses share.
A move away from fully OA publishers has also led to a slight increase in hybrid OA. Growth in hybrid is experiencing an uplift over long-term trends.
It’s too soon to tell if there is a systemic slow-down in OA growth entirely, or whether growth in OA output (and in OA publishers) will return to its historically high levels. The outlook for 2024 appears mixed, and we anticipate that growth in OA share will continue to face headwinds in 2024.

Conclusion

Total scholarly journal output has moved back to long-term trends following previous corrections to the post-COVID upswing. Open Access output, however, was held back by issues experienced by OA publishers.

Quality problems due to paper mills and the loss of JIFs for fully OA journals have been well-rehearsed elsewhere. Although affecting a subset of journals, the problems have led to a wider move away from journals published by fully OA publishers. The data suggest a mix of authors choosing alternative venues for their OA papers or rejecting OA completely. Large and more established publishers have seen continued growth in OA, so are likely picking up the slack.

It is worth noting that the fully OA publishers still account for around one fifth of the market’s output. Even with declining output or slowing growth, they will continue to account for a significant share of the market.

Historically, the high growth rates in fully OA publishers’ journal output have fueled the high growth rates in overall OA output. With this fuel running out, we see the whole OA growth engine sputtering. Output in hybrid journals has benefited (whether open or not), and we saw an increase in public access output (aka Bronze) after years of slow decline. Non-OA (subscription) output has also seen a boost. Subscribers to our Publishing Data & Analytics Tool can explore these nuances in more detail; please get in touch if you are interested in finding out more.

The big question is now whether OA growth rates will pick up again, or whether we are seeing some sort of plateauing. Might OA even start losing share?

There are a couple of parallels here. One is that the large Megajournals found their output falling back after initial explosive growth, as the realities of scaling bit them. Could we be seeing something similar affecting the overall OA market?

The other parallel is the stock market. Problems affected relatively small numbers of fully OA journals, but their publishers experienced declines across their portfolios. When a few prominent companies experience problems, then it can cause wider stock market selloffs in the same way. However, after such corrections the market inevitably bounces back. Will this happen to OA output? Only time will tell.

Our industry does not systematically report comprehensive data about market volumes or value. So, any market sizing is an approximation, and figures should be taken as approximate. Subscribers to our Data & Analytics Tool can drill into the numbers in much greater depth, including analyzing society-specific output and subscription output. Please get in touch if you want to know more.

News & Views: The Realities of Increasing Open Access Charges

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 13:19:00 GMT

Earlier in the year, we looked at the latest Article Processing Charges (APCs) . This month we look at how they have risen compared with inflation. We saw some larger-than-average price rises going into 2024. Does this suggest prices are rising, or might APCs be reducing in real terms?

Background

Each year we survey the list Article Processing Charges (APCs) of over 30 major and significant publishers. Going back to 2015, the dataset includes over 20,000 unique titles and over 130,000 title/year combinations. Going into 2024, we noted significant price increases. Fully OA list prices across our sample rose by around 9.5% compared with those set a year ago. Hybrid list prices rose by an average of 4.2% over the same period. Maximum APCs for fully OA journals remained at $8,900, but those for Hybrid journals now rose to $12,290 (up $600 from the previous year).

Meanwhile, we know that the last few years have seen inflation rise above its long-term averages. As we explored in our analysis “Is the real value of our industry shrinking?,” the revenue coming into the overall scholarly journals market has actually fallen in real terms. So, prices of publishing in general have been reducing slightly. Does this hold for the prices of APCs?

We again use the global Consumer Price Index (CPI) as our inflation index, as we consider it to represent the most realistic view of our market place. Prices exclude zero APCs, so we can see the effects for when publishers choose to charge APCs.

Are APCs becoming cheaper or more expensive?

The chart below shows how increases in all list APCs work out in real terms.

The figure above compares the average annual changes in APCs as stated (top, blue line) with those adjusted for inflation (bottom, red line).

Positive numbers mean prices are increasing; negative ones mean they are falling.
For most years, APCs have fallen in real terms. In other words, they are increasing slower than inflation.
The exception is in 2021, when we saw large increases but a modest rate of inflation.
To put the numbers in context, inflation (we use the global CPI) averages around 4%, but we saw it spiking to just over 8% in 2022. It’s likely to be around 6% in 2024.

Fully OA Prices

How does the picture look for the higher rates of increase in just fully OA journal prices? The fully OA landscape is shown in Figure 2.

The figure above compares the average annual changes in APCs of fully OA journals as stated (top, blue line) with those adjusted for inflation (bottom, red line).

As before, positive numbers mean prices are increasing; negative ones mean they are falling.
Here, the picture is different. Fully OA APCs have risen in real terms as least as often as they have fallen in real terms.
The above-inflationary price rises were especially noticeable going into 2021 and going into 2024.

Conclusion

Overall, OA prices are increasing below inflation. Our market sizing suggests a real-terms growth in OA market value, so it seems the value of the OA market is driven by demand.

As authors use more and more open access, it’s not surprising that the total spend on it is increasing. However, the data suggest that they are getting (modestly) increasing value for money as they do so, as price rises are falling in real terms. (And to be fair, the same applies for the scholarly journals market overall, which is also seeing volume grow faster than value.)

The prices of fully OA journals are growing faster than inflation on average, but, again, not as fast as demand is growing. Remember, too, that fully OA prices are cheaper than those for hybrid, so they are growing from a lower base.

As discussions continue about the increasing cost and affordability of OA, it’s important to keep an eye on the reality and real terms effects.

News & Views: Sponsored Journals Update

Tue, 14 May 2024 13:00:00 GMT

This month we update our review of sponsored (“diamond”) open access journals. As conversations about non-APC based open access models are continuing at pace, we find out if anything has changed over the last year.

Background

We have previously discussed how APC-based models of open access ( even with waivers ) have been increasingly criticized as non-inclusive . We have seen some government funders and agencies move to finance “diamond” journals and promote OA without author fees . Most recently, the Gates foundation has announced a plan to move away from paying for publication fees altogether.

Following our March APC update , we have revisited our previous analysis of sponsored (diamond1) journals to see what may have changed.

Since there is no data at scale specifically listing sponsored journals, we infer whether a journal is sponsored by analyzing our data about publishers’ price lists. From our data set of around 20,000 journals, we look for fully open journals that have been available and have charged zero APCs for at least 3 years2. The prevalence of these journals hints at whether responding to increased demand for sponsored journals requires scaling existing efforts or cutting new ground.

How many sponsored journals are there?

We analyze proportions of sponsored journals below, in Figure 1.

The chart above shows proportions of fully open access journals that have, or have not, charged per-paper publishing fees (APCs). The sample only includes journals with at least 3 years’ data about APCs.

The top (yellow) proportion shows the likely sponsored journals, which have not charged APCs for at least 3 years. These account for just under one fifth of our sample.
The bottom (grey) proportion shows pay-to-publish journals, which charge APCs. These account for just over 80% of our sample.
The remaining proportions show journals that do not charge APCs, but have done so only for a year or two. These cover a very small proportion of our sample. If we include newer journals – not shown above – then we would find significantly more journals not charging APCs in 2022-23. As we cannot be sure whether these are truly sponsored or (say) offering temporary discounts, we exclude them so we can look at underlying trends.

Looking at trends, the data suggest that under one fifth of journals are now sponsored, down from just over 25% a few years ago. Our sample of journals has grown since our previous analysis3, however the trends remain the same. The share of sponsored journals has fallen from over one quarter at the start of 2021, to under one fifth today, and the proportion is continuing to decrease. The underlying data show that the numbers of journals have grown by over 50% over this period.

Society ownership makes a difference

On average, sponsored journals account for a small but significant proportion of activity. However, as ever, the averages mask important variations. Figure 2, below, shows how different the picture looks from a society perspective.

The chart above shows the same categories as before but split to show society journals on the right and other journals on the left.

Just over one third of society-owned journals are sponsored, or around 1.75x the market average.

However, this proportion has fallen from around 45% a few years ago, and the trend is downwards.

Other (non-society) journals make very little use of sponsored journals – around 6.4%.

For context, 48% of our sample are society-owned journals.

Conclusion

Overall, just under one fifth of fully open access journals appear to be sponsored. But their proportion and number have been decreasing. It seems that, over the last 3-4 years the market has been slowly moving away from a sponsored model. It will be interesting to see if this trend holds since discussions about sponsored journals are now heating up.

It’s noteworthy that societies make much greater use of sponsored journals compared with dedicated (and largely commercial) publishing organizations. We speculate that this is a symptom of societies’ mission and non-commercial focus.

This may be echoed in the higher prevalence of sponsored journals reported by the DOAJ. We focus on the scholarly publishing market, looking at activities where money may be transacted with publishers to cover publishing or reading fees and costs. We therefore do not include the long tail of community-run journals. The DOAJ does include this long tail, and thus shows a much higher incidence of sponsored, or zero-fee journals.

However, back to our sample, even amongst societies, the use of sponsored journals is showing signs of declining. We will need to wait and see if this trend reverses as discussion about “no fee” OA models takes root.

1 Using “color” names to describe journal business models is not self-explanatory. So, for our analysis, we use “sponsored” rather than “diamond” to refer to journals for which costs of the entire journal are covered so that reading or publishing fees are not charged.

2 The data can’t describe why journals don’t charge APCs. Journals that are new or newly flipped to OA may not charge APCs as an introductory offer. So, we take journals that have been in our database for at least three years and have not charged an APC during that time. Some journals may offer longer introductory offers (and some none), but our anecdotal feedback from the market suggests that the 3-year period seems reasonable for our analysis. Our figures likely exclude Subscribe to Open Journals. If they were to appear as sponsored journals, they would need to have been open for at least three years and be classed by the publisher as fully OA journals.

3 Our sample has changed compared with our previous analysis in June 2023 to include more titles, so the proportions for previous years have shifted compared with last year’s data.

News & Views: Total Value of Scholarly Journals Market

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 13:25:00 GMT

Following our recent analysis of the effects of inflation and exchange rates, this month we examine the underlying fundamentals. We look at how the scholarly journals market is defined, as well as its total value.

Background

After we explored of the effects of inflation , we received some questions about our figures on the total value of the scholarly journals market. What was it? Do we have up-to-date numbers?

We cover the numbers below. In addition to providing insight about the total scholarly journals market, we hope they will also illustrate that our data covers more than just the open access segment. These pieces of analysis – which we brand “News and Views” – started life promoting our OA data. However, to put OA into context, we first need to understand the whole market, so we can work out things like OA’s share and how it compares with that of subscription publishing. Upon reflection, we decided to make the reality of our broad coverage more explicit. We have therefore made a few additions to our analyses to show the breadth of data and coverage we have. We hope this will prove useful to our readers and better highlight Delta Think’s breadth of data coverage.

What is “the market”?

Our market sizing focuses on what we term “the addressable scholarly journals market.” We estimate the total amount of money changing hands to pay for scholarly journals, regardless of business model. (So our estimate includes both paid readership and paid publishing – i.e. subscriptions and open access. It does not separate out community journals, which are managed as part of institutions’ day-to-day operations.)

There is no standard list of academic journals, and different indexes have different coverage ¹ . To produce our analysis, we therefore needed to take some pragmatic decisions about definitions and availability of information.

We estimate a list of bona fide academic journals based on their presence in a number of publicly available indexes ² . We parse the results to exclude such things as repository copies, conference proceedings series, and so on.

To estimate the money, we run an annual survey of publishers and ask them confidentially about their revenues for scholarly journals. We then project the total from our sample to form a view of the total market. We do this based on the number of articles published and some further survey work to estimate the weighting of the long tail of smaller publishers, which operate at much lower price points to the core market.

In running our analysis, we have noticed that scholarly output comes in fits and starts from one year to the next. Thus, we extract underlying trends to avoid misleading headlines due to short-term variations, although we allow for some variation to account for events such as COVID-19.

There is likely to be “noise” due to differences in interpretation and definitions. However, our sample size is significant – covering more than 40% of published output--and the lion’s share of total value. While we don’t claim our numbers to be perfect, we think they are a good approximation given the limitations of the information available.

Total market value

The figure above shows the estimated annual value of the scholarly journals market over a 5-year period. In 2022, we estimated it to be $10.7bn, rising to $10.8bn in 2023. We estimate the long-term average growth of the market to be 2.3% per year. The years following COVID saw above-average growth, and the lower growth in 2023 likely represents a correction back to long-term averages. Our estimate for 2024 is based on mathematically projecting prior year’s data.

Conclusion

The executive summary is that we estimate the total scholarly journals market to be worth around $11bn, growing at around 2.3% per year. ( As we have previously noted , this translates to a mild decrease in growth in real terms.)

As we discussed above, any estimates about our market are approximations, as there is an absence of clean and consistent data about the make-up of the market. In running any analysis like this, the method is ultimately driven by practicalities, and analyzing data requires qualitative judgements.

It is too early to run our full analysis and survey for 2023, so 2023’s figure is a projection at this point. It is based on indications of sentiment from our previous publisher survey. We will be sending out the latest survey to the usual participants soon, and we will update our estimates later this year once we have had a chance to gather and analyze the data. When we run our update, it will be interesting to see the effects of the recent retractions and the slow-down in output of the major OA publishers.

As ever, subscribers to our market intelligence database (which some of you know as the OADAT; we’re currently in the process of rebranding) can see much more detail behind the charts, including detailed breakouts for subscription, fully open access, and hybrid open access content.

1 Pranckutė, R. Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World. Publications 2021 , 9, 12. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9010012

2 We look for journals which have one of: The Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers Level 1 or 2 status, or have a DOAJ Seal , or are on the Australian Research Council’s Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) approved list, or have a SNIP and are a citing source.

News & Views Webinar: APC Update 2024

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 19:52:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our March News & Views companion online discussion forum!

Join us to hear the latest trends around APC data, including APCs for both Fully OA and Hybrid journals. We'll talk about what we're seeing in relation to recent years and discuss the broader context for the APC market.

If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

News & Views: Open Access Charges – Continued Consolidation and Increases

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 13:49:00 GMT

This month we look at the latest data about Article Processing Charges (APCs). Per article pricing is a fundamental building block for all paid publishing models, so our review provides an invaluable insight into how costs of open access continue to evolve. This year, prices in general are increasing, some significantly. Important nuances in the distribution of prices continue to affect the value and cost of paid publishing models.

Background

Each year we survey the list Article Processing Charges (APCs) of a sample of major and significant publishers. Covering over 20,000 titles, and going back to 2016, our data set represents one of the most comprehensive reviews of open access pricing.

To compare like for like, we analyze non-discounted, CC BY charges. We take a snapshot at the end of every January, so we can track yearly changes while controlling for the different times of year that publishers may update prices.

Headline Changes

Going into 2024, we have seen significant price increases.

Fully OA list prices across our sample have risen by around 9.5% compared with those set a year ago.
Hybrid list prices have risen by an average of 4.2% over the same period.
Maximum APCs for Fully OA journals remain at $8,900.
Maximum APCs for Hybrid journals now top out at $12,290 (up $600 from last year).
The last big jump in prices happened in 2020-2021, when the high-impact journals started offering OA options for the first time. This served to drag up average price increases. They subsequently fell back to averages. Underlying trends continue.
There are almost 3x more Hybrid journals than Fully OA ones. Hybrid journals follow (or, rather, set) a similar pattern to the market overall.
On average, Fully OA prices are around 62% of Hybrid prices. But, after a few years of widening, the gap is showing signs of narrowing – it was 58% last year but 63% the year before that.
Around 31% of our sample of Fully OA journals charge no APCs.
Price rises vary significantly by discipline. Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences have seen particularly large average increases, especially in Fully OA journal prices.

Price Distribution

Marketwide headline price changes mask important nuances. We have discussed previously that the most important nuance lies in the spread of prices within a given publisher’s portfolio. For example, if the bulk of a publisher’s journals lie towards the lower end of its pricing, with just a few journals priced at the high end, the average (mean) price will be higher than most authors pay.

The following figures show how the spread of prices plays out in the market across our sample of publishers. The figures are outlines of histograms, showing how many titles sit in various price bands over the successive years of data we have curated. The red line shows the most recent year’s prices. The lines become greener as they go further back in time. Subscribers to Delta Think’s Open Access Data and Analytics Tool can see full details of axes.

Hybrid Prices

The spread of price bands for Hybrid journals is shown in Figure 1 below.

The overall spread of prices has remained relatively constant over time.

A few years ago, in 2019-20, the most popular price band shifted slightly towards the lower end of the market and remained there for a few years. However, in 2021-22 it moved back up to its historic high and has remained there since.
The very highest prices increased in 2020-21, when high-impact journals started offering Hybrid options. For clarity, the chart combines the very highest APCs into one band on the right-hand side.
Average prices paid are heavily influenced by the shape of the curves on either side of the peak. Notice how the curve on the right side of the peak is becoming shallower over time. This suggests that increasing numbers of journals are priced higher than average, and so average prices paid will increase. The curve to the left of the peak was getting shallower, but it is now getting steeper. So, the moderating influence of lower-priced journals is now reducing. The height of the peak has not changed, suggesting that the total number of journals has not changed significantly since last year. We are therefore seeing a movement in price bands of existing journals to increase average prices paid, as higher APCs are becoming more prevalent.

Fully OA Prices

The Fully OA landscape is shown in Figure 2.

The data suggest that both the number of Fully OA journals and their average prices continue to increase.

The peak of the curve is getting higher and moving to the right, so we are seeing an increase in the most popular price band and in average prices.
The secondary peak suggests the presence of a significant number of journals cheaper than the most popular price band, which will serve to moderate the increase in average prices.
However, as with Hybrids, the right-hand side of the curve is becoming shallower. The increasing number of more expensive journals will increase average prices paid.
The height of the curve has also increased at the same time, illustrating that we are seeing an increase in total number of Fully OA journals.

Conclusion

It seems that the world of open access pricing is not immune to the effects of inflation. We have seen price increases most years, but going into 2024 they are noticeably higher than in previous years.

While outlying price changes are important general indicators, they do not necessarily shift the market on their own. Changes in the spread and emphasis of popular price bands play key roles too. The increasing proportion of higher-priced journals serve to increase the average prices actually paid.

One moderating influence is the high number of journals – usually Fully OA ones – that don’t charge APCs. These are typically paid for by some other means.

Studying individual journal list APCs remains foundational for understanding pricing across all OA business models. Here we have covered average prices across the market. The averages vary depending on discipline. If you are curious how your APC pricing compares to the market, please contact us for a customized review.

News & Views: In Research We Trust

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 14:09:00 GMT

In Research We Trust

By Meg White and Heather Staines

The Traditional Role of Publishers

Maya Angelou famously said “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

Professor Angelou probably did not have scholarship or science top of mind when she made this observation, but in truth, this statement gives a concise summary of how scholarship works: it is a constant evolution of ideas - one discovery built upon another - hypotheses and ideas are tested, validated, and retested to gain consensus. Scholars and scientists constantly challenge, probe, and replicate in order to advance human knowledge and discovery.

Publishers have long played a significant role in the creation and dissemination of scholarly information, with a key goal being to ensure the validity and efficacy of the works that they publish. Publication in a scholarly journal is a “stamp of approval” from the most learned minds in a specific field. Collaborating with scholars and researchers, publishers provide peer review, work to uncover false or misleading data and information, and endeavor to expose “bad” scholarship or science so that quality research shines through. However, the growing number of high-profile cases ranging from plagiarism to outright fraud have raised questions about the effectiveness of the systems currently in place to ensure research integrity. Is scholarship facing an integrity crisis, and if so, what can be done to regain trust in the system?

Challenges on Multiple Fronts

The Expanding Ecosystem

From increased funding levels to the globalization of research, the pace of discovery and knowledge expansion has never been greater. Since 2010, the total number of scholarly papers published has more than doubled, from approximately 2.4M to nearly 5M (Source: Delta Think OA DAT Annual Market Sizing Update 2023 ). Some of this growth can be attributed to a more global and diverse author pool, with papers from authors in the Global South growing from just less than 25% to around 45% of total published output (Source: Delta Think OA DAT Annual Market Sizing Update 2023). While this expansion contributes to a more inclusive landscape, this rapid growth is stressing the existing peer review infrastructure. In a time when scholarship is exploding across multiple fields at an unprecedented rate, even small publishers and societies need to operate at scale in order to keep pace.

Technology and Artificial Intelligence

For all of its benefits, artificial intelligence is creating an entirely new class of challenges, such as text and image generation and manipulation which defy detection via traditional development and review processes. Frontiers recently retracted a paper that included AI-generated images after it went viral. Temple University launched an ongoing internal investigation in 2021, at the request of the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI), into alleged data manipulation. However, while technology helps create challenges, it can also be part of the solution. To combat fraud, Science recently announced plans to use AI-powered proofing to help identify suspicious images. All of this leads to the question: has the amount of fraud and bad scholarship actually risen as a percent of the overall scholarly record, or does technology simply provide the tools to identify it more efficiently? The answer is probably yes and yes. Is technology the problem and the solution at the same time? Yes and yes here as well.

Publishers in a Leadership Role

Publishers can and should lead on research integrity. This challenge also presents an opportunity. At a time when some in the scholarly community openly question the value of a traditional publisher , what publishers have always done well – contribute to and support the integrity of the scholarly record – is MORE critical than ever. Publishers can play a unique role by building upon existing systems and processes and collaborating to create and utilize new tools that help ensure the integrity of the content that they create and disseminate. If done well, the publisher brand and the authority it confers will continue to be the “stamp of approval” for vetted science and scholarship, even as “bad” or “questionable” content continues to proliferate.

It’s Everyone’s Job

We can all contribute to ensuring trust in the integrity of the scholarly record. Many new tools will help publishers leverage their experience and “best practices” as good stewards in the scholarly information ecosystem, as well as innovate to ensure that their processes are ready to meet new challenges.

Bibliometric tools and databases such as Dimensions , Web of Science , and Scopus (and even our own Data & Analytics Tool ) help publishers explore citation metrics and research analytics, while providing more transparency around research output.
New fit-for-purpose tools such as Signals and the Papermill Alarm from Clear Skies , among the many the AI initiatives highlighted at the recent STM Innovations Day , help researchers, editors, and publishers detect and prevent publication fraud by looking at researcher profiles, collaboration, or submission patterns.
Image duplication and manipulation tools like Proofig and Imagetwin make it easier than ever before to check for faulty research practices or fraud.

New players, as well as long-standing initiatives, are focusing efforts and resources on combating predatory practices.

STM’s Integrity Hub is designed to help publishers “effectively and efficiently respond to the increasing and alarming volume of materials entering scholarly communications that violate accepted research integrity.”
United2Act is a global coalition of commercial and non-profit publishers and societies focused on exposing paper mills, and it is working to establish shared tools and resources in support of integrity in the scholarly publishing process.
COPE, a long-time advocate for ethics in publishing, recently published a position statement calling for immediate action against paper mills and in support of United2Act.
Watchdog groups such as Retraction Watch , recently acquired by Crossref, and PubPeer , a post-publication peer review effort, have helped shine a light on fraudulent papers and publications.

Conclusion: Progress, Not Perfection

Where do we go from here? Scholarship is not now and has never been a perfect system. Self-correction is a feature, not a bug. Fraud has always existed, theories are disproven – scholarship continues apace as new discoveries are made and new knowledge gained. Publishers have an opportunity to play a critical role in this process by clearly defining their value as guardians and defenders of integrity in research and scholarship. What questions is your organization focusing upon now in this critical space? What tools are you interested in exploring? How can you combine your expertise and resources with others to further your mission?

Let’s Talk

Delta Think helps publishers, professional societies, technology companies, startups and others find their place in the rapidly transforming scholarly communication ecosystem. From sustainability, to research integrity, to diversity, equity and inclusion, our experience is your opportunity. We’d love to share more about what we are seeing and hearing in the world of scholarly communication, and how your organization can manage to change this fast-moving landscape. Contact us today to get the conversation started.

News & Views: Is the real value of our industry shrinking?

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 14:53:00 GMT

Over the last couple of years, inflation has become big news. Unusually high inflation has affected economies and business around the world. Economists are now suggesting a better outlook for 2024. As we start the year, we ask whether inflation is relevant to scholarly publishing, and what effect it has had. Is it an outlying issue of little interest? Or does it pose a more profound challenge?

Background

When we explored the effects of currency exchange rates , we noted how many organizations report their annual revenue gains both with and without currency effects. They can be significant, so excluding them is important to understand the underlying performance of an organization or our industry.

However, it’s rare to see reports or accounts explicitly analyzing inflation. (Although underlying budgets for cost might.) Revenues are simply stated “as is” each year. When comparing year-on-year figures, management accounts do not adjust for inflation. Should they? Or are the effects not significant?

How do we work out inflation?

Inflation is calculated by observing how prices for a sample of goods change over time. Results are usually worked out per country. The most familiar measure is the Consumer Price Index (CPI) , which uses a sample of goods typically bought by consumers. However, different samples may be applicable for different situations. The Higher Education (HE) Price Index, for example, looks at spending patterns of higher education institutions (in the US). It is roughly twice the rate of the CPI, as HE institutions spend on different things than consumers.

As we want to analyze our global industry, we need to take a global average. However, this too may vary. Should we look at the whole world, or just at the major economies? The latter account for the bulk of spending, so would seem more appropriate. Analyzing data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) , the CPI of only the major economies averages just under half that of the whole world.

We will therefore take global CPI as being a reasonable representation of inflation affecting our industry. It’s roughly half of HE inflation but twice that of the major economies – the two differences cancel each other out, allowing us to use a convenient, widely-available measure.

Is inflation significant?

The figure above compares the annual rates of growth of the scholarly journals market with annual inflation rates (growth in prices). We can clearly see how the prices are growing at a higher rate than our market.

We can see the spike in high inflation over the last few years. 2023 saw it beginning to fall, with economists anticipating a return to long term trends in a year or two.

The underlying IMF inflation data we used suggests that, since the turn of the 21st century, inflation (the CPI) has averaged around 2% per year in developed economies. This is reflected in the mid- to long term targets of central banks, such as those in the US , the EU , and the UK .

As we noted above, however, Higher Education spending has grown faster than CPI. So the best case for our industry is that our average annual growth is neutralized by inflation. Inflation is significant.

How does this affect our value?

The figure above analyses what inflation means. The top (blue) line is our estimated value of the scholarly journals industry as stated each year. It is growing at an average of 2.3% per year.

However, if we adjust for inflation, the bottom (red) line shows the opposite. In real terms, our industry value is actually shrinking at 2.1% per year.

As we noted above, we took world CPI as our typical figure. But what if we use the lower CPI of the major economies? This is shown in the middle (green dotted) line. Even in this best case scenario, our industry is shrinking at 0.3% per year in real terms. For an industry which grows at an average of 2% per year or so, this is a significant amount.

So our industry appears to be shrinking in real terms – even using the most optimistic measures.

Conclusion

Inflation is not something we normally discuss in management meetings. It may be included in cost budgets, but the typical management P&L does not state this vs last year’s revenues in real terms. We usually take the figures as stated each year.

However, inflation matters.

Its huge increases in the last couple of years have made it newsworthy and significant. Economists are predicting it will fall back to longer term trends in a year or two, but they also urge caution. Early into 2024, problems of conflict and global supply chains look set to continue and perhaps worsen.

Even if current events are just outliers, in normal times inflation rates are similar to our industry growth rates. The best-case scenario is that we are barely standing still. Taking more realistic scenarios, the data suggest that our industry is in a long-term decline in real terms.

We wish our readers a happy – if cautionary – new year.

News & Views: The Currency Effect on Publishing

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 14:42:00 GMT

This month we look at how currency exchange rates may skew our understanding of the value of publishing activities. Are “currency effects” just a technical detail in the financial results of large corporates? Or do they profoundly affect even small organizations?

Background

When big corporates present their financial results, they often cite a secondary set of results “if currency effects are excluded.” Typically, this shows how different their financial growth would be if currency exchange rates did not change over time. In our Market Sizing Update last month, for example, we noted that, if we excluded currency effects, the value of the scholarly journals market would go from barely growing at all to keeping up with long term trends – an 8x increase.

In our October 2023 Market Sizing Update webinar we discussed whether currency effects are a technicality. They are not a usual part of most people’s day-to-day tasks and are – to a cynic – perhaps even an excuse for underperformance.

However, even smaller publishers rely on global submissions and global operations. Exchange rates are therefore an unavoidable environmental factor for many organizations. If changes in rates are significant, then they may skew measures of the organizations’ performance.

Lost in translation

Currency effects quantify the impact of changes in exchange rates on various aspects of financial transactions.

“Translation currency effects” relate to the conversion of financial statements from one currency to another. They most obviously affect multinational organizations, which typically maintain financial records in the local currencies of their regional operations. When these records are consolidated into the organization’s central reporting currency (usually its home currency), fluctuations in exchange rates can affect the reported financial results. The same local numbers may translate to different central numbers depending on the exchange rates in place when the calculations were performed.

This same principle affects our market sizing calculations, for which we must convert multiple currencies into one. Normally, analysts calculate each year’s numbers based on each year’s average exchange rates. We can then calculate the growth (change in total value) each year which includes any fluctuations in rates. But would controlling for exchange rate fluctuations make a difference?

The figure above analyses the annual growth in the total value of the scholarly journals market. It shows the percentage point change in annual growth due to fluctuations in exchange rates. For example, in 2018, currency effects boosted the market growth by just over 1 percentage point.

We estimate the long-term average growth of the market is 2%-4%, so these changes are profound. In 2022, foreign exchange (FX) rates reduced the market from a healthy growth rate to flatlining.

Transactions and globalization

Currency effects are not limited to financial reporting. More or less money may change hands for the same transaction depending on prevailing rates. Even small publishers may sell into several countries, spanning perhaps 10 or more different currencies – the DOAJ has APCs listed in over 40 currencies, for example – so these transactional effects are widespread.

Where publishers fix their prices in one currency, the costs of fluctuations are born by their customers. Costs to libraries, consortia, and universities are at the mercy of exchange rates. (We explored this further in our analysis of affordable pricing .)

Where publishers offer prices in several currencies – as many do – they are taking a bet that exchange rates won’t change too adversely through the year that the prices set remain in effect. The timeframe may be longer for multi-year deals.

The degree to which publishers are exposed to currency effects will depend on the proportion of their activities conducted outside their home country.

The figure above analyses where published articles come from, based on the location of authors’ affiliated institutions. The sample covers the top 100 publishers by total volume of output in 2022. The three bars on the right cover open access (OA) publication output. As OA publishing often charges per article published, the output translates directly to revenue and indicates exposure to transactional currency effects.

The chart shows to what degree authorship is global. A large corporate located in the US, for example, might find that a significant majority of its publications come from non-US authors. But so too might a smaller commercial publisher or a society publisher. The narrowing of the small sample to the largest publishers excludes small organizations that are more likely to be highly localized. Highly globalized operations appear to be commonplace.

Subscriptions revenue is harder to quantify, as authorship may not necessarily translate to higher subscription revenues. However, the bars on the left, which show all output, give a useful context.

Conclusion

Currency effects are not simply a technical issue buried in the big corporates’ annual reports. They profoundly affect the performance of even modestly sized organizations and our ability to measure it.

If exchange rates changed slowly, then they would have little effect beyond modest price changes. However, in recent years we have seen exchange rates swing significantly – particularly in the wake of systemic problems such as COVID-19. We saw swings of over 10% between 2021 and 2022 in some cases, which significantly outweigh the changes of a few percent in costs or income that are typical in our industry. An organization might grow at a spectacular 10%, only to see its performance wiped out if exchange rates swing the wrong way. Even the high growth rates of open access revenue are affected.

The scale of currency effects would mean little if organisations operated within national boundaries. But in our highly globalized industry, they don’t. Research is a global endeavour – and so even small organizations are exposed to fickle exchange rates. Small publishers operate in a global ecosystem; many engage the services of large publishers. Cost bases may be exposed as so much of publishing operations are offshored. Even the safe haven of fixing prices in a local currency, and letting the buyer take the risk, is under threat, as we see increasing discussions about setting prices to reflect local affordability.

In years of volatility, we need to control for currency effects in our reporting. Otherwise, the underlying health of an organization – or of our ecosystem – may be obscured by environmental factors outside its control. We also need to understand these effects so we can plan for risks ahead.

Perhaps those technicalities in financial reports matter after all.

The analysis here is an illustration of what we can look into. For those interested in understanding the specifics for their organization, please get in touch.

This article is © 2023 Delta Think, Inc. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . Please do get in touch if you want to use it in other contexts – we’re usually pretty accommodating.

Digital Transformation (DX) in Education: eBooks

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 17:30:00 GMT

In a recent Ideas in Action, Delta Think explored the topic of Digital Transformation (DX) in Education . Digital Transformation is a decisive strategy intended to increase the value, reputation, and sustainability of higher education institutions: how can educational institutions be reshaped to foster learner-first approaches while also keeping up to date with the growing technological, cultural, and financial demands of the 21st century?

Part of the answer to this question focuses directly on teaching and learning. Digital Transformation promises to reinvent education using technology to support curriculum delivery, improve pedagogy, expand access, and ultimately improve teaching efficacy and student outcomes. EDUCAUSE reported the top two drivers of Digital Transformation are 1) improving the student experience and 2) improving faculty teaching and advising. While there are multiple technologies and systems being leveraged to address these needs, scholarly content of all shapes and sizes remains foundational in higher education.

The 2022 ACRL Academic Trends and Statistics survey reported that since 2017 the average eBook collection across all library types (community college, college, and university libraries) increased 96.6% from 315,213 to 619,895. Despite cultural change and cost barriers , institutions, via their libraries, have invested to build significant collections of eBooks. Alongside journals, eBooks form the bedrock of the academic research enterprise and are fundamental in support of the education usage occasions that power DX.

How Does Book-Based Content Support Digital Transformation?

eBooks and book-based content can play a critical role in support of two key drivers of DX:

Student Success – Despite overwhelming evidence (and common sense) that access to content impacts student success, SPARC reported in 2023 that due to the cost of required course materials, more than two in five students (44%) said they took fewer classes, nearly one in three (32%) reported earning a poor grade, and nearly a quarter (24%) reported dropping out of a course. Administrators are focusing on improving access to educational resources as part of their DX initiatives, including content that is funded and provided by their library.
Sequencing and Scaffolding – Course design has traditionally been the purview of faculty. Core textbooks are often supplanted by learning objects including book chapters, multimedia, and even figures and tables, providing the flexibility to adapt courses and integrate content into technology tools and platforms essential to efficiency and efficacy of teaching and learning. eBooks serve as a primary source of information and knowledge for a course and empower faculty to select and utilize content that align with the learning objectives and cover essential concepts.

What does DX Look Like in Teaching and Learning?

Dr. Jonathan Wisco is a leader in curriculum design and one of the architects of Boston University School of Medicine’s pre-clinical curriculum, Principles Integrating Science, Clinical Medicine, and Equity (PISCE). During a recent webinar on how technology has impacted education (co-hosted by Delta Think and Silverchair), Dr. Wisco and his medical students shared their current education needs and preferences: self-directed learning is primary … they are motivated information-seekers and will utilize multiple resources, methods, and learning styles to ensure mastery.

“You want the flexibility of a curriculum to be able to learn when you want and how you can, in the most efficient way for yourself.”
– Gabrielle Lakis, M1

The learning paradigm continues to move away from rote memorization to emphasize critical thinking and problem-solving skills, shifting the focus from linear comprehensive content to granular, specific, and contextual knowledge.

“You cannot memorize everything you need to know, but where can you go to find that information when you need that information … you don’t need to memorize every little detail … and that is an affirmation of where our curriculum is heading.”
– Gabrielle Lakis, M1

Dr. Wisco emphasized the benefits of personalized learning. He and his colleagues work not only to ensure students have the knowledge they need to pass board exams, but also are prepared to have an impact in their field of medicine throughout their professional life.

“The idea of individualized education is extremely important to us … and one of our highest priorities is to train lifelong learners. We are trying to train them with the skills to be able to decide what content is most important for them at the moment. Instead of telling them what anatomy is, we help them discover and understand why that anatomy is important.”
– Dr. Jonathan Wisco, Associate Professor

Is Your Content DX-Ready?

There are fundamental characteristics that can ensure book-based content remains a vital component in support of teaching and learning and student success. How can publishers ensure that their content is relevant in support of DX? By being fluid, flexible, and findable .

“What is most frustrating to me is when I want to provide content and deploy it to the students in the way they need it, but I go to this resource, and this resource, and this resource. And I can’t use it anymore because it is not helpful for that [learning] pathway.”
– Dr. Jonathan Wisco, Associate Professor

Let’s Talk

Delta Think helps publishers, professional societies, technology companies, start-ups and others find their place in the rapidly transforming education ecosystem. We collaborate with our clients using proven methodologies to define actionable, customer-driven strategies across content and product development, commercial infrastructure, and operations. Our experience in the education landscape – from undergraduate and graduate-level through to professional development, licensure, and certification – is your opportunity. We’d love to share more about what we are seeing and hearing in the world of education and how your organization can learn to thrive in this fast-moving landscape. Contact us today to discuss an education-based project customized to satisfy your specific organizational objectives and budget.

News & Views Webinar: 2023 Market Sizing

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 19:34:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our October News & Views companion online discussion forum!

Each year, Delta Think’s Market Sizing analyzes the value of the open access journals market. This is the revenue generated by providers or the costs incurred by buyers of content. This webinar covered highlights from this month's News & Views.

If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

News & Views: Market Sizing Update 2023

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 17:53:00 GMT

Overview

Each year, Delta Think's Market Sizing analyzes the value of the OA scholarly journals market. This is the revenue generated by providers or the costs incurred by buyers of content.

We estimate the OA segment of the market to have grown to just over $2bn in 2022. This is strong growth over the previous year, although it is significantly lower than the year before. The overall scholarly journals market showed very little growth during the same period.

The headlines suggest that we may be seeing the beginnings of a correction to long-term trends after two years of exceptional growth in the wake of COVID-19. However, reductions in growth rates are exaggerated by currency effects.

It is too soon to know exactly when we may see a return to long-term trends. Our models currently suggest a further correction through 2023 and possibly 2024.

Headline findings

Our models suggest the following headlines for open access market sizing:

We estimate that the OA market grew to just over $2bn in 2022.

2022’s OA market grew by a little over 24% from 2021. This is around two thirds of the growth we saw in 2021.
We estimate the total scholarly journals market to have increased by 0.4% in 2022, compared with its long-term low single-digit growth of 2%-4%.
Given the exceptionally high growth in 2020 and 2021, a correction in 2022 was expected. We saw this in the whole market. It is less obvious in the OA segment as its growth remains strong; however, OA’s growth was significantly lower than it had been previously.
Growth in hybrid revenues was a major factor driving growth in OA, although all types of OA saw improved revenues per article, which helped to drive growth.
Currency effects contributed to reduced growth. Many publishers operate in non-USD currencies, which lost value against the US dollar in 2022. If we exclude currency changes, the OA market would have grown by over 29% (an additional 5 points) in 2022, and the overall journals market would have grown at 3.6% (around 8x its headline growth). This suggests that underlying growth in the OA market has slowed slightly, and that of the overall market is growing in line with long-term trends.
Growth in OA remains significantly above that of the underlying scholarly journals market.
Just over 49% of all scholarly articles were published as paid-for open access in 2022, accounting for just under 20% of the total journal publishing market value.
We anticipate a 2022-2025 CAGR (average growth each year) of 13% in OA output and 13% in OA market value.

A note about our method

As ever, we are very grateful to the organizations that participate in our annual survey, which we anonymize and aggregate to inform our estimates. We will be sending out our usual detailed market update and analysis to participants shortly.

Our market estimates focus on research publications for which money is likely to be paid, either to read or to publish. We focus on underlying trends to inform strategic decision-making. Open Access in this context excludes “Bronze” (public access) and Green OA. Each year our data improves, so we restate figures as needed to keep them up to date1.

Trends

We have seen a slow-down in growth in 2022, although underlying drivers of the market remain strong.

COVID-19 led to a significant increase in publishing activity, showing above-average volumes and growth rates in 2020 and 2021.
Last year, results from our survey and anecdotal feedback gave mixed messages about the outlook for 2022. Low growth in 2022 was expected by many, as things corrected towards underlying trends. 2022 did show markedly lower growth compared with the previous year. However, as the underlying growth of OA remains strong, 2022’s lower growth numbers seem high when taken in isolation.
Our anecdotal evidence and our publisher survey lead us to expect a further slowing of growth in 2023, as activities normalize back to underlying trends through 2023 and 2024. It is too soon to say by exactly how much and when this will happen.
Slowing growth in OA output contributed to its reduced growth. Fully OA output grew at around half the rate of hybrid output. However, growth in OA revenues was greater than growth in output. This suggests that OA “yields” – revenues per article – improved. Hybrid showed the best performance – its value grew almost twice as much as that of fully OA.
We noted last year that OA has systemically accelerated in recent years, and we think the fundamental drivers behind this remain. Publishers continue to focus on OA in the wake of various policy announcements.
Prices have increased, and we anticipate that this will continue, although the effects of mixed-model deals on pricing dynamics have yet to become clear. Hybrid revenues realized per article published remain higher than those published in fully OA journals, and we expect this trend to continue.
OA is increasingly delivered as part of mixed-model deals, combining read and publish elements. This may impact OA’s share of revenue in the market in the future depending upon how publishers apportion revenue from those deals to OA.
In 2022, 49% of output was OA, accounting for just over 20% of its value. This means that on average less money changes hands for OA articles than for non-OA ones. However, OA’s share of revenue is rising proportionately faster than share of volume, so this gap continues to narrow.

Conclusion

2022 was preceded by two years of exceptional growth in open access activity and value. We saw the beginnings of a correction to offset this in 2022. The overall scholarly journals market remained flat, and growth in OA in 2022 – while strong – fell to two thirds of its previous high.

Last year , we questioned whether things would fall back quickly or slowly. They appear to have done both. The headline numbers show a significant reduction of growth compared with previous years, although the strong growth in OA masks this. When the effects of currency variations are removed, reductions in growth rates look softer – growth in OA moves from 24% to 29% (a 5-point increase), and the overall market comes back to normal growth rates.

We are likely still witnessing the effects of disruption in the wake of COVID. However, it is too soon to tell when the reduced growth rate will return to normal, and whether the 2022 figures will alter long-term trends. Our anecdotal feedback and our publisher survey suggest a reasonably positive outlook for 2023 – although not for everyone – and several factors will influence the results.

If exchange rates swing back from 2022 levels, then they could boost growth in 2023 in the same way they reduced it in 2022.

The increasing use of mixed-model deals brings with it reporting issues. Our methodology includes steps to isolate and model just the publish part of these deals when estimating OA value. As OA becomes an increasingly large part of revenues, we anticipate that higher proportions of revenue will be apportioned to OA when organizations report their figures, as they wish to best reflect the balance of their operations. Such reclassification may in turn lead to an apparent growth in OA value.

Finally, OA’s share of value (just under 20% in 2022) has always lagged behind its share of output (just over 49% in 2022). If this were to continue, then the overall value of the market will reduce as more OA is adopted. However, the gap is narrowing. In 2022, as in previous years, we saw the value of OA grow faster than its output, suggesting that yields from OA articles continue to increase. This is a critical dynamic if the value of the market is to be maintained. While publishers have been actively pursuing activities that diversify revenue and manage costs for years, their efforts to maintain value remain critical.

Our industry does not systematically report comprehensive data about market volumes or value. So, any market sizing is an approximation, and figures should be taken as approximate. Subscribers to our Data & Analytics Tool can drill into the numbers in much greater depth, including analyzing society-specific output and subscription output. Please get in touch if you want to know more.

1As our survey coverage improves, we recalculated our estimates for 2021 market values. Of particular interest in this context, we revised our estimate of the total 2021 OA market from $1.60bn to $1.65bn. Please note that market estimates by their very nature are not exact.

News & Views Webinar: Publisher Tools – Portfolio Modeling and Affordability Calculator

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 08:03:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our September News & Views companion online discussion forum!

With the buzz around the OSTP Nelson memo and the search for more equitable models, publishers are taking a look at the composition of their current portfolios to model their best strategy to move forward with Open Access.

Join us for an overview of our Modeling Tool and APC Affordability Calculator to learn how you can use data to make informed decisions around journal strategy.

If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

Coming Soon: Delta Think’s 2023 Market Sizing Update & Analysis

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 12:20:00 GMT

Each year, Delta Think’s Market Sizing analyzes the size and the value of the journals market. This is the revenue generated by providers or the costs incurred by buyers of content. Our free October 25 webinar will cover highlights from the October 2023 News & Views (publishing on October 24), as well an update on the potential impact of the OSTP Memo. We’ll look at trends over time for output and revenue.

If you want to refresh your memory prior to the event, please check out these resources.

2022 Market Sizing Update News & Views and webinar recording

2021 Market Sizing Update News & Views and webinar recording

News & Views: What questions should your organization ask during times of change?

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 13:35:00 GMT

At Delta Think, we’re big fans of using data-driven decision making to help you navigate our changing world. But how do you determine what data you need and what decisions you need to take?

This month, we change our usual approach and look at some questions that you can ask to help find your way in a time of constant change, as well as the data you might need to answer them.

Background

The world of scholarly publishing continues to evolve.

Generative AI is currently trending, but new technology is nothing new. Remember the Information Superhighway? Web 2.0? The iPad revolutionizing the way we consumed content? The rise of XML?
Last summer’s OSTP memo made headlines. A zero embargo on open content is a significant and potentially disruptive change. But new policies have continued to shift: Plan S, the NIH deposit mandate, China’s publishing evolution, the Wellcome Trust’s early OA policies, to name a few.
Open Access was once an unproven model that many considered unlikely to be financially viable. Born-OA publishers now account for one fifth of content produced and have been growing an order of magnitude faster than the underlying market.
The APC-based OA business model is now itself being disrupted. Big OA publishers’ growth is slowing. Transformative Agreements and their like might move OA closer to the Big Deal. New Subscribe to Open launches are increasing even as calls for more equity are making publishers rethink their APC models entirely.
Operations change too. Publishers that once outsourced and divested their production suppliers have been acquiring publishing platforms and services companies as part of their competitive strategy.

Change brings with it questions.

So what? How does my organization adapt? Should we do things differently? If so, how? And when? What should we do next?

Questions

To get a handle on these big questions, we suggest breaking them down into smaller parts to work through how to set strategies and plan for change. It might also help to consider the answers to your questions using two different lenses:

Focus – where should you prioritize your efforts?
Risk – what could go wrong or right?

In the following sections, it is not our intent to cover every question you might ask. Our goal instead is to surface a few questions and demonstrate how you might go about answering them.

1. Focus

Even small specialist publishers with a few journals will likely cover several disciplines. Mid and large-sized publishers will cover many more. We frequently write about how a specific publisher’s situation will determine whether an industry trend has greater or lesser effects. When dealing with change, it’s vital to understand how different journals or collections of journals might be affected.

For example, if considering the effects of a policy that promotes “open” publishing, you might ask:

What is the appetite “out there” for open vs closed content?
How does this compare with what we publish?
How does this vary by journal? By collection? By discipline?
What are the big and small areas of content usage?
How are they changing over time?

The figure below works an example for two subjects within physics. It’s deliberately simple to illustrate the principle of building simpler questions into broader insights.

The figure above looks at our estimates of articles published in the addressable market (research publications for which money is likely to be paid, either to read or to publish).

The left side of Figure 1 shows uptake of different access types. Particle & High Energy Physics (HEP) has high uptake of OA: almost 90% of its content is published OA, with over 90% of that published in fully open (gold) journals. Compare this with Condensed Matter Physics, with just under 15% of output published OA, split roughly equally between fully open and hybrid journals.
A publisher with journals covering these areas might therefore prioritize HEP if considering launching a new journal to meet growing demand for OA. A library might consider negotiating lower subs prices or cancelling subscriptions for HEP journals.
However, looking at the right side of the chart, HEP covers just 1% of output in physics. So that new journal may have little effect on the publisher’s fortunes, and that cancellation little effect on the library’s spending. Condensed Matter accounts for over a fifth of physics output. If you multiply the ratios, a new Condensed Matter Physics journal would have over 3x the effect of an HEP one in this context. It might, therefore, be better to focus on Condensed Matter.

Our example here is simple, but the principle scales well. We have run projects that cover dozens of subject areas, using charts like these to highlight where a publisher’s leadership team should focus their priorities.

Figure 2 shows thumbnail sketches of how the Uptake vs Scale comparison looks across 200+ subjects. As before, they compare uptake (left, share of output within subjects) with scale (right, contribution to total for each subject).

You are not meant to see the detail at this resolution. In fact, the point is to show that in the real world, the situation is complicated.
In practice, we often present analyses like these as an interactive spreadsheet, which highlights the key outliers and allows clients to navigate the chart to zoom into the details as needed.
We also develop scoring systems to combine the different dimensions (uptake and scale) into easy-to-digest metrics.

2. Risk

Any change has the potential to disrupt the status quo. Another key set of questions therefore falls under the “what might break” category. If a particular policy was enacted or adopted, how might the revenue or cost change? Developing our example of looking at a policy promoting “open” publishing, you might ask:

What subscriptions might be at most or least risk?
Are there multiplier effects? For example, bundles or collections of journals that might be much less attractive if just a few key journals were removed or made open.
Are we clear about the value of subscriptions and of OA activity… by journal/collection/subject?
Are there other sources of value, such as advertising or licensing? How much are they dependent on paywalls or publishing fees?
At what threshold might we need to flip a journal from hybrid OA to fully OA?
At what threshold does a subscription journal become unviable?
How do we measure thresholds: Pricing? Volumes of output? Usage?

You usually need to combine focus (such as uptake and scale, as above) with financial modelling to address these questions. For example, if a journal’s subscriptions collapsed because of a move to open, it may have little effect on publisher income or library spend if the subs value is very small. Visualizations therefore need to work in three dimensions to help you gain insight.

Figure 3 illustrates the idea of turning questions into data. Here we’re looking at gains vs. losses in value across a specific group of journals. (This is a simplified table pulled from real world examples, but the data is illustrative.)

By comparing different values of subscriptions (rows), with different levels of OA uptake or usage (columns), we can see where the sweet spot lies for moving a journal or collection to OA vs. not (or continuing a subscription or not – the model works for buyers too).
Here, for low volumes of current OA use, the publisher would be worse off if it moved to OA (negative numbers in brackets on the left column of the table). But, as OA uptake increases (moving to the right of the table), the OA fees start to offset the loss in subs (green, positive numbers middle right). However, this is only true if the subscription revenue wasn’t too large to begin with (yellow & orange negative numbers in the bottom rows). In this case, there is more ground to make up when moving to OA. The same principle applies when assessing library subscriptions.
The subtlety behind visualizations such as this is to choose the correct data, based on the questions being asked. For example, if considering the effects on subscriptions, you would need to decide whether to analyze things such as revenue, collection coverage, or usage.

Conclusion

“Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm. It was a long time before anyone spoke. “I think the problem … is that you've never actually known what the question is.”

The challenge is that the big open-ended changes we encounter lead to big, open-ended questions. By breaking them down through a process of analysis, we can arrive at the right questions, which in turn leads us to the right decision-making tools.

The starting point is often a variant on “Will I be better or worse off,” which can then be expanded into the specific details. “How much does x make or cost?” “What’s the appetite for this over that?” “What contributes to its success or failure” “What will make a noticeable difference?” “How do I balance growth and scale?”

We have floated some questions here. Please do get in touch and let us know your thoughts. What questions is your organization facing? What should we be asking?

News & Views: Can open access be made more affordable?

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 13:57:00 GMT

This month we look at the challenges of providing global access to OA in an equitable way. Among the many issues discussed, a central one is cost. We look at how prices could be changed to match local affordability… and turn up some surprising results.

Background

Cost is key in the active discussions around the challenges to providing equitable access to OA. Modest fees for one country may be very expensive for another, particularly for the less wealthy regions outside the US and Europe.

cOAlition S, UNESCO, the International Science Council (ISC), the Open Access 2020 Initiative (OA2020), Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL), the Association of African Universities, and Science Europe are organizing a series of workshops on global equity in Open Access publishing . OASPA has convened a series of workshops that examined equity in pricing models for all forms of OA business models – “to help dismantle the financial barriers authors face to participation [in OA]”. cOAlition S has commissioned a study to explore a “globally fair pricing system for academic publishing.”

One of many ideas being discussed is basing fees upon what is affordable locally , rather than pricing them at an identical level for customers irrespective of their geographic location. Precedents exist, such as the tiered pricing of vaccines .

Quantifying affordability

To work out pricing based on affordability, we need to account for how cheap or expensive things are between different countries. Exchange rates alone don’t account for local spending equivalence.

The Big Mac index ¹ illustrates the problem, as it allows us quickly to compare a similar item across many countries. If currency exchange rates reflected local purchasing power, then a $5.36 Big Mac in the US would cost the local currency equivalent of $5.36 everywhere. However, a Big Mac costs the local currency equivalent of, for example, $7.28 in Switzerland, or $4.44 in Brazil ² .

Such Burgernomics provides an easily digestible example of the principle of quantifying differences in affordability between countries. In practice, economists use Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) , which uses a complex sample of goods and services for its calculations.

How affordable are things around the world?

The map below compares the differences in purchasing power around the world.

The map’s shading indicates the ratios of PPP in USD (purchasing power) to currency exchange rates for US dollars. They can be used to visualize the local affordability of prices based on currency exchange rates. The darker the area, the less affordable prices are due to weaker local purchasing power. There is arguably over-charging in these areas. Conversely, the lighter the shade, the more affordable prices are. (Note, the very lightest areas – such as Antarctica along the bottom – have no data.)

Unsurprisingly, high-income countries – such as the US – can better afford things compared with low-income countries – such as many in Africa. However, the middle ground is quite extensive. For example, it includes many countries in Europe, even though Europe is considered a wealthy area of the world.

Making prices affordable

If open access prices were to be set based on affordability, then what sort of discounts – or increases – might be needed to make them equitable?

Figure 2 is a box plot showing how prices might need to change to reflect affordability based on local purchasing power (PPP). The horizontal line at 0% represents current state pricing. There is one dot per country. The dot’s distance from the 0% baseline represents how much prices in the country would need to change to reflect affordability based on PPP. The dots are not labelled to indicate country, as the point of the chart is to show the overall patterns.

To help put the comparison in context, we show different combinations of countries. These are the vertical groups of dots: N. America and Europe, Research4Life (R4L) eligibility (Group A/free and Group B/low-cost), and World Bank Income categories. Countries may appear in more than one group. The hollow boxes show the two middle quartiles for each group, with the horizontal line across the box showing the median change. For example:

The dots for the US require no change (as PPP is set relative to USD), and so will appear on the 0% line. Its dots appear in the leftmost group (N. America) and the High-income group, but not in the R4L groups, as it is not eligible for discounted prices.
Brazil would require 50% price discounts to reflect its PPP. Its dot is plotted at the -50% line in the Middle-income group (the only category it falls into in our chart).
Switzerland at 25% is the outlier in the High-income category.

What is striking in Figure 2 is the middle quartiles of almost every group of countries are entirely below 0. In other words, it is not only the case that lower income countries have lower purchasing power, requiring downward adjustments on prices for parity. It is the case that most countries have lower purchasing power than the very few (including many countries in the Global North, in Europe, or of High Income).

As a result, estimating the effects of the entire market moving to a solely PPP-based model, we see overall market value (aka market cost to those paying to participate) dropping by roughly 34%.

If we assume that a market value adjustment of the magnitude illustrated above would not be the end state, what type of pricing increases would be needed to offset pricing power parity? Assuming a case of full recovery of revenue (not likely, but it represents an interesting like-for-like comparison model), who would pay what?

The bars in Figure 3 show how prices would need to change to both reflect PPP and maintain current total market value. This allows us to visualize what the current market might look like if it were priced according to affordability.

Countries with stronger PPP would subsidize weaker ones, but, again, the results turn up surprises. For example, the top quartile of countries in the Research4Life Group A (free access) would see price rises, while over half those in the High-income category, or over half of Europe would require price cuts.

For context, in our burgernomics examples: Prices would need to reduce by 50% in Brazil to reflect PPP alone, or by 25% to maintain total market value. Switzerland would see price increases of 10% (PPP only) or 66% (market adjusted). And the home of the Big Mac? 0% (for PPP only – PPP is in $USD), or an increase of 51% (market adjusted).

Conclusion

There are many issues surrounding equitability of OA publishing, but affordability remains the major one.

The APC barrier effect suggests that “APCs impede researchers with fewer resources in publishing their research as OA”. Transformative Agreements (TAs) and Read & Publish (R&P) deals, which may base their pricing on APCs, can bring similar problems of affordability to those of APCs themselves. The expense of subscriptions too, even for the wealthy , has been discussed at length, and their cost is one of the drivers behind advocacy of a move to OA. Affordability is an issue whatever the business model.

Waivers are the usual fix, but they can be problematic . Their implementation varies, and they may be perceived as patronizing or undermining the dignity of those receiving them (“Waivers are a charity; why can we not pay in our own way with our own money?”). Waivers are typically applied based on World Bank income categories, but, as our analysis of its data shows, these may not match affordability.

At first glance, exploring a PPP-based pricing model is attractive. It strikes at the heart of affordability, by accounting for participants’ ability to pay. However, as we have seen, it is not that simple. A move to PPP, in most cases, causes price increases for many (some of which are unexpected) to subsidize the others that need more affordable options. This may result in some controversial changes. That impact would be magnified if publishers attempted to adjust prices upwards overall to counteract market value shrinkage.

A PPP based pricing system, while attractive in principle, would need to be carefully implemented in practice. Prices or pricing tiers would need to account for more than the raw numbers. Optics would need to be carefully considered. There will be winners and losers. And, like William Gibson’s view of the future, they will be unevenly distributed.

For those interested in exploring this topic further, we have developed a tool to help organizations explore affordability-based scenarios. Please get in touch .

1The Big Mac index was invented by The Economist in 1986 as a “lighthearted guide to whether currencies are at their “correct” level. It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), the notion that in the long run exchange rates should move towards the rate that would equalise the prices of an identical basket of goods and services (in this case, a burger) in any two countries.” Further color was added in a 1994 article in the UK’s The Independent newspaper – Nick Wiseman, a statistician with the Economist, said: “We are often asked why we don't use the price of the Economist or of prostitutes instead. The former is printed in various places and the price is not uniform while the cost of the latter may depend on local custom.” The term burgernomics was coined by editor Pam Woodall at the same time the Big Mac index was first produced.

2The Economist Big Mac index , January 2023 figures, taken as a proxy for 2022 end of year.

News & Views: Transformative Journals – An Experiment in OA Acceleration

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 13:33:00 GMT

In its recent annual update about Transformative Journals (TJs), cOAlition S noted that many journals had not met their targets, for the second year in a row, and were being removed from the list of approved TJs.

Since most journals consistently missed the annual targets, we wondered if the originally included journals, at their demonstrated rates of growing OA content, could have eventually met the goal of 75% open access. Was this a timely move by cOAlition S to cut journals or was it premature?

Background

Transformative Journals are an interim means to comply with Plan S open access (OA) requirements. Publishers nominate hybrid journals and commit to increasing their share of OA output each year, with a view to flipping them to fully OA once they reach 75% OA output. Plan S sets targets for each journal and reviews their performance each year. Those not meeting their targets have their TJ status revoked and no longer qualify for cOAlition S funders to cover their OA fees.

The program started in 2020 and will be stopped at the end of 2024. Our previous analysis of TJs covered requirements in depth and looked at how the journals might grow based on their historic output going into the TJ program. At that time, we noted that the journals’ OA output was growing at roughly half the rate needed for them to keep their TJ status.

Although 56% of journals did not meet their first year targets , they kept their TJ status due to the novelty of the program. However, following its review of the second year of TJs , cOAlition S withdrew TJ status from 68% of the 2,326 journals for failing to meet targets in 2022 and reiterated its commitment to ending the TJ program in 2024. So far just 26, or 1.1%, of the journals in this program have flipped to OA.

How long is long enough for TJs to work?

By combining cOAlition S’s data from last year and this year, and projecting it forward, we can prepare a rough estimate of how long this set of journals would need to reach 75% OA content.

The chart above looks at all the journals in the TJ program, regardless of whether they met their 2023 targets1. It looks at what proportions of them might meet or exceed the 75% OA output “flip to fully OA” threshold over the nearer and longer terms.

To date 30% of journals have met their targets or will very likely meet them within 5 years from now (2028)
56% will take more than 5 years from now
14% of journals are unlikely ever to exceed 75% OA output based on current OA growth rates

There are also interesting dynamics within the total program set of journals. More than two thirds of the journals that might reach a flip within 5 years appear to be shrinking overall. Their OA proportions might be rising due to lost submissions for non-OA content, rather than rising demand for OA. The journals that might flip more than 5 years from now (the 56%) look much healthier – they are growing – but 81% won’t reach the 75% threshold until after 2040.

Were the right journals cut?

Using the previously referenced combined dataset and focusing on the journals that are still in the TJ program, we can estimate whether journals might preserve their TJ status in the years to come.

The charts above show whether journals that met their TJ targets in the previous year might meet their TJ targets in the current year.2

Of the roughly 30% of journals which still have their TJ status in 2023 (or are fully OA already), we estimate that 39% will fail to make their 2023 targets – a large improvement over 2022’s 68% failure rate.
Then, of the journals that might make the cut (or are fully OA already) in 2023, we estimate that 82% will meet their projected 2024 targets.
Note, as the numbers of journals reduce, the proportion of the flipped journals will rise by default, and there are some that are already set to flip to OA by 2024.

It appears cOAlition S may have cut the right journals and the right number of journals. They have kept the ones more likely to meet program targets.

Conclusion

Success is always measured by one’s objectives. When looking at the TJ program, evaluating its success depends on what cOAlition S set out to accomplish.

If none of the journals in this program had their TJ status revoked, the program would cover around 9% of the market’s output by 2024. A mass flip at the end of 2024 could have accelerated OA uptake by around two years at current trends. While this isn’t game-changing, it is certainly notable.

We must also remember that cOAlition S didn’t select these journals – they selected themselves. If the goal was to see what kind of uptake was possible and then to see how journals included in a TJ program would perform, this feels like a reasonable experiment. Could a program like this provide another “tool in the toolbox” for accelerating OA? What were the results?

Our previous analysis in June 2021 suggested that journals in the TJ program had historically grown their OA proportions at half the rate they needed to. We may have been slightly pessimistic, but not by much. There has been no significant leap in OA proportions. Over two thirds of TJs have already lost their status, and well under one fifth will make it to the end of the program.

If the real point of the TJs was to encourage flips to fully OA journals, just 3% have flipped (or are due to flip in 2023), and fewer than 30% of TJs are likely to make the 75% OA threshold by 2028. The program appears to have had little effect on OA growth, and cOAlition S sees this slow uptake of OA as justification to close the program (end the experiment?) at the end of 2024 as planned.

It may be that the Achilles Heel of TJs is the small proportion of global output funded by cOAlition S. While Plan S has undoubtedly reinvigorated discussions around OA, publishers take a broader view. For example, just two of the 70 or so TJs that publishers have committed to flip to OA by 2024 are projected to have more than 75% output as OA by that time. It seems the publisher is driving this flip rather than the requirements of the TJ program.

The fragmented, global nature of scholarship remains a key inhibitor to faster OA acceleration. One region’s rules cannot provide a silver bullet to boosting global OA uptake – but they can contribute.

15% (113) of the journals did not have sufficient data to make these projections, so they are excluded for Figure 2B. They are counted as not making their targets in other charts.

2To be consistent with cOAlition S’s statistics, we include flipped journals.

News & Views: Diamonds in the Rough: Societies Shine under Pressure

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 14:05:00 GMT

This month we look at diamond open access journals (“sponsored”). With some large funders advocating their use as a more equitable form of open access, can publishers make them work?

Background

An APC-based payment model is increasingly seen as challenging. APCs represent a rising expense, especially for institutions publishing large volumes of articles. Additionally, the APC model ( even with waivers ) has been increasingly criticized as non-inclusive . So it’s perhaps no surprise that we have seen moves to finance “diamond” journals and promote OA without author fees from some government funders and agencies.

Using color names to describe journal business models is not self-explanatory. For this analysis, we will use “sponsored” rather than “diamond” to refer to journals for which costs of the entire journal are covered, without fees charged to read or publish articles.

Since there is no data at scale listing sponsored journals, we infer whether a journal is sponsored by analyzing our data about publishers’ price lists. From our data set of over 18,000 journals, we look for fully open journals that have been available and have charged zero APCs for at least 3 years ¹ . The prevalence of these journals hints at whether responding to increased demand for sponsored journals requires scaling existing efforts or cutting new ground.

How many sponsored journals are there?

We analyze proportions of sponsored journals below, in Figure 1.

The chart shows proportions of fully open access journals that have, or have not, charged per-paper publishing fees (APCs). The sample only includes journals with at least 3 years’ data about APCs.

The top (yellow) proportion shows our likely sponsored journals, which have not charged APCs for at least 3 years. These account for just under one fifth of our sample.
The bottom (gray) proportion shows our pay-to-publish journals, which charge APCs. These account for just over 80% of our sample.
The remaining proportions show journals which do not charge APCs, but only for a year or two. These cover a very small proportion of our sample. If we include newer journals – not shown above – then we would find significantly more journals not charging APCs in 2022-23. As we cannot be sure whether these are truly sponsored or (say) offering temporary discounts, we exclude them so we can look at underlying trends.

Looking at trends, the data suggest that around 18% of journals are now sponsored, down from just over 25% two years ago. The underlying data show that the numbers of journals have grown by 20% over this period.

Publisher type makes a difference

The chart shows the same categories as before but split to show society journals on the right and other journals on the left.

Societies make far greater use of sponsored journals: over 40%, but down from almost 60% two years ago.
Non-society journals are just over half of the market averages.
For context, there are around one third the number of society versus non-society journals in the underlying data.

Conclusion

Overall, 18% of fully open journals appear to be sponsored, but their proportion and number have been decreasing. It seems that over the last 3-4 years the market has been slowly moving away from a sponsored model. It will be interesting to see if this trend holds since discussions about “diamond” journals are now heating up.

However, these current averages vary greatly depending on whether titles are owned by societies.

Among society-run journals, sponsored titles account for more than double the market average, for non-society (commercial) journals they account for just under half. Societies’ greater proportion of sponsored titles and their not-for-profit status could therefore place them in a stronger position than their commercial competitors if we see a large scale move by funders to require publication in journals without publisher fees and – as some noises from European funders suggest – which are not for profit.

With the situation varying so wildly, and government pushes to an OA world showing no signs of abating, it’s vital that publishers look at the data for their circumstances, to fully understand the situation for their mix of journal types, profit status and discipline.

1The data can’t describe why journals don’t charge APCs. Journals that are new or newly made OA may not charge APCs as an introductory offer. So, we take journals that have been in our database for at least three years and have not charged an APC during that time. Some journals may offer longer introductory offers (and some none), but our anecdotal feedback from the market suggests that the 3 year period seems reasonable for our analysis. Subscribe to Open journals will also appear in our sample, however, at the time we carried out this analysis, they will be very few in number and make no difference to the outcome.

News & Views: Fully Open Access Journals – Size Does Matter

Tue, 23 May 2023 13:49:00 GMT

This month, we look at how fully Open Access journals are managed differently depending upon who publishes them.

Background

Most publishers need to ensure that their income at least covers their costs, whether they are mission based or profit driven. Assuming constant prices, for open access publishing, income is driven primarily by the number of papers published. For subscription publishing, it’s driven primarily by the numbers of journals published. Costs scale based on numbers of papers for both. It would then be logical to assume that publishers focus increasingly on article volumes over numbers of journals as they publish more open access. But what do the data tell us?

For purposes of comparison, we split publishers into two types:

Mixed Model publishers , which publish a mix of journal types: fully open, hybrid and those with no OA option. This category includes many established publishers.
OA Only publishers , which only publish fully OA journals. This category includes PLOS, Frontiers and MDPI. For the purposes of analysis, it also includes F1000 and Hindawi. These are now owned by Mixed Model publishers, but they were born-digital fully OA publishers and so bear comparison with other publishers of similar ilk.

How different publishers scale

Patterns in output vary between publisher types and by journal type, as illustrated in Figure 1.

OA Only publishers publish more articles per journal.

OA Only publishers’ journals contain 4 to 5 times as many papers as journals from Mixed Model publishers.
While this is certainly expected for subscription and hybrid journals, this holds true for fully OA journals published by Mixed Model publishers as well. Fully OA journals at Mixed Model publishers are publishing far fewer articles than their OA Only publisher counterparts.
When looking at fully OA journals, it appears that publisher type, rather than journal type, is a better predictor of journal size.

How the situation has changed over time

Figure 2 shows how the situation has evolved.

We can see that the large difference in average journal size discussed above hasn’t always been the case. Average fully OA journal sizes of Mixed Model publishers are shown in grey (the left-side of each pair of bars), and those of OA Only publishers in orange.

Fully OA journals from OA Only publishers have always been larger than those from Mixed Model ones.
A decade or so ago the difference was small, but journals from OA Only publishers have grown exponentially over the last few years.
The jump in OA Only publisher journal size around 2012 was driven by PLOS One really taking off, against a background of relatively few titles at that time. As more OA Only publisher titles came out, the averages fell back slightly even though output was growing.

Conclusion

The scaling of fully OA journals shouldn’t be surprising. Unencumbered by physical print constraints, digital journals can simply publish more papers to meet demand – assuming the publisher workflows can keep up.

The economics of OA publishing support this too. As the publisher publishes more papers, income follows directly. The paper is the basic unit of economic output. Contrast this with a subscription journal, where greater throughput means more cost and less margin (surplus) until the publisher can increase prices. The journal is the basic unit of economic output, so the main way to justify greater subscription prices is to publish more journals and sell larger collections. The economics of fully OA journals favor growth in journal size, but those of journals relying on subscription income inhibit growth.

However, it appears that publisher type, rather than journal type, is a better predictor of journal size. Whatever the journal’s economics – and whether the organization is for profit or not – it seems that Mixed Model publishers continue to publish fully OA journals of similar sizes to their other journal types. OA Only publishers have historically published slightly larger journals, but the size of their journals has really taken off over the last decade.

It appears that Mixed Model publishers continue apply their tried and trusted subscription thinking to their fully OA journals. This means that they need to create more and more journals to keep up with demand, with all the overhead that implies. Meanwhile, the new kids on the block have no such qualms. Why publish more journals when you can simply publish more stuff?

Digital Transformation (DX) in Education

Thu, 04 May 2023 18:52:00 GMT

What is DX in education?

For publishers, courseware developers, and technology providers, the need for digital transformation (DX) in education creates opportunities and prompts innovations to support students, faculty, and academic institutions – across all stages of learning. DX expands beyond the move of content online to that of adopting technologies for curriculum delivery or improved efficiency. For an academic institution, it is a decisive strategic direction with a defined set of iterative steps with the goal of increasing their value, reputation, and sustainability through enhanced learner outcomes. With its role continuing to rise in importance, DX underpins the progression of higher education.

Addressing DX in support of education is not new, yet the prevalence of attention and investments continues to accelerate, especially on the heels of the pandemic. EDUCAUSE , a non-profit association and leading voice for the use of information technology (IT) in higher education, issued a 2020 study entitled, Driving Digital Transformation in Higher Education, which reported that 67% of leaders across higher education IT believe that DX has become more important in the past 2 years, with an additional 31% seeing it just as important as it was two years ago, highlighting that DX across the education spectrum is well underway.

DX fundamentally focuses on providing accessibility to desired learning resources, coupled with technology to enhance the student experience, thereby making learning more personalized, advancing teaching and collaboration, and enabling enhanced engagement and understanding through increasingly interactive and immersive approaches. A host of new technologies and innovations continue to impact educational outcomes including: refinement of online and remote learning, nano and adaptive learning approaches, learner-based digital analytics and performance metrics, immersive and simulated learning via augmented and virtual reality, advanced connectivity and collaboration, and an increased influx of artificial intelligence.

Understanding how the combination of content and technology supports curricula, learning objectives, and learning efficiency and effectiveness is an important strategic imperative for publishers and developers. To understand how your organization can support DX in education, we offer a short list of considerations:

DX is strategic, not operational. Does your organization understand where DX fits into your academic customers’ strategic objectives? Are conversations happening across the institution – with academic and curriculum leadership, faculty, library, along with learners – to best understand needs and identify opportunities, challenges, and barriers?
Learner outcomes are central. What are the core learning objectives for your academic customers? Where do they see gaps with student outcomes? How is the institution transitioning to support today’s - and tomorrow’s - learners? Where do they see challenges with current educational resources?
DX in support of education must evolve. Does your organization have clear knowledge of current learning needs, but also understand the road ahead? How are you supporting academic customers through points of transition and change? How are your education products, platforms, and services meeting the needs of tomorrow’s learners?

What is the market experience?

To shine additional light on the evolving education landscape and the direct impact of DX, Delta Think spoke with individuals on the front line about their experiences:

Dr. Jonathan Wisco , Associate Professor & Director of the Laboratory for Translational Anatomy of Degenerative Diseases and Developmental Disorders, Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology at Boston University (BU) School of Medicine, whose recent work was instrumental in the re-engineering of BU’s medical curriculum, and
Brian Moore , Director of Online Learning, Assessment, Examinations & Curriculum Planning at the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons (AAOS), lead for AAOS’s residency online learning platform – Resident Orthopedic Core Curriculum (ROCK)

Delta Think: With the evolving move to digital content and education platforms across the academic landscape, what do you see as some of the most important benefits for your learners?

Dr. Wisco: “Digital content has been available for some time, so accessibility has been dependent on whether students have internet access and an electronic device that is updated enough to view and interact with the content. Content that runs on a flexible platform is best since it will run on any type of device. Accessibility for students and faculty alike is key.”
Brian Moore: “A key advantage for our learners is the ease and speed of access. Prior to our digital transition in 2017, learners would have had to wait for the book, video, or DVD-ROM. As a result, we’ve moved from an intentional, pre-mediated purchase to a resource utilized in their day-to-day. With technology now underpinning the learning environment, we also have the ability to crosslink content sources, curate content to cover particular subject areas, along with the ability to keep it up to date – all of which bring efficiency and increased effectiveness to our learners.”

Delta Think: Conversely, from your vantage point, what have been the primary challenges for your institution/organization with its digital transformation?

Dr. Wisco: “The cost and the ability for educators to adjust to a digital world, not just to disseminate interactive content, but how to utilize it to its full potential as part of learning activities and assessment. Cost is by far the biggest challenge. Students prefer free resources but will pay under duress to buy resources that will help them succeed on their assessments.”
Brian Moore: “Prioritizing content migration. When we first launched the ROCK, everyone across the organization wanted to be a part of this new ‘delivery channel.’ Being intentional about what we moved and in what order aided in our success. Similarly, having a clear development strategy driven by a thorough assessment of the market’s needs was essential. And, don’t underestimate maintenance – you can’t leave online content static; it needs refreshing to stay relevant for today’s learners.”

Delta Think: Knowing that you and your organizations are on the path of digital transformation in support of education, what advice would you offer to peers who have yet to head in this direction?

Dr. Wisco: “As an educator, I would say working with a coach or mentor to help you navigate through the process! Leverage the learnings of others and understand that change is challenging.”
Brian Moore: “It takes time! Budget more in terms of time and resources to implement – even if you have assets ready to go, it takes time to learn new systems, build new competencies. It’s new to your staff, processes, and culture.”

How can Delta Think help you?

Delta Think has helped publishers, societies, technology companies, start-ups and others find their place in this rapidly transforming education ecosystem. We collaborate with our clients using proven methodologies to define actionable, customer-driven strategies across content and product development, commercial infrastructure, and operations. Our experience across the education landscape – from undergraduate and graduate-level through to professional development, licensure, and certification – is your opportunity. We’d love to share more about what we are seeing and hearing in the world of education and how you can learn to thrive in this fast-moving landscape. Contact us today to discuss an education-based project customized to satisfy your specific organizational objectives and budget.

Want to hear more?

Join Dr. Wisco and Brian Moore, along with several of today’s early learners on May 16th at 11am EDT for the upcoming webinar: HOW HAS DIGITAL EDUCATION IMPACTED HOW WE LEARN, TEACH, & RESEARCH? The session is part of Silverchair Technologies Platform Strategies 2023: Strategies Spotlight series. The webinar will be co-moderated by Jake Zarnegar, Silverchair’s Chief Client Strategy Officer, and Diane Harnish, Director of Delta Think’s Education Practice. Register today!

News & Views: Open Access Charges – Popular Price Bands Become More Expensive

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 12:53:00 GMT

Last month , we looked at the headline price increases. This month, we look at spreads of prices and price optimization. In the following months, we will look at how the competitive landscape is evolving.

Each year we survey the list Article Processing Charges (APCs) of a sample of major and significant publishers. Covering over 18,000 titles, and going back to 2016, our data set represents one of the most comprehensive reviews of open access pricing.

Background

Market-wide headline price changes mask important nuances. We have discussed previously that the most important nuance lies in the spread of prices within a given publisher’s portfolio. For example, if the bulk of a publisher’s journals lie towards the lower end of its pricing, with just a few journals priced at the high end, the average (mean) price will be higher than most authors pay.

The following figures show how the spread of prices plays out in the market across our sample of publishers. The figures are outlines of histograms, showing how many titles sit in various price bands over the seven successive years of data we have curated. The red line shows the most recent year’s prices. The lines become greener as they go further back in time.

Hybrid Prices

The spread of price bands for hybrid journals is shown in Figure 1 below.

The overall spread of prices has remained relatively constant over time.

A few years ago, in 2019-20, the most popular price band shifted slightly towards the lower end of the market and remained there for a few years. However, in 2021-22 it moved back up to its historic highs and remains there.
The very highest prices increased three years ago, when high-impact journals started offering hybrid options. (For clarity, the chart combines the very highest APCs into one band on the right-hand side.)
The curves either side of the peak are becoming shallower, suggesting increasing numbers of journals at price bands adjacent to the most popular one. The height of the peak has reduced, suggesting that the total number of journals has not changed significantly, and that we are seeing a movement in price bands of existing journals. Numbers of mid-high-priced journals show the largest increase. This will have the effect of increasing average prices paid, as higher APCs are becoming more prevalent.

Fully OA Prices

The fully OA landscape is shown in Figure 2.

The data suggest that the number of fully OA journals and their average prices continue to increase.

A few years ago (green lines), there was a double hump in the curve, suggesting two popular price bands. Over the intervening three years, the bands had merged into what amounts to a broad range of prices, although this year we see the double peak appear again.
The width of the curve under the peak has widened, suggesting that the spread of the popular price bands is increasing.
The height of the curve has increased at the same time, illustrating that we are seeing an increase in the total number of fully OA journals. The curve to the right of the peak is becoming shallower, which – as with hybrid journals – will have the effect of increasing average prices paid.

(Note: the chart does not show journals without APC. Subscribers can filter the chart options to include these journals in a chart.)

Conclusion

While headline and outlying price changes are important general indicators, they do not necessarily shift the market on their own. Changes in the spread and emphasis of popular price bands play a key role too. It is the aggregate effect of these changes, as illustrated in the figures above, that enables a better understanding of how the market is shifting.

We are seeing an increasing spread of popular price bands. These are skewed slightly to the higher end of the pricing spectrum, and average prices paid will continue to increase.

Per-APC information is useful in a wider context too. Even where deals are calculated based on bundles, they are often set by discounting from list APCs – especially where publication activity exceeds agreed caps. Similarly, understanding revenues generated per paper is important to calculate thresholds for journal flips or for launching and sustaining a Subscribe to Open (S2O) model.

Studying individual journal list APCs remains foundational for understanding pricing across all OA business models.

How Diverse Are Your Publications?

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 19:00:00 GMT

What Problem Were We Trying to Solve for our Client?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become priorities for organizations as they strive increasingly to be sensitive to the needs of their community and to provide solutions on topics of primary importance to their constituents. Any organization that wishes to be successful in today’s market needs to consider DEI as an important component of their current and future strategy.

But how does an organization go about building a baseline or foundation from which to set goals and improve the DEI of their portfolio?

To understand where your organization should be in your DEI makeup and efforts, you must start by benchmarking current state. One of Delta Think’s scholarly publisher clients recently decided to do just that – pursue a project with us to understand and benchmark the underlying demographic makeup of their authors and other contributors to their portfolio as a starting point to implement processes and procedures that ensure they are always working toward a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community.

What were the Goals & Objectives?

The project goal was to develop a foundational understanding of the demographic makeup of the organization’s portfolio and offer a path forward to set organizational goals to maintain DEI efforts for their publications into the future.

Delta Think and the client set out to collect and analyze demographic data for all its publications to achieve the following more detailed goals:

Based on author information in its editorial workflow systems, identify gender, race/ethnicity, and geographic information for authors, reviewers, editors, and editorial advisory board members for each partner journal, over the last three years.
Provide a comprehensive data analysis report for each publication, including an overview of gender, race/ethnicity, and geographic findings for each publication/editorial team. Benchmark these findings against broader averages for STEM demographic data as a baseline for comparison purposes.
Develop recommendations for setting goals and implementing best practices around collecting/storing the demographic data going forward as well as organizational and/or public reporting/sharing of data.

The key here was to establish data that would allow the client to understand their baseline DEI makeup and build goals going forward.

What Methodology was Deployed?

Collecting opt-in data from the community is the most accurate solution. However, efforts to do so have proved slow, time-consuming, and not statistically valid in early days. This is the method of choice going forward, but a quick solution for establishing a baseline has great value, as organizations are ramping up to collect and store the opt-in data and accumulate a large enough sample set to be accurate and useful. In the interim, a method that allows organizations to establish a baseline using an automated data analysis system can provide the foundation needed to set starting goals and measure success.

We first worked with the client to generate activity lists for all their publications - lists of authors, reviewers, board members, and editors were gathered, consolidated, normalized, cleaned, and readied for analysis. For this client, we started with 500,000 ‘person/activity’ records, which reduced down to 200,000 unique records after cleaning/deduping.

After some research, the commercial specialist software Namsor was chosen to estimate likely gender and ethnicity based on patterns in the names. Namsor was established more than 10 years ago, cited in 162 papers since 2016, and used by one of the largest international scholarly publishers for their biannual Gender reports. Namsor also utilizes an international outlook and bases its classification algorithms (rules) on global data sets; most alternative suppliers systems are based on US name data, or much narrower samples.

The software was used to identify likely gender and ethnicity to be applied across the journals and portfolio, and so produce data about the program by analyzing name and country and returning categories and probabilities of a good match based on a number of factors. Manually and self-declared information was included and allowed the team to assess automated results and calculate accuracy.

An anonymized results set was produced to allow safe reporting. Data was never assigned back to the individuals studied; it was only used in the aggregate to show baselines and trends.

Finally, it was crucial to manage expectations and understand the limits of the automated methods used. The software only estimates a likely categorization of metadata, which can be used as a proxy to form a view of contributors. It is not trying to classify people. The final method was arrived at in consultation with our client, to consider issues such as non-binary gender identification and appropriate classifications of ethnicity.

What did we find out and how will it be used?

Through this process, the client achieved their goals. Delta Think was able to identify the DEI makeup of their portfolio, compare it to current industry trends, and, most importantly, provide the client with intelligence they could use to establish goals for improvement going forward. The sample below is an example of the type of data and analysis this project yielded for the client. We also provided multiple visualizations to compare individual journals and collections of journals with the portfolio-wide averages. These can all be used to identify strengths and weaknesses and develop strategies to do more of what is working, less of what is not, and use this information to track and trend the impact of change.

How can Delta Think help you?

In order to set targets and strategies for improving the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness of your portfolio, you must have a starting point upon which to base your goals and track impact of change. Delta Think can help you establish that starting point and set goals based on industry best practices when developing your longer term solution around self-reported/opt-in data and secure tracking.

Contact us today to discuss a DEI project customized to satisfy your specific organizational challenges, goals, and budget.

News & Views Webinar: Open Access Charges – Continued Consolidation and Increases

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 10:45:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our March News & Views companion online discussion forum!

Each year, Delta Think provides an annual update on APC Costs and the trends that affect them. This webinar will cover highlights from the March 2023 issue of News & Views .

If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

News & Views: Open Access Charges – Continued Consolidation and Increases

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 12:35:00 GMT

The latest analysis of list prices suggests prices in general are increasing, although averages for some publishers have fallen. This month, we examine the headlines and variations that lie underneath them. In the following months we will look at spreads of prices and optimization and how the competitive landscape is evolving.

Headline Changes

To compare like for like, we analyze non-discounted, CC BY charges. Overall, list prices continue to increase slowly:

Two years ago, high-impact journals began to offer OA options, which led to above-average price increases. This year, like last year, sees overall price increases following their underlying averages.
The highest price point for fully OA journals remains at $8,900. We now see a couple of dozen or so fully OA (“gold”) journals charging above $5,300, whereas this was the highest price for all but two last year.
The highest price for a hybrid journal is now $11,690, up from $11,390 last year.
Outliers aside, fully OA journal APCs are less expensive than hybrid, averaging around 59% of hybrid average APCs. Last year it was 57%; the year before 58%.
The average hybrid APC has increased by 4.2%, compared with an average 3.5% increase last year ¹ .
The average fully OA APC has increased by 4.3%, compared with an average 4.1% increase last year ² .

Variations by Discipline

The market-wide averages are just that: averages. They mask important variations:

The chart above picks out 4 of the 200 subjects we can track to illustrate the variations we see by subject. The yellow bars (left side of each pair) show average APCs of fully OA journals in the subject; the blue bars (right side of each pair) show averages for hybrid journals.

We see a big variation. For example, Geophysics averages amongst the cheapest fully OA APCs, which is less than one third of Agricultural Biotechnology, which is amongst the most expensive. For hybrids, Communications Engineering is amongst the cheapest, at under half of the average for Multidisciplinary journals, which are the most expensive.

Subject AND journal type both make a difference. For example, Geophysics may offer the cheapest fully OA prices, but it is above average for hybrid APCs.

Type of Publisher

The last few years have seen a rapid expansion in born-OA publishers, so we also examined whether their pricing is different to that of the incumbents.

Publishers that only publish fully open journals (the group of bars to the left) have historically charged lower APCs than their mixed-model siblings (shown on the right). However, the fully OA prices of the OA-only publishers have caught up over the last few years and are now slightly higher than the fully OA prices of mixed-model publishers. Although not shown here, our data allows us to separate out fully OA imprints (such as BioMed Central) from their parent publishers. These have followed similar trends to the prices of OA-only publishers but are slightly cheaper than their OA-only siblings.

We can also see the differential between higher hybrid (in blue) and fully OA prices.

Conclusion

APCs continue to rise but have settled to their long-term trends after the entrance of the expensive high-impact journals to the market a couple of years ago. Last year they rose below the average level of inflation in many countries.

Simple averages mask variations, and we see some big variations between APCs. However, the biggest predictor of price remains whether a journal is fully OA or hybrid. Additionally, while on an individual APC basis there is some overlap between the highest fully OA prices and the lowest hybrid prices, on the whole fully OA journals remain around 40% cheaper than their hybrid siblings. It also appears that born-OA prices have caught up to, and now slightly exceed, the prices of the fully OA journals in mixed model publishers’ portfolios.

A journal’s field plays a major part too, with prices showing very different averages depending on subject.

To understand the pricing of journals – whether you are setting them or paying them – it’s therefore vital to drill into the detail.

Our database tracks 18,000 prices, tracked across 200 subjects, including roll-ups into broader fields (such as Medicine or Nursing) and broad disciplines (such as Health Sciences or Life Sciences). With dozens of visualizations overlaying the data, it’s easy to put your situation in the context of the wider landscape at a glance. Please get in touch to find out more.

1In March 2022 we cited this as 3.5%. The 0.1 percentage point difference is because we have a slightly larger sample of journals this year compared with last.

2In March 2022 we cited this as 4.1%. The 0.2 percentage point difference is because we have a slightly larger sample of journals this year compared with last.

News & Views: Open Access Books

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 13:00:00 GMT

This month we examine how the growth of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) has developed over the last 18 months. We look at some key statistics from the Directory and examine the continuing growth in OA Books.

Background

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) tracks academic books, which “ must be made available under an open access licence and be subjected to independent and external peer review prior to publication”. It is a useful proxy for how the OA books market is developing.

We have previously analyzed how it was growing and its composition. Around 18 months later, we update our analysis to see how things have changed.

Growth of the DOAB

The DOAB now claims to have well over 60,000 titles, and continues to grow. The chart below shows how the index has grown.

The chart above shows the cumulative number of titles and publishers growing over time.

The number of titles has doubled since our last analysis, to just over 60,000 from around 500 publishers1.
There was a 17% year-on-year growth in the number of titles from 2021 to 2022.
The rate of growth is slowing: The 5-year CAGR from 2017-2022 is around 36%.
There are now 525 publishers registered in the index, up from around 490 at the time of our last analysis.
As with the number of indexed titles, the number of publishers continues to grow, but at a slowing rate.
Our previous analysis excluded titles with an unspecified Indexed year. Our current analysis includes all titles, using their publication year as a proxy for their indexed year if the latter is not specified.

Leading publishers using the DOAB

The chart below analyses the larger contributors of data to the DOAB.

The figure above shows the cumulative number of titles added to the index over time by the top 10 publishers.

The books market is consolidated: The top 10 publishers account for around 48% of total output.
Consolidation has been increasing, with the top publishers taking increasing share over time. From 2018, the few larger publishers have increasingly started to dominate.
Around 16% of the records do not specify when the book was added to the index. (These are shown in the right-most column.) This speaks to some issue either with publishers’ deposition of metadata or the indexing itself. A subset of the larger publishers covers a disproportionally large share of these unknown years.

DOAB Largest Publishers Analyzed by License Type

Publishers deposit information about books retrospectively.

The chart above analyses share of output by year of book publication, rather than the year in which a book’s metadata was indexed.

Again we see a consolidated market. For titles published in 2022, the 10 largest publishers together account for around 43% of the index.
Consolidation by year of publication has slowly increased until 2021, but is showing signs of reversing. It’s too soon to tell if this is a reversal in trend or just a one-off.
Across all years, IntechOpen remains the largest publisher (9.6% share), followed by MDPI (8.5%) and then de Gruyter (4.8%).
Another 595 or so publishers lie outside the top 10.

Conclusion

The DOAB continues to see strong growth, and continues to outpace the growth in journals. Over the 5 years to 2022, its CAGR was 34%, compared with 22% for OA journal articles.

Growth has previously been driven by larger organizations coming on board, plus a growing long tail of publishers joining OAPEN. However, with the growth in the numbers of publishers slowing, it seems that the index is increasingly reflecting the underlying growth in the market, rather than a growth in the adoption of its infrastructure.

Books show less consolidation than journals. The top 10 OA book publishers cover around 45% of book output, while the top 10 OA journal publishers account for around two thirds of OA journal output. This may partly reflect the greater maturity of the journals market. However, it’s likely to be a systemic reflection of how books scale differently.

Users of our OADAT can explore the data in much greater depth, including drilling into the usage of licenses, subjects, and languages.

We will run further analysis of some of these other areas later in the year.

1Methodological note: Our analysis of DOAB metadata returns totals slightly lower than the DOAB’s own headlines, as we filter out book chapters, records with sparsely populated metadata, and have only plotted items until the end of 2022.

News & Views: OASPA Open Access License Types

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 14:19:00 GMT

At this time of year, we review patterns in the licenses attached to open access publications. This year, we will look at the changing balance of license use among OASPA members and explore how different publishers place difference emphasis on different license types.

Introduction

Each year OASPA surveys its member organizations to gather information about the volumes of output they publish in their fully OA and hybrid journals, under various license types. We’re delighted to be working with OASPA on its survey again this year. We process the raw data into consistent categories, normalize publisher names, and create visualizations of the data over time. We also produce a yearly blog post for OASPA, outlining some of the results.

Our underlying analysis of the OASPA data covers much more than we can fit in their one blog post, so we explore the data a little more here. Subscribers to our OA Data and Analytics tool can explore the data further still. It provides a complementary view into our market-wide analysis.

As we examined last year , Creative Commons (CC) licenses have become the de facto standard for open access publications. They account for over 98% of OASPA members’ current OA output, and almost 94% of OA output indexed in Crossref. We therefore focus on CC licenses in our analysis here.

Growth in OASPA’s Coverage

The volume of output produced by OASPA members has grown significantly in recent years. The charts below examine this.

The charts show numbers of articles published in fully OA journals (left), and OA articles in hybrid journals (right), color-coded by license type. The most permissive licenses are at the bottom (CC BY), through to least permissive at the top, except for the tiny amount of CC0.

The volume of publications from OASPA continues to grow. Just under 4M articles were published by members in the period 2000-2021.
Just under 1M of the cumulative total were published in 2021, representing a growth of around 46% over the previous year and around one quarter of total recorded output.
The total number of articles reported by members has more than doubled since 2018, and grown around 20x over the last decade.
Publications in fully OA journals continue to dominate output, at around 4x that in hybrid.
CC BY licenses (Creative Commons attribution only) dominate. They account for almost three quarters of members’ total output, and for 81% of their output in fully OA journals.

Changing make-up of membership

The growth in OASPA members’ output in 2021 is higher than our estimate of the market’s underlying growth in OA output of 32%. This is most likely driven by new members joining OASPA in 2021/2022 and adding their data retrospectively to the overall numbers. We estimate new members boosted output of OASPA members measured over all time by roughly 25%.

OASPA membership covers a different sample of publishers to our market estimates, so comparing growth between the two is not a like-for-like comparison. However, we can see how OASPA’s evolving membership influences the composition of its output.

The chart above compares snapshots of license usage by OASPA members totalled across all years they supplied data for (dating back to 2000 for some). Each bar represents the results of the survey conducted in the year indicated. Surveys include cumulative data up to the full year before they were conducted. So, e.g., the 2022 survey (right-most bar) covers output up to end of 2021.

Patterns in use had seen only a slight movement up until the most recent survey:

CC BY licenses dominate, growing slightly to just over 86% of output by 2021.
CC BY-NC licenses (non-commercial use) grew slightly to just over 9% of output by 2021.
CC BY-NC-ND (non-commercial, no derivatives) share fell back to 3.5% by 2021.

2022’s data then shows more notable changes:

CC BY fell back to “only” 81% of output, having been displaced by more restrictive licenses.
CC BY-NC fell back slightly to 8.2%
CC BY-NC-ND has more than doubled to 9.3% share.

Other license types remain negligible, at less than one percent share.

Conclusion

Comparisons between OASPA survey data and Delta Think’s market data are not strictly like-for-like as each represents different samples and methods. However, they set a useful context.

In 2021, OASPA members published around 1M OA articles, which compares with our market-wide estimate of 1.2M. With all four of the largest corporates as members, and given our highly consolidated market, this large overlap is not surprising.

The focus of OASPA’s members is, of course, reflected in their use of licenses. Three quarters of OASPA members’ output falls under CC BY, compared with around 55% of the total OA market. The three most-used licenses by far are CC BY, BY-NC, and BY-NC-ND. They account for over 99% of OASPA members’ output between them, compared with around three quarters of the wider OA market.

New members have joined OASPA over time and have retrospectively added data. Their different approaches to licensing therefore influence the trends we see. Born-OA publishers largely use the most permissive CC BY license and have been the historical bedrock of OASPA membership. Springer Nature and Wiley have both acquired big born-OA publishers, and Springer Nature has its born OA megajournals. The combination of all this has likely been a big factor in tilting historical OASPA output towards high levels of CC BY. With Elsevier joining in 2022, we now see things tilting back towards market averages, and a greater prominence of the more restrictive CC licenses. (It’s also interesting to note that Elsevier has now embraced Creative Commons licenses, and its own license now appears largely reserved for archive content.)

As more publishers – especially the larger societies – explore moves to becoming OA, it will be interesting to see if OASPA’s membership continues to grow, and whether we’ll see the changes in 2022 become the start of a trend, or just a temporary realignment.

News & Views: The Nelson Memo – Charleston Perspectives

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:56:00 GMT

The Nelson Memo – Charleston Perspectives

By Meg White

The annual November pilgrimage to Charleston, SC made its post-COVID return last month. While many topics were discussed, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) provided a last moment addition to the planned agenda, with the August 25th publication of a memorandum (aka the Nelson Memo ) and accompanying report “Economic Landscape of Federal Public Access Policy."

There were three sessions during the Conference that focused specifically on the OSTP Memo, all taking slightly different formats and perspectives: The Nelson Memo: A Tipping Point for Open Access Science in the U.S. , Ask the Chefs: The OSTP Memo , and the OSTP Public Access Guidance: Headlines, Details, and Impact . In this issue of News and Views, we’ll illuminate some important themes and takeaways from the Charleston discussions.

Theme #1: It’s Bigger, by A LOT

No matter how you define “big”, the Nelson Memo is bigger than its predecessor in scope and content. The headline from the new OSTP-issued policy is the elimination of the existing embargo, which currently allows a 12-month post-publication delay in public access to publications based on federally- funded research. The Nelson Memo also extends to all federal agencies and includes not only scientific data, but also “… peer-reviewed book chapters, editorials, and peer-reviewed conference proceedings published in other scholarly outlets that result from federally funded research.”

The “Tipping Point” panel agreed that while there are some existing standards in place to support public access to journal articles, there is little to no existing infrastructure to support the data requirements of the guidance at scale.

Daniel Sepulveda suggested that compliance by smaller agencies would be accomplished by leveraging processes established and built by larger agencies. Essentially, agencies for whom research is not a core function in terms of mission and priorities would simply ride the coattails of larger agencies that allocate more resources to fund research. This would include processes and support for more traditional research outputs such as journal articles, but would also extend to data and other content included in the expanded scope of the Nelson Memo.

Theme #2: Born in the U.S.A.

Looking at “Open Science” initiatives outside of the U.S. can provide context for this guidance, its attributes, and how it fits into the larger landscape.

Robert Kiley offered his perspective from his vantage point as one of the main supporters and implementers of Plan S in Europe. While advocating for Open Science to speed innovation and discovery, he cautioned against replacing “one inequitable system with another” and expressed his position that the Nelson Memo “provides a prime opportunity for the U.S. to accelerate the transition to full immediate open access, but also to play a leadership convening role in determining how publishing can become transparent, equitable and sustainable.”

Theme #3: One Size Does Not Fit All

Implications for publishers were front and center during the “Headlines, Details, and Impact” panel. The speakers agreed that publisher response to the Nelson Memo would likely vary widely based on multiple factors, including mission, size of portfolio, and subject area(s). Lori Carlin pointed out that market and customer intimacy has never been more critical and understanding the needs of your readers and authors must be top-of-mind when formulating future strategy and processes. Some of this information will be quantitative, saying “Publishers need to understand what their portfolio covers and who is funding their author’s research … what is your OA uptake now? … what is the culture of your community? … this is not one-size fits all.” Michael Clarke echoed Carlin, stating, “It’s [the impact] very much going to be dependent on the journal and the journal portfolio. Different journals have more or less funded research from different funding agencies.”

Theme #4: The Devil is in the Details

The Nelson Memo simply outlines the expectation that the agencies themselves will put plans and processes into place to ensure compliance with the new guidance. These details, large and small, were debated at varying levels by all three panels in Charleston and promise to drive conversations and decision-making well into 2025.

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, speaking as part of the Scholarly Kitchen’s annual Charleston Q&A “Ask the Chefs” roundtable, noted that, since researching funding in higher education is an agreement between the funding agency and the institution, universities will be required to have mechanisms in place to ensure compliance with grant requirements. Will compliance with agency public access policies be part of future grant agreements between federal agencies and institutions that accept federal research funds? On the funder side of the compliance issue, Rick Anderson and Jerry Sheehan had a spirited exchange during the “Headlines, Details, and Impact” session about the resources required for federal agencies to ensure compliance … at the time of award and throughout the research process.

All OSTP-focused panels and associated audience Q&A zeroed in on numerous small but significant details mandated but not specifically defined by the guidance. The Nelson Memo makes no statement on which version of an article or other data must be made publicly available or where this content must be made available/hosted. It does not discuss who is responsible for compliance or potential repercussions for non-compliance. It makes no comment on what re-use licenses, if any, apply to publicly available research outputs.

Bottom line, the Nelson Memo outlines the “what” and the “when” but intentionally leaves the “how” up to the agencies, and by extension, the larger ecosystem(s) that supports the creation and dissemination of scholarly research.

Funding: The Elephant in the Room

Funding for the systems needed to support the requirements outlined in the Nelson Memo was top-of-mind in all three sessions. There was generally agreement on the increase in scope, but less on how to fund the infrastructure needed to support the expanded mandates of the new guidance.

As context, Delta Think’s 2022 OA Market Sizing Update documented that the global OA publishing landscape is estimated to be $1.6B, and Delta Think projects a 2021-2024 CAGR of 13% in OA output and 12% in OA market value, but these figures refer only to journal articles, just one research output included in the new guidance.

During the “Tipping Point” session Sepulveda used his extensive experience as a policy advisor to several senators to give an overview of how the U.S. appropriation process works, with various agencies petitioning the Congress for funding to support their activities and initiatives. Through appropriation, the agencies can request additional funds to support implementation of the OSTP guidance. Sheehan echoed this theme, commenting that “wouldn’t it be great if the NIH is able to get an increase in its budget for research.” So, one scenario is that additional federal dollars, provided by US taxpayers, are the source of funding needed to ensure public access. Rick Anderson suggested a related potential solution, suggesting that publication becomes part of the research process and therefore funding publication fees does not take money away from research. Other scenarios discussed in Charleston were institutions contributing resources, either via the library or on behalf of researchers, akin to existing “transformative” or “read and publish” agreements. It was also suggested that publishers absorb some or all of these additional costs as part of the traditional publication process, leveraging scale across their s larger portfolios.

There were multiple conversations concerning whether there is enough money in the system currently and simply re-aligning how these funds are allocated could enable processes and systems to support compliance. However, given the scope of the Nelson Memo, it is dubious at best to envision that its mandates can be fully met by the existing infrastructure in place, including and perhaps most critically, funding. Danielle Cooper echoed this concern as part of the “Tipping Point” panel, pointing out that the memo “signals the prioritization of open [data] sharing over costs … the idea that it’s OK for something to cost more and that not a lot of thought has been put into that yet.”

Stay Tuned

The level of effort associated with the creation and implementation of processes and infrastructure needed to support Nelson Memo mandates can be described as daunting. Carlin summed up what is perhaps the most critical component needed to ensure that scholarly publishing continues the march toward an open, seamless, connected, and sustainable future: collaboration, “This [discussion] points to the need for collaboration,” she said. “There are many stakeholders involved in this process and we all need to be working together to find the best solutions and options … it is not one solution or option across the board. But it is something that publishers, libraries, researchers, and funders need to come together and be talking about to see how we all move forward.”

Want to develop your Open Access strategy or talk more about the OSTP Memo and its impact on your organization? Get in touch!

This article is © 2022 Delta Think, Inc. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . Please do get in touch if you want to use it in other contexts – we’re usually pretty accommodating.

News & Views Webinar: 2022 Market Sizing Update

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 05:03:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our October News & Views companion online discussion forum!

Each year, Delta Think’s OA Market Sizing analyzes the value of the open access journals market. This is the revenue generated by providers or the costs incurred by buyers of content. This webinar will cover highlights from the 2022 News & Views as well as potential impact scenarios based on the August OSTP Memo.

If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

News & Views: Open Access Market Sizing Update 2022

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 12:00:00 GMT

Each year, Delta Think's OA Market Sizing analyzes the value of the open access journals market. This is the revenue generated by providers or the costs incurred by buyers of content. We have seen two strong years of growth in the wake of COVID-19, as well as a shift in publishers’ focus in the wake of Plan S and exchange rate effects. Together these have compounded OA’s underlying strong growth and suggest a systemic acceleration in the growth of OA which we are now able to observe. We estimate the OA market to have accelerated ahead of our previous expectations, to around $1.6bn in 2021, growing to over $2bn in 2024 if current trends continue.

Headline findings

Updates to key industry indexes are released over the summer, and we combine these with benchmarks obtained from our publisher survey to size the market. We updated our models in 2022, which are examined in greater depth within our Open Access Data & Analytics Tool . Our revised models suggest the following headlines for market sizing:

We estimate that the OA market grew to around $1.6bn in 2021.

The 32% increase over 2020 is significantly larger than the growth in the underlying scholarly journals market, which is typically low to mid-single digit. It is larger than expected for the OA market.
Growth in OA will remain above that of the underlying scholarly journals market, although we anticipate both will slow in 2022 before resume underlying trends. The open access market is on target to be over $2bn in 2024.
Around 45% of all scholarly articles were published as paid-for open access in 2021, accounting for just under 15% of the total journal publishing market value. (Note that this year, we have changed our method of calculating total market, which will mean our figures for market share will increase by one or two percentage points).
We anticipate a 2021-2024 CAGR of 13% in OA output and 12% in OA market value.

A note about our method

The data sources change over time , so we restate our findings each year to reflect the latest data available. Even a few weeks’ difference in timing of analysis can make a significant difference in results.

We normally base our analysis on underlying trends to avoid misleading headlines resulting from short term fluctuations we see in the data. However, where there are exceptional off-trend events – as we witnessed with COVID-19 – we must incorporate them into our models. Last year we were cautious in our assumptions as we did not want to over-state what might have been a short-term blip. This year we can now see that high growth rates are persisting, so have revised our models to reflect this and be more aggressive.

Trends

The exceptional growth we saw in 2020 continued through 2021. Results from our survey and anecdotal feedback give mixed messages for 2022. Some publishers are expecting good growth to continue through 2022, albeit at slightly lower levels, while others expect a falling back and correction in 2022. The effects on underlying trends suggest that OA has systemically accelerated over the last two years, and we have revised our figures upwards accordingly.

COVID-19 has led to a significant increase in publishing activity, showing above-average volumes in 2020 and 2021.
Publishers have been increasingly focused on OA in the wake of Plan S. The recent OSTP policy announcement is likely to accelerate OA further.
The large corporates have seen very strong growth in OA activity. This will serve to accelerate the growth in the value of OA: the large publishers are able to harness economies of scale and resulting efficiencies to maximize revenue.
OA output in hybrid journals continues to be boosted more than other OA output.
Prices have increased.
Exchange rate fluctuations and the strong dollar have compounded the exceptional growth in publishing activity, increasing reported revenues further above long-term trends.
We may see a slowing of growth in 2022, as activities fall back to underlying trends, but we then expect strong growth to continue. The mid-term growth is likely to be 14%-15% in both volume and value. Long-term, the growth will likely slow as OA takes increasing share and begins to saturate the market. Growth in market value may remain stronger for longer, as prices increase.
Hybrid revenues realized per article published are higher than those published in fully OA journals. The gap appears to be fluctuating as the market is undergoing transition.
OA is increasingly delivered as part of mixed-model deals, combining read and publish elements. We try to model just the publish part of these when estimating OA value. However, publishers may include both when stating OA figures, and we anticipate that mixed model deals will increasingly be classified as OA when organizations report their figures.

Conclusion

In normal times, we see fluctuations in growth from one year to the next around a clear underlying trend. We usually focus on the underlying trend, so we avoid misleading headlines of explosive growth followed by collapse. Last year we saw that COVID-19 had led to an increase in publishing activity. We noted that it was too soon to tell if this was a one-off blip, or whether underlying trends were shifting.

This year it has become apparent that the exceptional growth in OA was more than a single-year event. It seems that the growth in OA has accelerated, and that the underlying trends are changing. Last year the high growth rates seemed exceptional, and we did not want to overstate their effects. This year they seem normal – or at least, less abnormal – so we can be bolder in our assumptions. This has resulted in our revising our figures upwards compared with previous estimates.

The law of averages suggests that the exceptionally high growth rates will fall back to underlying trends. However, it is too soon to tell if this will be a sharp correction, or whether things will gradually slow as OA takes increasing share and simply runs out of room to grow.

The underlying drivers of policy changes and of publishers’ responses to them remain in play. The macroeconomic situation and outlook have deteriorated since last year, but it is too soon to tell what effects it will have on academic and research funding, and therefore on our market.

As always, each organization’s situation is different. We work with organizations to analyze the impact of these trends on their portfolios. Subscribers to our OADAT tool can see detailed breakdowns of fully OA, hybrid, and other revenues, along with projections the coming years, and more detailed analyses and commentary about market drivers. Please get in touch if you want to know more.

News & Views: OSTP Memo – Modeling Market Impact

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 10:00:00 GMT

This month we look at the possible effects of the new OSTP Public Access policy on the value of the scholarly publishing market. We also suggest some ways that publishers can meet the challenges ahead.

Background

In August 2022, the US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced a new policy (“the Nelson memo”) covering the results of US federally-funded research. The previous policy (“the Holdren memo”) has been in effect since 2013, and mandated that the published results of research funded by large federal agencies is made publicly accessible after a maximum 12 month embargo. The new policy, which applies to all US agencies that fund research, specifies a zero-length embargo on articles and data, that content is machine-readable, and specific metadata directives. There are interim dates indicated for agencies to publish and implement their plans (dates vary according to the amount of federal funding the agency provides), but for all agencies, January 2026 is the latest the changes can go into effect.

The details of the policies have been discussed at length , so we will not explore the nuances further here. Our focus is to investigate if a move to zero-embargo public access may lead to falling subscription revenues, whatever the mechanism used. The hypothesis is that content will become available that is free and good enough to replace paywalled Versions of Record (VoR), and so demand for subscriptions will fall.

Scenarios

At this stage it is not possible to predict the specific approaches the various federal agencies will choose. The policy does not rule out publication in hybrid journals and the economic impact assessment discusses the notion of publication charges. Issues around licenses, manuscript types, and manuscript location, are left open as well as requirements around data.

The models below consider a general case: What might happen if “open” content in some form is good enough to replace subscriptions? And is there an upside if the newly open content were paid for in some way?

Taking our currently projected market value as a baseline, we look at how the value of the market might shift from the baseline under a few different scenarios. We explore what might happen to the market overall and what this might mean for a publisher in practice.

The effects of the policy are heavily influenced by the proportion of scholarly articles that fall under it. The OSTP’s Economic Impact Statement (issued along with its new policy) puts this proportion at between 6.7% and 9.1% of global output. Our own analysis suggests a figure between 6.6% and 7.2%. The differences depend (largely) on what is included in total scholarly output. We will take the average of their figures as a baseline for our market-wide analysis: 7.9%.

It’s important to note that the charts below must be read alongside the analysis that follows. We found that the mechanism behind the charts yields important insights for publishers who want to understand the effects for them.

Effects on Market Value

We chose three scenarios for the overall scholarly journals market, spanning our view on worst to best case, as illustrated in Figure 1. It is critical to remember that the intent of this analysis is to show the overall effect on the total market.

The chart above shows the relative difference between each of three scenarios and the projected market status quo. To illustrate, -1% on the chart means that the total market value (revenue for sellers, or costs to buyers) is 1% less that might otherwise be expected. Each scenario assumes that ALL papers arising from federally funded research (the 7.9% of global output noted above) are included in the scenario. We model a four-year S-shaped transition to 100% compliance from around 18 months after the policy’s 2026 start.

Scenario 1: Publication fees are paid for all affected papers; there is no effect on subscription revenues
This “best case” scenario is where researchers secure funds to pay publication charges to make papers open or public access. It assumes that the content remaining under the subscription models is sufficient to maintain subscription revenues.
This will lead to a small increase in overall market value, as the new OSTP policy drives bolt-on publication fees.
Scenario 2: Publication fees are not paid on affected papers; subscription revenues fall because of the zero embargo
This scenario (aka the “worst case” for publishers) assumes that publicly available papers – Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) or Version of Record (VoR) – are deemed good enough. Publishers must reduce subscription prices to reflect the increased proportion of content available free of charge.
This will lead to a decrease in total market value of around 3.5%.
Scenario 3: All affected papers are included in subscription fees, but subscription revenues fall to offset the openly available content
This combines the upside of Scenario 1 (new publication fees) with the downside of Scenario 2 (decline in subs).
Here, there is still a net reduction in market value of around 3%. The lower publication charges are outweighed by the loss of the higher priced subscription charges.

Effects on Publishers

Specific publishers will find their situation different to the broad market averages. One difference will be the share of their papers arising from US federally funded research. Delta Think has worked with publishers, predominantly US-based, where federally funded research accounts for 30-50% of their publications. A second difference is the size of the gap between the lower revenue generated per open access article, and the higher revenue generated per subscription access article. For many publishers, the difference is less than the market average. So as the balance of their publication output shifts towards OA, their subscription revenues won’t fall as quickly as market averages.

We ran three further scenarios looking at different proportions of papers affected. We based this on aggregated revenue per article data from our annual publisher survey. Could the smaller differences between OA and subscription revenues in our sample mitigate the effects of the larger proportions of papers affected?

The chart above shows additional variations of Scenario 3 from Figure 1, assuming ALL articles affected by the new OSTP policy attract publication fees, but that subscription revenues decline to offset them. The variable is the proportion of papers affected.

The new OSTP policy affects 9.1% of the publisher’s output.
This is the high end of the OSTP’s estimate of the US government-funded share of all scholarly output. It could be a reality for a large publisher, with an international author base.
It leads to a reduction in the publisher’s revenue of around 2%.
The new OSTP policy affects 15% of the publisher’s output.
Publishers with a tilt towards the US may find themselves dealing with this scenario.
The higher proportion of affected papers leads to higher reductions in revenue, of just under 4%.
The new OSTP policy affects 30% of the publisher’s output.
This could be a reality for a society publisher that relies heavily on US government-funded submissions.
The high proportion of affected papers leads to higher reductions in revenue, of just under 9%.

Other Factors

A few other important drivers are not immediately obvious from the charts:

The US’s share of global output is declining slowly: 1 percentage point or less per year, depending on the data sources used. Therefore, the effects of the OSTP policy reduce over time. (Which is why the charts head back towards the horizontal axis.)
Pricing policies are key. Understanding reduction in market value could help publishers to set price increases and help funders and buyers to understand likely cost implications. Publication fees can be optimized across a portfolio of journals and subscription prices raised further to offset softening revenues.
As the difference in revenues per article between OA and subscription narrows, then the effects become less profound. We have long noted that publication charges are likely to rise to achieve parity with subscriptions.
The models show revenue changes compounded over time. They don’t show annual revenue increases generated by increasing APC prices.

Conclusion

William Gibson’s famous quote has rarely been more apt: “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.” The market-wide effects of the OSTP policy may be modest at first glance, but the effects felt in practice will depend hugely on each publisher’s own circumstances.

The fundamental question for most, is at what threshold might subscriptions collapse? Or not? Could 10% of a subscription journal’s content (rounding the high OSTP number up) lead to mass subscription cancellation? What about 15% (if we then layer in Plan S )? Or 30% (which may be the reality for many societies)? Meanwhile, large publishers, with a global footprint of authors, may see fewer of their submissions affected. They may find modest price rises enough to counter small ill effects, especially if they already have well-developed open access portfolios. And born-open publishers, will, of course, see this as an opportunity. Your mileage may vary.

The OSTP’s mileage may vary too. Each agency will decide its specific requirements. Unlike Plan S, there is no mention of requirements related to Hybrid or license types or manuscript types. There is mention of metadata, which feeds speculation about Green. Researchers simply don’t want to scour the web for secondary versions at present. But could subscription revenues decline if the changes mean that “free and good enough” becomes readily discoverable through better search engines or aggregation services? Or would subscriptions be affected at all if AAMs cover agency policies, but researchers continue to prefer the VoR?

The answers lie in analyzing the specifics for your organization and planning a response. We chose a spread of scenarios here to illustrate what might happen for a range of different organizations. In practice, we work with publishers on a regular basis to tailor models to their situation and analyze the factors affecting them. Every publisher is different, and on close examination of their situation, they may find that things are not as bad as they may seem initially. Please contact Delta Think if you are interested in a custom analysis.

News & Views: Publishers and Market Consolidation – Part 2 of 2

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 13:07:00 GMT

This month we present the second part of some results of big data analysis of the scholarly publishing industry. We look at the latest data sources to tease out information about numbers of publishers and changing patterns in consolidation of the industry.

Background

At the start of 2022, the Open Alex data set was launched . It combines data from multiple sources, including the (now unsupported) Microsoft Academic Graph, Crossref, Unpaywall, the DOAJ, ORCID, and PubMed. It weighs in at over 1.6 terabytes, with several hundred million records covering papers, authors, institutions, and more. Analyzing it requires big data tools and techniques.

Delta Think is now using it ¹ to analyse the entire scholarly landscape. We utilize it to look at patterns across all journal access types, and it will inform our 2022 OA market sizing process. By way of illustration, we thought we’d look at what it can tell us about the basic structure of the scholarly publishing industry.

Consolidation and activity

Last month we examined the large degree of consolidation in journals publishing. We saw that 95% of publishers publish 10 journals or fewer, but account for barely one fifth of articles published. Meanwhile, half of total scholarly output is published by just 10 publishers, those with the largest numbers of journals.

We can further analyze the market’s consolidation by comparing annual growth rates in the numbers of publishers, journals and articles, as shown below.

The chart above shows the change in numbers compared with the previous year. The undulations in the lines are not uncommon when looking at annual changes. Activity does not always fall cleanly within calendar years. Changes on an annualized chart can therefore appear in fits and starts. However, by looking at the trends, some clear patterns emerge.

The numbers of publishers (in blue) grew more quickly in the mid-teens than before or since. This is consistent with the S-shaped curve in the numbers of publishers we noted last month. So it seems the market showed signs of fragmentation in the mid-teens, followed by consolidation more recently.
Growth in numbers of journals (in orange) accelerated until about 2017, then started to fall off. This happened in tandem with the slowing growth in the numbers of publishers.
The rate of growth in numbers of articles (in grey) seems to run counter to the trends above. On average it was flat (at around 5%-6%) until 2018/2019, but then it accelerated. We think much this is because of the unusually high levels of submission in the wake of COVID (as we discussed in our market sizing analysis last year).

Even allowing for the outlying effects of COVID – and a subsequent falling back towards trend – it seems that publication output is accelerating, while the growth in the publication venues is slowing and the market consolidates.

Changes over time

The market has evolved over time, as we explore below.

The chart above shows how the total numbers of articles published each year were shared between publishers of various sizes.

Publishers producing 50 titles or less2 (shown in orange) have increased their share of output over time. By 2020, they are collectively taking almost 1.5x their share compared to 2000.
The share for mid-sized publishers (50-100 titles, in yellow) has remained almost static, with only a mild increase.
The share of the largest publishers (in green) has decreased by around one quarter from 2000 to 2020.
The figures for 2021 are slightly off trend. We explore this more below.

Conclusion

Last month we noted that, while the consolidation in our market is probably not surprising, the scale of it might be. This month we see that the market has become less consolidated over time.

Smaller publishers now publish a significantly greater share of output than they did 20 years ago. The largest publishers appear to have less share. So, extreme though the consolidation may appear to some, it’s not as great as once it was.

The exception to this appears to be 2021. The last full year’s data run counter to the long-term trend. The largest publishers have increased their share in 2021, although they still have less share than 20 years ago.

This could be due to lagging data; even 6 months into the current year, we may not yet have a fully mature reading on the last full year. It could also be due to COVID. Perhaps larger organizations are simply better equipped to scale up to meet the resulting increases in demand, as they are used to operating at scale already. The rise of mixed model publishing deals (Transformative Deals) may be a factor, but it is likely too soon to tell. (We will explore this in a future analysis.)

The data also suggest that growth in publisher and journal numbers has slowed, while growth in output has accelerated. Over the last few years – irrespective of Covid effects – it seems the larger publishers are producing larger journals, and the smaller publishers smaller ones. Larger organizations may be able to produce things more efficiently than smaller ones. Meanwhile, the rise of Open Access and reduction in reliance on print works removes constraints on publication sizes.

The large volume of activity amongst smaller publishers does more than just drive growth in the overall market. It also provides potential acquisition targets for larger publishers wishing to expand their activities. Only time will tell, of course, but we wonder if consolidation will pick up again and the reversal of patterns last year is the beginning of a new trend.

1 Methodological notes. The data basically cover “anything with a DOI”. We process the underlying OpenAlex data to group to collated common variations in publisher names. We include only research articles. We exclude repositories and data with no stated publisher or year.
Reference: OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts. Jason Priem, Heather Piwowar, Richard Orr. Jun 2022. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.01833

2 Pedantry Corner : “Fewer”, surely? Maybe not! We are measuring output, not counting things: “fewer choices” but “less output”. Besides, the rule about “fewer” is the opinion of a poorly educated, anonymous 18th Century critic.

News & Views: Publishers and Market Consolidation – Part 1 of 2

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 04:44:00 GMT

This month we present the first part of some results of big data analysis of the scholarly publishing industry. We look at the latest data sources to tease out information about numbers of publishers and consolidation of the industry.

Background

At the start of 2022, the Open Alex data set was launched . It combines data from multiple sources, including the (now unsupported) Microsoft Academic Graph, CrossRef, Unpaywall, the DOAJ, ORCID, and PubMed. It weighs in at 1.6 Terabytes, with several hundred million records covering papers, authors, institutions, and more. Analyzing it is not for the faint-hearted and requires big data tools and techniques.

Delta Think is now using it to analyze the entire scholarly landscape. We apply some clean-up to normalize publisher names and link with our data on APCs, societies, and public sources of journal metrics. We can then use it to look at patterns across all journal access types, and we will be using it to inform our 2022 OA market sizing process.

By way of illustration, we thought we’d look at what it can tell us about the basic structure of the scholarly publishing industry.

How many publishers are there?

The data suggest that in total there were a little over 16,780 publishers in operation between 2000 and 2021, publishing around 121,700 journals. The numbers have grown over the years. There are just under 10x the number of publishers now than in 2000, compared with 4.4x the number of journals (and around 4.1x the number of articles).

With so many publishers in operation, the market has interesting dynamics, as shown below.

The chart above shows how the numbers of publishers have grown over the last decade (the blue bars). But notice how the average number of journals published by each (the orange line) has halved.

The data suggest that publishers now publish an average of 4.5 journals each – down from ten at the start of the century.

Of course, we know that there are many publishers that publish more than a handful of journals. We analyze this further below.

The chart above shows the proportion of publishers that published various numbers of journals in 2021.

The left-hand pie shows that just under 95% of publishers publish 10 journals or fewer. 71% of publishers publish only 1 journal; 23% publish between two and ten journals.
The remaining 5.3% of publishers are shown in the right-hand pie: 5% publish between 11 and 100 journals (grey and yellow segments combined). 0.26% publish – about 34 or so – publish more than 100 titles.

So, our average 4.5 journals per publisher is made up of a few large publishers plus a very long tail of smaller ones. To put this in further context, we can see how the thresholds above translated into volumes of output.

The chart above looks at how all the articles published in 2021 were shared between publishers of various sizes. We use the same size buckets as the previous chart, and refer back to it.

Reading clockwise from 12 o’clock, the (71% of) publishers who published one title each accounted for 9% of total article output. Those publishing between two and ten titles accounted for 10% of total output, and so on.
Notice how the large publishers dominate: 47% of total output is produced by the 0.06% of the publishers who publish 500 titles or more. Just under two thirds of all articles are produced by those publishing more than 100 titles.

Conclusion

That our market is highly consolidated is probably not surprising. But the extent of the polarization – and the length of the long tail – might be. Half of total scholarly output is published by just 10 publishers, each of whom publish 400 or more journals. 80% of that is accounted for by the top 5.

The underlying data allows us to analyze trends over time. We will examine trends in more depth in part 2 of this analysis. It reveals some interesting results about how the degree of consolidation is changing.

Weighing in at 1.6 Terabytes, and with hundreds of millions of records, analyzing the data is a formidable task. The analysis above is just a taste of what’s possible. We have examined the whole market here, but we can dice and slice by article or journal types, to break out open access or subscriptions. We can also break the data down by subject, etc. We will look into the best way to make interactive versions of the data available to our subscribers over the coming months.

Methodology notes

The data basically cover “anything with a DOI”. We process the underlying OpenAlex data to group together common variations in publisher names. We include only research articles. We exclude repositories and data with no stated publisher or year.

News & Views: How does the growth of a particular publisher’s open access content factor into the relative value of a Big Deal? Part 2: The Findings

Tue, 17 May 2022 01:58:00 GMT

This month’s News & Views is the second part of an article derived from ongoing research involving Michael Levine-Clark, John McDonald, Jason Price, and Heather Staines. This content, and the previous April 2022 News & Views , is based on a session presented at the Charleston Conference in November 2021.

Introduction

If you missed our April News & Views containing Part 1 of this investigation, please review it here .

Now that data sources for both institutions and publishers have been identified and usage outliers removed, we can get to the analysis of whether growth in OA affects value.

First, let’s look at usage of our two publishers’ content at the broad level of Carnegie class. (Figure 1) To recap, there is a group of eight libraries in the R1 Very High Research activity category with an average student FTE of 37,000. Our 12 smaller institutions, the R2+ group, have an average student FTE of 8,700. We see a higher average usage in the R1 group, with 38-42 uses per student FTE. Meanwhile, the R2+ group average 13-15 uses per student. For both groups, open access gold usage accounted for approximately 10% of the controlled usage.

We can now look into whether the value of the Big Deal is declining.

Cost per Controlled Use (CPCU)

The standard metric used to determine package value is cost per use (CPU). A decline in package value (increase in cost per use) would occur if there is an increase in total cost or a decrease in total usage (or both). However, to take into account the underlying usage of publisher-hosted gold open access articles, we need to remove that freely-available usage from the denominator. Cost per controlled use (CPCU) does just that. (Figure 2)

The next set of figures addresses each of three factors: total cost, total usage, and gold OA usage, depicting a detailed view and a summary view of each trend over the five years of the study. The last set of figures brings them back together, comparing cost per use and cost per controlled use over time. Each line represents an individual institution, and their colors are consistent throughout. The dashed lines are the Carnegie Very High Research institutions (or R1s for short). The solid lines include High Research Intensity (R2s) on down to Baccalaureate institutions (R2-Bac for short).

It will likely not be surprising to anyone that most institutions’ costs increased over time. Figure 3 also reveals that Publisher 1 shows more variation in the cumulative change in cost with a few R1 institutions showing quite large increases and two experiencing cost reductions. It is worth noting that the two institutions that had decreases for Publisher 1 also had decreased prices for Publisher 2.

Summarizing these same data (Figure 4), Publisher 1’s package cost (in purple) increased 4 to 6% per year and Publisher 2’s package cost (in red) increased 2 to 4% per year (with the error bars reflecting Standard Errors). Publisher 1’s cumulative cost increased more than Publisher 2’s in 2019 and 2020: these increasing costs create downward pressure on package value.

Next, we move to usage. To make it easier to see the trends, we plotted Total Item Requests on a log scale. (Figure 5) As one might expect, the large, research intensive institutions (dashed lines) had the highest usage for both publishers. Even with outliers removed, some institutions experienced large fluctuations in usage from year to year.

We also see differences in usage trends for the two publishers. Usage increased for 14 out of 20 institutions for Publisher 1 from 2017 through 2020, despite the start of ‘work from home’ in March of 2020. For Publisher 2 over the same period of time, 15 out of 20 institutions’ usage declined.

We can look at the average usage for each publisher to see whether total usage is declining. (Figure 6) For Publisher 1 (in purple), the answer is no. The increase seen from 2017 to 2020 amounts to almost 40% or an average of 13% increase per year. In contrast, usage of Publisher 2’s content declined about 15% in the same time period, starting in 2019 and resulting in an average decline of about 5% per year. Thus, in the case of Publisher 2, we see both an increase in price and a decrease in usage, both contributing to declining value.

The proportion of total usage of content that is freely available within the package is a third factor that can impact the value of journal packages over time. As detailed in Figure 7, that proportion is fairly small and fairly consistent across the institutions. These data are plotted on a 0 to 100% scale to highlight the fact that 85-95% of usage still comes from paywalled ‘controlled’ content. (Figure 7)

Now, let’s zoom in on that same data. In Figure 8, we see that trends in usage of publisher-hosted open access differ between these two publishers. Publisher 1, on the left, shows a clear increase in the proportion of OA usage. Publisher 2 is less clear with the proportion of hybrid usage of some institutions appearing to peak midway through.

When one looks at the averages in Figure 9, the differences are clear. The proportional use of Publisher 1’s hybrid open access articles is increasing by about 1 to 1.5% per year (in purple), while Publisher 2’s usage is effectively flat. The right side of the figure uses a 0 to 100% scale to remind us that the annual average change in hybrid OA usage has still been quite small.

Next we move to cost per use. (Figure 10) Once we put the costs and total usage together to calculate cost per use, we learn that institutions tend to experience flat or decreasing cost per use for Publisher 1 and flat or increasing cost per use for Publisher 2. Because the change in the proportion of hybrid use is so small, when we adjust for cost per controlled use (Figure 11), the lines only move up a bit, retaining their shape, to reflect the removal of hybrid open access use from the denominator.

In the summary chart, we compare cost per controlled use and cost per use directly. (Figure 12) The cost per controlled use, indicated by the solid lines, is always higher than traditional cost per use (dashed lines). The difference is driven by the proportion of hybrid open access.

To the extent that transformative agreements lead to more rapid increase in the proportion of hybrid OA content and use over time, then these lines should diverge, with cost per controlled use increasing faster than traditional cost per use. Given this, we suggest that cost per controlled use should be used as a standard measure going forward.

Now, when we bring cost per controlled use from the two publishers together on the same axis, we can see a clear difference in their multi-year trends. (Figure 13) The purple line (Publisher 1) shows a slow decrease in cost per controlled use over time, whereas Publisher 2 shows a fairly rapid increase in 2019 and 2020. Next, we can reverse the y axis to acknowledge that increasing cost per controlled use equates to a decline in value. Therefore, Publisher 1’s package (in purple) is slowly increasing in value, and Publisher 2’s (in red) shows a sharp decline. (Figure 13) So, value did decline for one of the two publishers examined. To review: (1) average cost increased 2 to 6% per year, (2) average usage changed by between +10 and -5% per year over a four year period (and it was by far the most variable across institutions), and (3) the average proportion of hybrid OA usage changed by about 1% per year.

Conclusion

Some final thoughts: (1) Overall usage was a stronger influence on the change in value than the small changes in the proportion of hybrid OA article usage. (2) Despite the range of research activity levels across our institutions, there wasn’t much difference in the proportion of the open versus controlled usage across the site-licensed institutions for either publisher. (3) COVID likely affected these trends, but precisely how was unclear. Did lockdown increase the usage or limit it? Did it affect our two publishers differently? We have no ‘non-COVID’ control unfortunately. (4) If the impact of transformative agreements on the rate of hybrid OA article output influenced these trends, the impact was quite small. Still, with more libraries negotiating transformative agreements, growth in the proportion of OA articles should accelerate. As long as usage in publisher packages continues to grow, cost per controlled use will increase more quickly than cost per use. This new cost per controlled use metric should help libraries track the return on investment from their journal package subscription payments as a growing proportion of underlying articles are free to read.

News & Views: The Impact of Transformative Agreements on the Value of the Big Deal, Part 1: Methodology

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 03:08:00 GMT

This month’s News & Views is derived from ongoing research involving Michael Levine-Clark, John McDonald, Jason Price, and Heather Staines. This content, and the May News & Views , is based on a session presented at the Charleston Conference in November 2021.

How does the growth of a particular publisher's open access content factor into the relative value of a Big Deal?

As open access publishing has grown, libraries have begun to question the value of their expensive Big Deal subscriptions. Data from Delta Think show that OA articles account for an increasing percentage of overall publishing. This study examines those data as well as usage data from library subscriptions to determine whether the overall value of Big Deals is decreasing. Included in this study is a detailed explanation for how to remove outliers to create a more reliable data set - an important component of any study, and one that could be used by librarians who wish to perform a similar analysis on their own collections. Part 2 (to be published in the May News & Views) will include the findings of this study, which are informed by information from the Delta Think Open Access Data & Analytics Tool.

This study utilizes COUNTER usage data from twenty libraries [note: eight libraries are Carnegie Research 1 (or Doctoral Very High Research Activity) and 12 others range from R2 (or High Research Activity) down to small baccalaureate] - all chosen because they had Big Deals with the publishers used in this study. The study used two large publishers with a mix of gold, hybrid, and non-OA titles across a four to five year period (note: 2016-2020 and 2017-2020 respectively).

Using data about those two publishers from Delta Think, we see that open access publication is possible - via either gold or hybrid journals - across 85-95% of the publisher portfolio - slightly higher for Publisher 2 (Figure 1).

When we look at the articles actually published, the numbers are lower. Gold articles ranged from about 23% to 25% of publishing output for Publisher 1, while OA articles in hybrid journals increased from 4.4% to 9.3% over five years. Publisher 2 follows the same pattern but with 6.5% to 11.5% gold and a fairly consistent 4.3% to 5.4% for hybrid over four years. Both publishers show an increase in gold articles as a percentage of total output over time. Hybrid increases slightly for Publisher 1 and decreases slightly for Publisher 2. (Figure 2) It is important to keep these numbers in mind as we turn to usage data.

We looked at COUNTER 5 Title Master Reports for each library, noting in particular Access Type, which divides usage into Controlled and OA gold. We cleaned up the data to remove fully OA journals, which would be open on the publisher website whether or not a big deal was in place. However, if gold titles also showed controlled usage, we kept these in, assuming that only a subset of the journal run was open. Usage in hybrid journals was retained.

We also removed outliers whose usage seemed to indicate that something unusual had happened, potentially a breach. Our exclusion criteria took out any title that had over 1,000 requests in a single year, but fewer than 100 in the previous or following year, or any time when the total for one year was more than two times all other years’ totals combined. For example, if there was a title that had 4,000 uses in one year, but the other four years added up to less than 2,000, we removed that title as well. Outliers removed based on this sort of pattern included 863 university-by-journal combinations in all (out of a total of 143,833) or about 0.6% of the total usage.

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News & Views Webinar: Open Access Charges Update

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 13:26:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our March News & Views companion online discussion forum!

In our online discussion, we focused on he latest Open Access Article Processing Charges Update to learn more about recent price changes and trends for both fully OA journals and articles in hybrid journals. If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

Note: There is no speaker view on this video. Q&A Audio continues after the slides "podcast style."

Webinar: Librarians Using Delta Think’s OA Data & Analytics Tool

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 02:13:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our webinar "Librarians Using Delta Think's OA Data & Analytics Tool"!

Librarians Mat Willmott (California Digital Library) and Ádám Dér (Max Planck Digital Library) discuss how they use data to inform decisions and negotiations around Transformative Agreements. Heather Staines, Delta Think's Director of Community Engagement, explains a new effort to make the tool more useful for libraries of all sizes and budgets.

If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

News & Views: Open Access Charges – Continued Consolidation and Increases

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 03:49:00 GMT

Our market sizing has previously suggested that fully OA and hybrid prices are converging and consolidating. The latest analysis of list prices suggests that prices are now becoming more widely distributed as publishers optimize prices across their portfolios. Prices in general are increasing.

Headline Changes

To compare like for like, we analyze non-discounted, CC BY charges. Overall, list prices continue to increase slowly:

Last year, high-impact journals began to offer OA options, which led to above-average price increases. This year, overall price increases have fallen back to their underlying averages.
The highest prices for fully OA journals have risen from $5,560 to $8,900. The maximum is due to one outlier ¹ : Cell Press’s Patterns (published by Elsevier). Springer Nature’s Nature Communications takes second place at $5,560. Otherwise fully OA (“gold”) journals usually top out at around $5,200 to $5,300.
Outliers aside, Fully OA journal APCs are less expensive than hybrid, averaging around 59% of hybrid average APCs. Last year it was 58%.
The average hybrid APC has increased by 3.6%. This is just over half the increase we saw last year, but remains larger than the 1% or so increases over the previous few years.
The average fully OA APC has increased by 4.3% compared with the previous year. It falls back to a similar level to the year before last, after the above-average increases we saw last year.

Shifts Within Portfolios

Market-wide headlines mask nuances per publisher. Most of the larger organizations have increased both fully OA and hybrid average APCs. We have discussed previously that the most important nuance lies in the spread of prices within a given publisher’s portfolio. For example, if the bulk of a publisher’s journals lie towards the lower end of its pricing, with just a few journals priced much higher, the average (mean) price will be higher than most authors actually pay.

The following figures show how this plays out in the market across our sample of publishers. The figures are outlines of histograms, showing how many titles sit in various price bands over the seven successive years of data that we have. The red line shows the most recent year’s prices. The lines become greener as they go further back in time. Subscribers to Delta Think’s Open Access Data and Analytics Tool can see full details of axes.

For hybrid journals – shown in figure 1 below – the overall spread of prices has remained relatively constant over time. A few years ago, the most popular price band shifted slightly towards the lower end of the market and remained there for a few years (1). However, last year it moved back up to its historic highs. The highest prices increased last year (2). However, there are increasing numbers of journals at mid-to-high prices (3). Notice how the right-hand side of the curve is becoming shallower (3). This will have the effect of increasing average prices paid, as higher APCs are becoming more prevalent ² .

The fully OA landscape is shown in Figure 2. The extreme left shows journals without APCs ($0). This significant proportion of journals are sponsored, or their APCs are covered in some way that does not rely on authors arranging payments. Moving to the right, a few years ago (green lines), there was a double hump in the curve, suggesting two popular price bands. Over the last three years, the bands have merged into what amounts to a broad range of prices. Averages were getting cheaper over time, but last year they appear to be increasing. As with Hybrids, the popular band is widening, which will drive up the average APC paid.

Conclusion

Prices continue to rise, but there have not been the large headline price increases following the entrance of some of the expensive, high-impact journals we saw last year. However, as we noted last year, the outlying headlines don’t shift the market. The shifting and widening spread of popular price bands do.

As we explored at length in our analysis “APC Price Changes – When does up mean down?” , average headline price rises can lead to falling overall spend or vice versa, depending on the numbers of papers published and spread of price increases across a portfolio. An important variation of this is that making a few journals slightly more expensive could drive significant extra revenue for publishers.

Our study examines list prices. Mixed-model deals (RAP/PAR deals) are often calculated based on bundles. However, many deals are set by discounting from list APCs, especially where publication activity exceeds caps agreed. Therefore, the study of listed APCs continues to be relevant.

The APC market is continuing to mature. The shifting balance of prices and broadening of popular price bands suggest that publishers are now beginning to optimize their portfolios.

1 One other sibling journal (Cell Genomics) will also offer this maximum once its special introductory discount expires.

2 For clarity, the chart combines the very highest APCs into one band on the RHS.

Be Part of Our Team – We’re Hiring!

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 12:41:00 GMT

Are you thinking about a career in scholarly communications? Or are you already working in the industry, but want to expand your skills and the breadth of your industry knowledge?

Are you passionate about enabling mission-driven organizations to impact the world by supporting researchers and other stakeholders in the scholarly communications ecosystem?

If you are, we may have a role for you! Delta Think is looking for an Associate Consultant with enthusiasm, drive, and the desire to learn. In this role you will support clients and senior consultants across a breadth of strategy, market research, data & analytics, and marketing services engagements. You will be an integral part of a growing team. Our team!

If this sounds like you, please send your CV or resume to info@deltathink.com along with any other information you’d like to share about your interest and qualifications.

Associate Consultant

Fully Remote; Full or Part Time applicants welcome.

Delta Think is a strategic consulting and advisory firm that enables innovation and growth in organizations focused on the scholarly, professional, and education communications and knowledge ecosystem. Delta Think supports the full life cycle of customer and market research, evidence-based strategy and competitive assessment, and product and business development. To further support organizations in making strategic decisions around Open Access, Delta Think offers the Open Access Data & Analytics Tool . Through the OA DAT and our client engagements, Delta Think has become one of the premier organizations to engage when considering journal strategy and the impact of Open Access.

As an Associate Consultant at Delta Think, you will support numerous projects and clients across the breadth of our business.

Key functions

Performing market research efforts by analyzing selected markets, customer and buyer trends and motivators, content platforms, software systems, and supportive processes and operations
Supporting market insight projects that may include in-depth customer interviews, user experience interviews, focus groups, advisory boards, surveys, and ethnographic studies
Writing marketing messaging such as emails and blog posts
Writing social media posts and managing social media accounts
Maintaining Delta Think customer lists and email deployments
Additionally, for Delta Think Open Access Data Analytics Tool, this role will be responsible for:
Creating new user accounts
Training and onboarding new account and users
Updating data to the platform

Qualifications

3+ years of experience in marketing/marketing coordination, market research, editorial support would be preferable; However, entry level candidates will be considered
Must be proficient in Microsoft Office tools such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
This position is remote. Must have home office capabilities
Strong verbal and written communication skills required
Ability to collaborate and communicate effectively with clients at all levels
Digital and social media marketing experience a plus
Knowledge of scholarly publishing would be ideal, but not required

Travel Requirements (when feasible and safe): Up to 10-15%

Please send your CV or resume to info@deltathink.com along with any other information you’d like to share about your interest and qualifications.

News & Views: Open for Business – Tracking New OA Models for Journals and Books

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 03:55:00 GMT

The last few years have seen a flurry of new OA business models across both journals and books, including twists on existing models and combinations of models. Delta Think tracks these models and continually updates definitions and example links for subscribers to our Open Access Data & Analytics Tool (OADAT) .

It’s a time of experimentation, and most models are still too new to assess data on sustainability. Still, funders (like those in cOAlition S ) and assessment bodies (like the UK Research Excellence Framework ) are moving forward with requirements that scholarly content be made available with open licenses or in accessible repositories. For publishers who may have only recently implemented their first Open Access offerings, the possibilities of when (or whether) to move to entirely open content might seem overwhelming.

Where to start?

Publishers should start with their own data. Some disciplines are further along the open access path than others. This may be due to funder requirements or author appetite for publishing open. Differences across a portfolio might be striking with some subfields more interested in OA licenses and others less reliant upon government or philanthropic funding. Data about your current state of OA publishing and author enthusiasm/interest in OA uptake can help establish a baseline. Data about comparable publishers or journals and their OA output can help to determine where your publications sit in the marketplace and how to price or update an APC model if that is an attractive pathway.

Publishers should consider their OA publication strategy within the context of their overall strategy.

Gathering baseline information:

What models are currently in place and how well are they performing?
What does the current subscriber base look like, from types of subscribers to geographic location?
What are the usage patterns for the current content?
What is the appetite for OA among authors (and their funders)? How might this be changing?

Practical questions:

How will a shift to OA affect revenue moving forward?
What staff resources are available to support the transition?
Is there a backlist and will it continue to be provided under a subscription or license option?
What is the size of the frontlist in proportion to the backlist?
What administrative burden might a new model bring to bear on the publisher? On the customers?

Big picture questions:

What are the challenges and opportunities for shifting to OA?
What role will diversity, equity, and inclusion play?

We’re also looking closely at how these issues impact libraries and research institutions, but that is a topic for another day.

Making sense of what’s out there

Whether you’ve been following OA developments since the outset or you are new to the space, there are a lot of things to track. Within publishers, teams touch the OA workflow at different points. Editorial colleagues may be more focused on working with Editorial Boards and authors who have knowledge mainly of how OA affects funder requirements and payment of APCs. Production teams, working closely with vendors, want to ensure that information on funding and license options are visible and accurate. Marketing teams want to promote new strategies and new partners to increase submissions and author uptake. Sales might now be selling new discount or membership models, transformative agreements, and more. From their standpoint, making things as simple as possible for institutional administrators may be a top priority.

Subscribers to our OA Data & Analytics Tool (OADAT) rely on its dynamic and interactive elements to customize their inquiries, but sections of the tool also track OA business models, definitions, and examples. Moving forward we want to make it easy for subscribers to utilize templates to augment with their own organizational details to onboard new colleagues or share contextual information with internal stakeholders.

Some new(er) models to consider for books and journals

Direct to Open

Being developed by MIT Press, and designed by Raym Crow, Direct to Open (D2O) will open collections of the Press’s frontlist monographs contingent on specific financial targets being reached. Direct to Open is similar to Subscribe to Open (S2O) in that institutions that commit to supporting the frontlist gain term access to substantial collections of gated backlist titles, even if the open frontlist offer fails. Unlike S2O, Direct to Open is a collective funding approach, and the support fees will be reduced if more institutions participate. Titles are available in HSS and STEAM packages. MIT intends to make its model freely available for other presses to adapt.

In January 2022, MIT released a white paper on the program and announced that it had hit 55% of its participation target (180+ libraries). Some of the success criteria for D2O detailed in the report include it being “economically sufficient for all press monographs”; that it integrates with “current editorial processes” along with existing distribution platforms for both online and print; inclusive and equitable; and “replicable by other presses.” The report provides extensive information on financial modeling, as well as contextual information about other OA book models.

Flip It Open

Announced in the summer of 2021 , Cambridge University Press (CUP) added Flip It Open to their OA book offerings. CUP committed to make 28 titles available as OA books once they have met “a set revenue threshold.” Aware from the outset that the titles could become open, libraries pay to receive the titles early and to fund a wider good for the community. Once the threshold is met, CUP will release paperback versions of the titles, acknowledging there (and in the digital version) the libraries that contributed towards the opening of the title.

This experiment, which is not proposed to replace other OA models nor to scale to cover all CUP books, is “more fundamentally geared towards demand.” In contrast to trends where publishers might exclude their more popular or best-selling titles from special arrangements, Flip It Open is a way to make those high-demand titles freely available more quickly.

Read, Publish + Join

While Read + Publish or Publish + Read agreements may be familiar (if somewhat confusing) to readers, in 2020 the American Physiological Association added a new element to the mix, announcing their Read, Publish + Join model . Combining reading and publishing for a participating institution, this offering also provides authors with a one year membership to the society.

In a time when some membership organizations may struggle to appeal to early career researchers, this model connects them “to the Society’s multidisciplinary community of scientists and educators from around the world, driving collaboration and spotlighting scientific discoveries in physiology.” It provides an opportunity for institutions to both bolster the professional development of their own researchers and demonstrate support for professional societies.

Pay to Close

Not to be confused with closed or toll access content, Liberate Science announced in December 2021, in conjunction with the release of their Research Equals incremental publication platform, a model they call Pay to Close . With the goal of providing more equitable access to researchers around the world, Pay to Close would provide 0 cost APCs to those publishing with the most permissive licenses, CC 0 or CC-BY, with increasing APC costs for more restrictive licenses up to and including All Rights Reserved. The resulting articles would all be free to read, regardless of the license selected.

Experimentation will continue

Staying abreast of newer models can take a significant amount of time. Tracking progress of these models over time will require care and attention. How will researchers respond? How might libraries be more involved? What mandates will come (or change) in the near future? In addition, the spirit of open is rapidly moving beyond published research to include efforts around open infrastructure, open code, and open data. Monitoring these projects and considering the resulting data is a key part of what we do in the OADAT and in the News & Views. Please help us to make the tool and associated program more useful to you by letting us know the key data questions your organization is considering and the types of data you rely upon to make critical business decisions.

TOP HEADLINES

NERL and Elsevier Continue Agreement and Develop Open Access Pilot – February 3, 2022

"The deal provides 13 of the NERL member institutions with ScienceDirect access and pilots retroactive open access (OA) for participating institutions’ authors. In 2021, a project team of NERL and Elsevier representatives established the agreement terms to ensure continued access to Elsevier's journals and support the NERL core values(link is external) of transparency, sustainability, equity, reproducibility, and flexibility."

A Fork in the Road: OA Books and Visibility-Value in the Humanities – January 26, 2022

"What we see emerging at this time, as a result, is a dual system in which all scientific research will be available to anyone to read, free of charge, while the most significant work in the humanities and social sciences will remain extremely expensive and less visible in the digital world."

Founding Journal MicrobiologyMicrobiology Announces Open Access Transformation in its 75th Year – January 25, 2022

"As the Microbiology Society’s founding journal, Microbiology, begins its milestone 75th year, the Council of the Microbiology Society is delighted to announce that Microbiology will be the first in the Society’s journal portfolio to transition from a hybrid model to fully Open Access. The transition to Gold Open Access will happen in 2023."

MIT Press Announces Release of White Paper on its Open Monograph Model – January 19, 2022

"The MIT Press Open Monograph Model: Direct to Open, a new white paper published by Chain Bridge Group and the MIT Press, describes a collective model for supporting the open dissemination of scholarly monographs. The report examines the context for designing the framework and explains the logic behind the model’s design."

Who's Afraid of Green Market Forces and the Rights Retention Strategy? – January 13, 2022

"How to achieve universal open access (OA) to research outputs is the topic of sometimes heated discussion. Major publishers pronounce the superiority of ‘gold’ OA as the ‘only’ sustainable route to full OA... Although cOAlition S values the input and services publishers offer – and some of its funders state a preference for OA via the gold route – they do not support paid gold OA at any price nor to the detriment of content ownership."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

January 12, 2022

F1000 launches GDC Open Reserarch in Latin America

"GDC Difusión Científica has created the GDC Open Research in Latin America Gateway to highlight the work of Latin American researchers, to amplify the impact of their research, and to promote the principles of open science throughout Latin America and beyond."

January 18, 2022

PLOS Digital Health Publishes First Papers

"PLOS announced the launch of five new journals last year and PLOS Digital Health is the second of these journals with papers ready for publication. The journal’s mission is to drive transformation in the delivery of equitable and unbiased healthcare through ethically conducted, impactful and immediately accessible research."

February 1, 2022

Health Affairs Introduces Health Affairs Scholar, a New Open Access Journal

"Health Affairs Scholar will be a companion to Health Affairs, providing an additional forum for high quality, peer-reviewed health policy and health services research. Health Affairs Scholar will launch in Fall 2022 as the first new journal under the Health Affairs brand since our founding in 1981."

News & Views: Breaking Out Open Access License Types

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 03:04:00 GMT

This month we revisit the types of licenses attached to open access publications. We examine the balance between more or less permissive licenses, and the patterns make for interesting reading.

Introduction

Last year we examined the use of different sorts of OA licenses. We noted that formal definitions of open access require that articles are both free of charge and from reuse restrictions. Creative Commons licenses have become the de facto standard for open access publications, but the licenses offer a range of permissions. For the purposes of analysis we define:

“Permissive” as articles published under CC BY (attribution only required) or CC0 (no restriction). CC BY is typically the license required by major funders of OA, such as Plan S, Wellcome, HHMI, etc.
“Restricted” as articles published under other licenses that allow restricted reuse, such as CC BY-NC (non-commercial), CC BY-ND (no derivative), or publisher-specific licenses. Although not conforming to the strictest OA mandates, such licenses are widely used and are consistent with many OA requirements. Publishers sometimes charge lower APCs for these more restrictive licenses compared with their permissive counterparts.

The use of these licenses types in open access is shown in the following figure.

The chart splits these licenses between content in fully OA journals (in yellow), and the OA content in other journals (“hybrid” – in blue).

Overall, the Permissive licenses (CC0, CC BY – the paler colors) are most commonly used, outnumbering more restrictive ones by around 3:2.
Within fully OA journals, the ratio is similar to the overall average, compared with an even split in hybrid publications.
Long-term trends (not shown here) suggest that fully OA output and the use of permissive licenses is slowly gaining share.
The underlying data has changed since last year. This year’s data shows greater numbers of fully OA journals, with a slightly greater prevalence of permissive licenses.

Variations by Discipline

Looking at our full data set, which allows for deeper analysis, breaking the data out by publisher and discipline shows that patterns of use vary. For example:

Larger publishers with mixed portfolios of fully OA and hybrid journals publish a greater proportion of their output in hybrid journals. They also publish a significantly greater proportion of their output under more permissive licenses.
Figures vary between disciplines. For example, Health Sciences shows a similar uptake of fully OA, but a greater leaning towards more restricted licenses. Environmental Sciences shows a similar uptake of fully OA, but greater leaning towards permissive licenses.
Users of our Open Access Data and Analytics Tool can explore these details further.

Analyzing Specific Creative Commons Licences

We have worked with OASPA on their annual survey again this year. We put together a blog post to show the results. This year we have also expanded our own analysis. The chart below compares some different sources, including our analysis of journals, OASPA members, and the Directory of Open Access books (which we have previously covered in greater depth).

The chart above shows the combined output of various indexes from 2015 – 2020.

Across the whole of Crossref (the leftmost bar), just under 55% of OA output is published under CC BY license. The non-commercial, no derivatives CC BY-NC-ND is next most prevalent at 20%.
The large publishers (middle bar) make greater use of CC BY (just under 65% of their output) and slightly more of CC BY-NC-ND (23%).
OASPA publishers make far greater use of CC BY (85% of output), with very little CC BY-NC-ND. They publish a significantly greater proportion of their output under more permissive licenses compared with the market-wide averages.

Conclusion

The data support what many of us know from anecdotal discussions. The majority of OA output is published under more permissive licenses. In particular the CC BY license dominates, especially in fully OA journals, and especially by OASPA members. It’s useful to see this confirmed across the market, and also to see how the figures differ for the large publishers.

However, licenses that allow sharing with some restrictions remain significant and show no signs of collapsing. Many publishers continue to make use of them. In fact, restricted licenses cover the majority of output in some disciplines. Subscribers to our database can examine this in more detail and also look at longer term trends.

Of course, we have yet to see the effects of large-scale mandates such as Plan S. Common sense suggests that the proportions of CC BY licensed output are likely to increase, and we look forward to revisiting the data in the coming months and years.

News & Views: Open Access Quantity & Quality 2021

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 03:44:00 GMT

For our last piece of analysis for 2021, we revisit how the “quality” of OA journals compares with the market average.

Background

We have previously examined the longstanding perception that OA journals are of lower “quality” than average. We used a few different citation-based measures of impact as a proxy for perceived quality. Although we found that fully OA (gold) journals had slightly lower average impact, they had caught up over the years from 2009 to 2017. At the time of our last study in 2018, we suggested that OA journals might have even been on track to beat the average. What’s happened since then?

Plus ça change

The figure below shows how the average Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) ¹ has changed over time, including the most recent years’ data. (The data set covers around 25,000 journals.)

The chart above shows the average SNIP each year analysed by journals’ OA type. The total number of journals in the sample shown above rose from 14.4k in 2010 (of which 1.6k were fully OA) to 20.1k in 2020 (of which 5.9k were fully OA).

The average for all journals (in black) is the baseline.
The average for fully OA (gold) journals (in yellow) has slowly been converging on the average over time, with an uptick in 2020.
However, journals that are not fully OA (grey) have also picked up in recent years.

Our previous study looked how quickly numbers of the highest quality journals were changing. The following chart brings this up to date.

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News & Views Webinar: 2021 Market Sizing Update

Wed, 03 Nov 2021 14:42:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our October News & Views companion online discussion forum!

In our online discussion, we focused on highlights from Delta Think's annual Market Sizing exercise. If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

News & Views: Open Access Market Sizing Update 2021

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 10:00:00 GMT

Each year, Delta Think's OA Market Sizing analyzes the value of the open access journals market. This is the revenue generated by providers or the costs incurred by buyers of content. Our analysis this year shows that the open access market has had an exceptional year of growth in 2020. The effects of COVID-19 and exchange rate changes have compounded OA’s underlying strong growth. Based on current trends, we estimate it to have been worth around $975m in 2020 and on track to grow to over $1.1bn in 2021.

Headline findings

Updates to key industry indexes are released over the summer, and we combine these with benchmarks obtained from our publisher survey to size the market. Our models, examined in greater depth within our Open Access Data & Analytics Tool , suggest these headlines for sizing:

We estimate that the OA market grew to around $975m in 2020.

The 25% increase over 2019 is significantly larger than the growth in the underlying scholarly journals market, which is typically low to mid-single digit. It is larger than expected for the OA market.
Growth in OA will remain above that of the underlying scholarly journals market. The open access market is on target to be over $1.1bn in 2021.
Around 36% of all scholarly articles were published as paid-for open access in 2020, accounting for just under 9% of the total journal publishing market value.
We anticipate a 2020-2023 CAGR of 14% in OA output and 17.6% in OA market value.

A note about our method

Trends

The effects of COVID-19 have driven exceptionally high growth in scholarly output across all access models. OA output in hybrid journals has been boosted more than other OA output.
Historically, there appears to be more OA output that we have previously thought and it is growing at a faster rate.
Exchange rate fluctuations have compounded the exceptional growth in publishing activity, increasing reported revenues further above long-term trends.
We are still in the middle of the exceptional effects of COVID-19. It will likely be another 18-24 months before we gain sufficient distance to observe any changes to underlying trends.
The long-term growth curves show signs of flattening out to a steady state of just over 15% in both volume and value of OA. This represents a slight uplift in long-term growth rates compared with previous years’ data, due to increased adoption of OA and rising prices.
Hybrid revenues realized per article published are higher than those published in fully OA journals, and the gap appears to be widening.

The trends mask important nuances. Individual publishers exhibit different dynamics, which is not surprising given how varied their portfolios can be.

Publishers may produce less than trend in one year but make up the shortfall in the following year, or vice-versa. As a result, we see fluctuations in the overall numbers from year to year. However, the underlying trends appear to remain consistent. Almost all publishers have seen exceptional rises in submissions and publication output in the wake of COVID-19.
Revenues generated per article vary widely depending on the sample. E.g., the OpenAPC data suggest higher-than-average numbers, reflecting their focus on higher output and (wealthier) European institutions. Meanwhile, some segments of the market may see fully OA APCs that are higher than hybrid APCs (counter to the market averages).
Regions vary greatly. Waivers offered to low-GDP countries and how OA is funded are highly variable.

Conclusion

Last year we noted that publishing activity would increase in the wake of COVID. This appears to have been borne out. The exceptional growth in 2020 is driven by the events of COVID-19 and compounded by fluctuations in exchange rates.

The growth rates may seem high, but all publishers in our annual survey reported significant increases in their publishing activities. We don’t comment on individual publishers’ revenues, as our survey is confidential. However, investor reports published by the publicly listed corporates do go into detail and bear these trends out.

As COVID-19 is (we hope) an exceptional event, the exceptional growth in 2020 should be temporary. It will likely take 18-24 months before we can observe the length of the temporary uplift and how much of it will perpetuate into long-term trends.

The underlying drivers we noted last year remain in play. Next month we will reflect on these in more depth. However, for now, the one key trend worth noting is how the OA model can respond quickly to changes in demand. Subscriptions cannot grow as quickly. They are paid in advance, so increases in activity can only be monetized in retrospect – especially where publishers are locked into multi-year deals – and only assuming the market will bear the price increases. It seems that the growth in the journals market is largely due to growth in OA.

COVID-19 has therefore served to boost the open access market.

Subscribers to our OADAT tool can see detailed breakdowns of fully OA, hybrid and other revenues, along with projections the coming years, and more detailed analyses and commentary about market drivers.

This article is © 2021 Delta Think, Inc. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . Please do get in touch if you want to use it in other contexts – we’re usually pretty accommodating.

Webinar: Open Access Data & Analytics Tool

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 12:02:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our Open Access Data & Analytics Tool webinar!

In 2017, Delta Think launched the Open Access Data & Analytics Tool. Publishers, societies, libraries, consortia, and aggregators have used the tool for market intelligence, data driven decisions around strategy, competitor analysis, and more. This video explores use cases and includes a deep dive into the APC and Market Dynamics portions of the tool.

If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

News & Views: Connecting the Metadata Dots

Tue, 21 Sep 2021 10:00:00 GMT

Connecting the Metadata Dots: An Hypothesis, A Method, and a Peer Review Walk into a Pub…

By Heather Staines

Background

A new platform called Octopus has been in the news lately, as it was referenced in a recent UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) policy statement . Octopus defines eight types of content objects that might be added throughout the stages of the research and publication process, including an hypothesis, a method, data, an analysis or a peer review. The conversation has turned around whether such a new platform with (so far) limited funding can change the way scholarly communications happens.

Indeed, many elements of the Octopus platform have already been with us for some time, perhaps not all collected centrally on one service. The conversation got me thinking again about the variety of content types and versions that make up our scholarly communications ecosystem and what will be necessary to help researchers utilize them effectively.

Getting smaller: Micropublications

One aspect of Octopus is the notion that a researcher would post several micropublications throughout their research process. Micropublications are hardly new. On Micropublication.org you can see peer reviewed micropublications that include brief results, novel findings, negative or reproduced results, and those that may lack a broader narrative. Each has a DOI, is indexed, and is often deposited in referential databases such as: Wormbase , Flybase , Xenbase , Arabidopsis Information Resource , and more. Researchers can build upon their existing publications, and others can benefit from this data also.

Registered Reports are another form of micropublication, which puts the emphasis on the research question and quality of methodology. Peer review is done even before data is collected. Authors who follow the methodology that they have registered can be routed through a publication workflow when their research is complete. Registered Reports might not be so “micro” but they are indicative of a preliminary research stage. Versions of publications, such as those that result from updates posted to preprint servers, for example, represent a later stage.

Search and you will find (hopefully!) Metadata Connections

As an author, my work sits on online publisher platforms, the open web, in institutional repositories, to name a few places. Related content like reviews, annotations, media mentions, articles citing my work, and resources I have cited exist in still other places. A journal article might live on SpringerLink, in PubMed, Ovid, JSTOR, or EBSCOhost. An ebook might be published on some combination of Project Muse, Knowledge Unlatched, Open Library of the Humanities, or PubPub. Standards and best practices around metadata and identifiers help us parse these versions, but they may not help us understand how each connects to the related-objects that we might also benefit from exploring.

To make this distributed ecosystem function in a way that is useful to researchers, connections between items need to be categorized and machine-readable. A few years ago, Crossref introduced DOIs specifically for application to units of publication smaller than articles or book chapters, such as peer reviews and annotations. The metadata schema provides for asserting the connection between the peer review and the item being reviewed. While the schema isn’t perfect, data show nearly 200,000 deposits for “peer reviews.” Crossref also released a tool called Event Data , where activities connected to content with DOIs can be deposited. This tool tracks annotations, for example, on content that has a DOI. It also notes annotations which contain reference to other content items with DOIs, effectively linking the items together.

An interesting place to look at how these connections are evolving is the open source platform PubPub maintained by my former employer the Knowledge Futures Group, which introduced the concept of Linked Pubs (chapter, article, or other unit of content) about a year ago. Creators can use the Crossref relationship schema to assert different relationships between Pubs on the platform and content elsewhere on the web. As of this writing, there are 1,884 Linked Pubs in 56 different communities (or groupings of collaborative activity). Review and supplement are the most used types, at 28% and 25%, respectively. Version is next at about 19%, with a more or less even distribution between other types (mostly commentary/reply/etc.) after that. Interestingly, there's a good balance between people linking to other Pubs vs. content that lives elsewhere on the web, with about 40% linking to other Pubs, and 60% external content. You can check out these examples: RTI Press uses Version to create multimedia iterations of previously published content, and Fermentology utilizes Supplemental to add materials for courses.

Resource Description

Crossref Relationship Schema

Documents relationships between different research objects

DocMaps

Provides machine-readable data and context about how community groups and peer review platforms are evaluating preprints to facilitate the exchange, aggregation and publishing of peer reviews within a distributed, interoperable infrastructure

NISO Access and License Indicators (ALI)

A project to add metadata and indicators that would allow metadata users, such as content platforms, to filter or target subsets of license information

NISO Open Discovery Initiative (ODI)

A technical recommendation for data exchange including data formats, method of delivery, usage reporting, frequency of updates and rights of use

NISO ResourceSync

Researches, develops, prototypes, tests, and deploys mechanisms for the large-scale synchronization of web resources

Publishing Status Ontology

An ontology designed to characterize the publication status of documents at each stage of the publishing process (draft, submitted, under review, etc.)

Publishing Workflow Ontology

A simple ontology for describing the steps in the workflow associated with the publication of a document or other publication entity

Peer review in the wild: Annotations, blog posts, curated feeds, and overlay journals

With new flavors of open peer review, small publications of this type are growing. Peer review now takes place in a variety of settings and the resulting reviews may not be hosted alongside the content itself. Overlay journals such as Rapid Reviews: Covid 19 and Current Cities publish reviews about content hosted elsewhere, on a preprint server, for example.

Less formal versions of an overlay model include blogs such as PreLights from the Company of Biologists. In this project early career researchers write reviews to highlight preprints that interest them. This gives them experience in both reviewing and in blogging, and, more than half of the time, the preprint author ends up corresponding with them around their feedback. PreLights data shows that 93% of these preprints are published in a journal within two years.

But how can we pull all of this activity together in a useful way? Sciety is a new project from eLife which connects communities evaluating preprints, curating the resulting reviews, and facilitating discovery through social media. This effort seeks to move the review and curation process to the post-publication space. Sciety works with existing reviewer communities and inspires the creation of new ones. Such reviewer feedback can be connected back to the publication space to close the loop. bioRxiv has introduced a dashboard feature that pulls in such reviews from the community and also from publisher initiatives to make them discoverable.

Where do we go from here?

A few years back a publisher friend on his way to a Crossref DOI committee meeting opined: “What is a publisher to do to manage DOIs now that content is hosted in so many different places?” To me the answer was clear. The beauty of it, my friend, is that the publisher no longer has to manage it. But don’t get me wrong, there is still a role for publishers (and librarians and researchers) to play as trusted third parties in asserting relationships between digital objects: this article is the same as this document; this dataset is related to this experiment; this review is connected to this book chapter; this is a later version of that.

Much work still needs to be done, around the creation of metadata useful for discovery and classification, search interfaces optimized to make it clear to the user which types of things their search results contain, as well as how they connect to one another.

In addition to Crossref initiatives, NISO has a number of projects that may be useful, including the Open Discovery Initiative (ODI), Access and License Indicators (ALI), and ResourceSync to help with versioning. A project called DocMaps , a collaboration between Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), eLife/Sciety, EMBO, and the Knowledge Futures Group, uses as a framework a “set of agreed-upon conventions for aligning editorial processes with the Publishing Status Ontology (PSO) and the Publishing Workflow Ontology (PWO) and for expressing these events in a domain-specific language that can be easily interpreted by machines and humans alike.”

We’re still at the beginning of this new journey, but I look forward to seeing where we go.

TOP HEADLINES

EUt+ alliance and OpenAIRE join forces for open science – September 8, 2021

"The OpenAIRE-Nexus consortium and the European University of Technology (EUt+), have announced a new cooperation agreement to improve the integration and discoverability of research results, to showcase the synergies and connections and aggregate the work from all partners across this pan-European network of Universities."

New report confirms positive momentum for EU open science – September 6, 2021

"The Commission released the results and datasets of a study monitoring the open access mandate in Horizon 2020. With a steadily increase over the years and an average success rate of 83% open access to scientific publications, the European Commission is at the forefront of research and innovation funders concluded the consortium formed by the analysis company PPMI (Lithuania), research and innovation centre Athena (Greece) and Maastricht University (the Netherlands)."

cOAlition S statement on Open Access for academic books – September 2, 2021

"cOAlition S recognizes that academic book publishing is very different from journal publishing. Our commitment is to make progress towards full open access for academic books as soon as possible, in the understanding that standards and funding models may need more time to develop. Rather than to decree a uniform policy on OA books, we have therefore decided to formulate a set of recommendations regarding academic books – in line with Plan S principles – that all cOAlition S organisations will seek to adopt within their own remits and jurisdictions."

Karger Publishers Advances Open Access with Plan S Aligned Transformative Journals – August 25, 2021

"Karger Publishers is adopting the Plan S-aligned ‘Transformative Journal’ model for a growing number of journals, acting on its commitment to accelerate the transition to Open Access (OA). Seven Karger Publishers journals have committed to the Transformative Journals model so far."

SCOSS Campaign: DOAB/OAPEN reaches important funding milestone – August 17, 2021

"The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and OAPEN, jointly part of SCOSS’s second funding cycle, has met a significant milestone by reaching its three-year funding goal of 505,000 Euros in about 18 months, despite the COVID-19 challenge."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

September 1, 2021

AAS Journals Will Switch to Open Access

"The American Astronomical Society (AAS), a leading nonprofit professional association for astronomers, announced the switch of its prestigious journals to fully open access (OA) as of 1 January 2022. Under this change, all articles in the AAS journal portfolio will be immediately open for anyone to freely read."

August 23, 2021

RSC New Journal Launch: Energy Advances

RSC's "new Gold Open Access journal Energy Advances focuses on energy science, and in particular the interdisciplinarity required for exciting breakthroughs in the field. Energy Advances welcomes research from any related discipline including materials science, engineering, technology, biosciences and chemistry."

News & Views: Open Access Books – Part II

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Last month we looked at the growth of OA Books from the perspective of the activity in the DOAB index. This month we look at them from the publishing perspective to understand how backlist compares with frontlist, how books compare with journals, and the subject coverage in OA Books.

Background

Most books will make the bulk of their revenues in the few months following publication. Although this is not always true, the separation of books into a frontlist (“this year’s books”) and backlist (“books from all previous years”) is common practice amongst book publishers. It will be interesting to follow new models where the backlist is monetized to support an OA frontlist to see what impact this has on the opening of older titles.

Analyzing when books were deposited in an index like Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) – as we did last month – shows us how the index is growing and how publishers are increasingly engaged with OA books. But, if a publisher decides to implement an OA books program, what does it do with older titles? Does it make its backlist retrospectively OA? Or reserve OA for frontlist titles only? (Or both?)

Frontlist vs Backlist Activity

By comparing the year a book was published with the year it was indexed (added to the DOAB), we can see to what degree books have been retroactively made OA. Figure 1 shows the results across the whole DOAB.

The chart above analyzes the lead times in indexing books. It shows how many years after publication books were added to the index (the DOAB) and deemed to be made OA.

If titles are made OA in their year of publication (deemed to be frontlist titles), the lead time will be zero. Just over 25% of DOAB titles are frontlist.
If titles were made OA after their year of publication (deemed to be backlist titles), then the lead time will be a positive number. Around 16% of titles were made OA the year after publication. The remaining 69% or so of titles are deep backlist.
Although not shown above, the oldest titles in the DOAB date back decades. Earlier years (before 2000) typically have a handful of titles per publication year, with annual numbers increasing significantly in more recent years. The oldest title in the index was published in 17871.

Analyzing the data by publication year reveals different – and more consistent – patterns over time, as shown in Figure 2.

The same colors are used in both charts above to represent different licenses. The charts cover different time periods; both show one bar per year. The details are deliberately small as the charts above are only meant to illustrate one thing: Patterns in license usage are different if analyzed by publication year (left) compared with the year they were made OA or added to the index (right). We can clearly see license use by publication year shows distinct patterns, but license use by indexed year appears more random.

Licenses – Comparison with Journals

The modern Open Access movement started with journals. Books and monographs present their own challenges. Figure 3, below, compares the two worlds.

The figure above shows the shares of various indexes’ open access content accounted for by various licenses.

The high prevalence of Creative Commons licenses is common to both OA books and OA journals.
The high degree of “unspecified” licenses for DOAB (books) is a facet of the data. It perhaps reflects that books infrastructure is less mature than that for journals.
We can compare shares of book titles in the DOAB (the left-most bar) with the shares of articles in journals listed in Crossref.
We see that the proportion of CC BY licenses (colors at the bottom of each bar) is significantly lower in books (32%) than in journals (51%). Likewise, CC BY-NC (2nd from bottom) – books (4%) vs. journal articles (15%). But CC BY-NC-ND licenses show the opposite: books have a greater proportion (29%) than journals (18%).
The differences remain even if we exclude unspecified licenses.

Subject Coverage

Anecdotally, the received wisdom is that OA books lean more towards arts, humanities, and social sciences compared with journals. Figure 4, below, examines OA books coverage by subject.

The figure above looks at relative numbers of titles in the DOAB broken down by major subject area.

The DOAB is transitioning to using Book Industry Communication (BIC) categories to index its subject coverage. As of July 2021, around 50% of the index has BIC categories specified.
Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences make up the lion’s share of the index. Around one fifth of OA books are in the sciences, compared with 90% of open access journal articles.
Subscribers to our Open Access Data and Analytics Tool can see how subjects change over time by both indexed year and publication year. Subject coverage has changed markedly over time.

Conclusion

Compared with journals, we can see that OA books follow their own distinct patterns. Books use more restrictive licenses, especially amongst major publishers. They show a complimentary coverage of subjects: 20% of book titles cover STEM compared with 90% of journal articles. Although not covered here, publishers’ market share is different too.

As publishers implement OA books programs, it is highly likely that they will retrospectively add books. Analyzing the indexes of OA books is a measure of activity, but it only shows when publishers made books OA or when they chose to deposit their metadata. So it is important to analyze OA books data by publication year. In the less mature world of OA book infrastructure, this is particularly important compared with simply looking at the activity in book indexes.

For the sake of brevity, we have only scratched the surface here. Licenses, subject coverage, and languages show distinct patterns that depend on the year of publication. Different languages are more prevalent among older titles compared with more recently published ones. Likewise, older titles are dominated by different subjects to newer ones.

Subscribers to our Open Access Data and Analytics Tool can explore the data in detail. Meanwhile, we hope our brief analysis here is useful to all.

1 Since you ask: Die Mitschuldigen (Ein Lustspiel) [The Accomplices – a comedy] by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

News & Views: Open Access Books – Part I

Tue, 20 Jul 2021 10:00:00 GMT

This month we look at the growth of Open Access Books. We look at some key statistics from the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and examine the rapid growth in OA Books.

Background

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) was originally developed in 2012. It is one of three platforms run by the Netherlands-based OAPEN Foundation and France’s OpenEdition. OAPEN provides infrastructure for OA books and promotes their awareness and discovery. It was originally an EU-funded project and became a foundation in 2010.

OAPEN’s other two platforms include the OAPEN Library OA book repository, and the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit for authors. The DOAB covers a superset of books in the OAPEN Library, so we use its data for the most comprehensive coverage. The DOAB focuses on academic books, which must be made available under an open access license and be subjected to independent and external peer review prior to publication.

Growth of the DOAB

We first analyzed the total number of titles in the DOAB and their licenses, as shown in Figure 1, below. Figures for 2021 are YTD to end of June 2021; all other numbers are full year.

Source: DOAB, Delta Think Analysis.

We can see that the DOAB now indexes over 30,000 titles.

The charts show the cumulative number of titles growing over time.
License proportions are largely consistent over time.
Just over 71% of titles use CC licenses.
CC BY-NC-ND licenses are the most common (32% of the index).
CC BY licenses are the second-most common (24% of the index).
The numbers above do not include the circa 5,000 titles with submission dates unspecified in the publicly available data. (At the time of writing – July 2021 – the team at the DOAB are working on a fix.) We have excluded these titles from the chart above. Subscribers to our OA Data and Analytics Tool will be able to see the updated figures when they are released by the DOAB.
Submissions for 2010 and 2011 were imported from an OAPEN service set up in 2010.

Make-up of the DOAB

The overall proportions of licenses in use by the index remain fairly constant over time. However, within the averages we see some interesting things depending on language and publisher.

The figure above shows how the different languages making up the index relate to license types. Each horizontal bar represents a license. The colors show how the titles under each license are split between languages.

Overall (the top bar), English is the most common language covering 55.5% of the index with German second (17.4%) and French third (15%). The remaining 12.1% of titles are split between around 40 languages in total. The most prevalent licenses are shown above; the rest form a long tail.
English accounts for 72.6% of CC BY and 78.2% of CC BY-NC licensed books.
Compare this with German, which accounts for 60.7% of CC BY-SA and 50.1% of CC BY-ND.
French covers the largest share (53.3%) of non-CC or unspecified licenses.

The figure above looks at how the largest publishers contribute to the index, and their preferred licenses. Each horizontal bar represents a license. The colors show how the titles under each license are split between publishers. The length of the bars show the total # titles in the index, so you can see the relative weight of each.

The 10 largest publishers together account 47.9% of the index (top bar). Another 460 or so publishers make up the remaining 52.1% of the titles.
The largest publishers are now IntechOpen (13.2% of titles), MDPI (6.8%), then de Gruyter, Peter Lang and Springer Nature (ranging from 4.7% to 4.5%).

Most publishers favor CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND licenses. CC BY is the most common for the majority. However, note that MDPI publishes more under NC-ND than BY.The underlying data (not shown here) reveal historical patterns in publishers’ growth. 2019’s figures were boosted by IntechOpen, KIT Scientific, and Peter Lang International adding significant numbers of titles. Before 2015, the current top 10 publishers accounted for only around 10% of the index.

Conclusion

The DOAB has seen explosive growth over the last few years. Over the 3 years to 2020, its CAGR was 53%, compared with 14% for OA journal articles. (5-year CAGRs to 2020 are 60% for the DOAB and 15% for journals).

Although some of this is likely a result of the infrastructure becoming more widely adopted, it’s clear that OA books are gaining traction. Growth is driven by larger organizations coming on board, plus a growing long tail of publishers joining OAPEN. The likes of Springer Nature, De Gruyter, KIT, and T&F have been longstanding contributors to the index.

The explosive growth of books should also be put in the context of “high growth from a low starting point”. Absent a definitive index of academic books, we sampled data from a few publishers. The results suggest that barely 1% of their output is in the DOAB on average. So, as with journal article output, we may see growth rates start to fall towards a steady state after the initial cohort of titles is made open.

Comparing patterns in books with those in journals shows that there is a similar level of consolidation in the market. The 10 largest publishers account for around 50% of both books and journal output. License usage, however, appears to be different for books: CC BY-NC-ND appears to be far more prevalent in books compared with journals. Books are different beasts to journals, so it’s likely that authors and publishers want greater restrictions intended to “protect” long form scholarship, which is so central to tenure and promotion in Humanities and Social Sciences and also to afford greater commercial opportunities around print and other formats.

With so many unknowns in the current data set we will need to wait for updates to complete a full analysis. We will run further analysis as more data becomes available to us.

News & Views Webinar: Plan S – Article Volumes, Market Value, and Transformative Journals

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 03:41:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our June News & Views companion online discussion forum!

In our sixth online discussion, we focused on Transformative Journals, as well as the related Plan S topics from April and May which address Article Volumes and Market Value . If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

News & Views: Transformative Journals

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 04:57:00 GMT

Overview

This month we look at Transformative Journals (TJs). We examine what their measures of compliance mean and how the criteria for growing OA in TJs compares with the typical growth of OA in hybrid journals.

Background

We have previously analyzed the proportions of papers that might be affected by Plan S , the European-led initiative “to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality.” Researchers funded under the initiative must publish via one of four routes , which lay down rules for allowed access types. One allowed route is a Transformative Journal.

A TJ may have a subscription component, but must demonstrate increasing OA uptake of “at least 5% in absolute terms and at least 15% in relative terms, year-on-year…assessed either on a rolling 3-year historic basis or each calendar year.” It must reduce subscription payments to account for OA payments and flip to fully OA “when 75% of its research content is published Open Access.”

TJ Requirements

We contacted cOAlition S to clarify the definitions of the terms used, which are as follows:

Absolute: the proportion of the journal’s output that is OA must increase by 5 percentage points every year. If 25% of a journal’s papers are OA this year, then 30% must be OA next year, then 35%, etc.
Relative: the number of OA articles in the journal must increase by 15% each year. If a journal publishes 100 OA papers this year, then it must publish 115 OA papers next year, 132 the next, and so on.

cOAlition S kindly provided us with a calculator spreadsheet , which allowed us to model the numbers of OA papers needed each year to maintain a journal’s Transformative Journal status. Figure 1 shows the results.

Using average market values from Delta Think’s Open Access Data & Analytics tool (OA DAT) , we modelled two scenarios. To allow us to see the trends, we ignored the 2024 expiration date of TJ support. The rules are such that the relative targets are always based on the previous year’s output. Therefore, where the absolute target is the driver, the relative target is increased each year to match it.

To see the dynamics at work, we start with a hybrid journal where the total number of papers published is constant from year to year at roughly 1600 papers (Figure 1A).
Around 8% (or 128 papers) of its output is OA in year one, the absolute growth criterion drives the growth target for the number of OA papers in the early years.
Once around 40% of output has been reached (or 640 papers), the relative criterion becomes the more challenging target.
By year 12 the journal would have exceeded 75% OA and had to flip to OA.
For journals growing their total output at around 5% annually, from the same 8% OA starting point, the absolute targets remain a driver for longer, and the point of flipping gets later by one year.

For journals that have higher starting points of OA uptake, you can start reading from further to the right of the charts – e.g. for 50% uptake, start counting from year 9.

How Realistic Are the Targets?

cOAlition S’s website lists 2,266 Transformative Journals from 12 publishers (as of May 2021). By cross-referencing this list with our OADAT data, we can see how the journals’ performance over the past few years compares with the TJ requirements and put them in context. Figure 2 shows the results.

The data suggest that historically, the OA proportion of journals’ output has not grown as fast as TJ requirements require:

Over the last three years, the total number of papers published across all journals currently marked as TJs is growing at roughly half the rate needed for them to continue to enjoy TJ status.
The number of journals meeting TJ requirements of OA growth is small. Only a dozen or so (out of around 2,000) have met TJ targets for each of the last three years. However, around two thirds have met TJ targets for at least one year out of the last 3.

The data also showed that only 20 or so journals (less than 1%) had over 75% OA uptake, while two thirds (68%) had 20% OA uptake or less. Smaller journals show the fastest growth in OA. Most of the larger ones appear to be virtually static.

We can also compare journals’ output over time with the TJ target model to see which combinations of the two TJs targets the journals met, as shown in Figure 3.

Reading clockwise from 12 o’clock:

Around one third (34%) met neither target.
A further 28% did not meet the Absolute target, but met the Relative one.
Only around 1.5% failed to meet Relative target but met the Absolute one.
This is consistent with our finding, above, that the Absolute criterion is the tougher of the two criteria to meet for journals starting with lower OA uptake.

Our analysis has some caveats.

The lack of ISSNs in cOAlition S’s TJs list made matching journals ambiguous, although we got around 95% of them.
Given the commitment needed to implement TJs, it’s likely that publishers will intervene to promote OA uptake. Therefore, historical performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance.
Three-year rolling averages can be used in the annual assessment of TJ status . The average might help a journal retain its status if earlier years (2021, 2022) lift its averages for later ones (2023, 2024). But the arithmetic suggests that rolling averages won’t help if a journal is fundamentally struggling to meet its OA targets.

Conclusion

The data suggest that the OA growth criteria for TJ status are aggressive, but not impossible. The current crop of TJs are on average growing OA proportions at around half the pace needed to be in compliance. (The average growth in OA uptake of hybrid journals from major publishers follows broadly similar patterns.) Many journals have previously met TJ targets for one year or even two, suggesting the challenges lie in adding to existing momentum, rather than building OA uptake from scratch.

However, the biggest caveat is timing. Support for TJs is due to be withdrawn completely in 2024, but two thirds of current TJs have less than 20% OA uptake. So many could meet their TJ targets, but still have only around one third OA uptake in 2024. Publishers would then be faced with a tough choice: flip minority-OA journals to fully OA, risk at least one third of output as zero-embargo Green impacting subscriptions … or fall out of Plan S compliance completely and lose one third of their submissions.

Latest Scholarly Communications Observations? The Delta Think Team Weighs In

Wed, 19 May 2021 14:22:00 GMT

We recently had the opportunity to gather insights from our expert team members about scholarly communications – what are our clients most interested in today and where are organizations in our industry focusing their attention or should be focusing their attention now. The longer video will be presented during the SSP Annual Meeting #SSP2021 on Tuesday, May 25 ^th at 9:30 am during our Exhibitor Breakout Session – but you can get a sneak preview from our highlights reel here now!

News & Views: Plan S Effects 2021 – Part 2, Market Value

Mon, 03 May 2021 00:40:00 GMT

This month we look at the possible effects of Plan S on the value of the scholarly publishing market. This follows last month’s analysis of the effect Plan S might have on the volumes of output in the scholarly publishing market. We also examine the potential effects of the UKRI adopting Plan S policies.

Background

In September 2018, 11 national European funding agencies announced cOAlition S , their “initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality.” Implementation was originally planned from 2020, but in practice came into effect for funding starting in January 2021. The initiative – called Plan S – is aimed at accelerating a move away from subscription to fully OA journals. However, it allows for interim, hybrid “transformative” arrangements.

Last month, working with the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™ at Clarivate, we analyzed Web of Science™ data to determine the proportions of scholarly papers affected by Plan S funders. For example, we found that cOAlition S funders accounted for around 5.2% of all publications that would fall under Plan S policy if it had been in place during 2020. The proportion of such papers in hybrid journals is over twice that of the average (12.7%). We also looked at what might happen if Plan S principles were adopted by the UK’s UKRI.

Scenarios

By combining the data on article volumes with our market sizing models, we can look at how the value of the market might shift. We take our currently projected market value as a baseline, and then compare how it might change under a few scenarios. For the sake of analysis, we compared what might happen if ALL authors chose one Plan S compliance route over another. In practice there will be a mix, and so the reality is likely to land somewhere between our two extremes. The chart below shows the results.

Plan S has three routes for compliance . The transformative arrangements routes are due to cease at the end of 2024. So, we modelled what might happen as we transition to either of the other two compliance routes over that time period, covering three scenarios.

We first looked at the cases where publishers are able to maintain subscription prices, even if the Plan S-funded articles move to different journals or business models.

Compliance via fully OA journals
Plan S could lead to a slight lift in market value of just under 0.25% in the long term. Plan S articles add incremental revenues by boosting volumes in fully OA journals. Meanwhile with a mild drop in volumes from subscription journals, publishers are able to maintain their prices.
The UK’s UKRI is currently considering its position on OA. If the UKRI were to adopt Plan S principles, then it will make little difference to the market if the fully OA compliance route was followed.
Compliance via repositories
Plan S could lead to a slight fall in market value of just under 0.6% in the long term. This is driven by lost hybrid OA revenue, as authors opt for subscription journals instead.
If the UKRI were to adopt Plan S principles, then the long-term fall in market value would be just under 0.8%. This is another third or so compared with Plan S on its own. The UK’s current policies have driven significant hybrid uptake. If the value of these APCs is lost, it will have a noticeable effect.

We also looked at the cases where publishers must offset subscription prices against increased OA volumes.

Compliance via fully OA journals
Plan S could lead to a fall in market value of around 2.8%. Subscription journals generate more revenues per article than their OA counterparts. Therefore, a reduction in subscription prices for a given volume of articles will be greater than the gains made from APCs. This adjustment will happen once. Then, as OA output is growing faster than the market as a whole, it will start to drive a very mild increase in market value.
If the UKRI were to adopt Plan S principles, then the long-term fall in market value would be just under 3.4%, or around 20% more than Plan S alone. The same dynamics apply as for Plan S alone.

Combining the repository route and offsetting does not apply here – submitting more subscription articles means there is nothing to offset. We have not modelled the effects of the required zero length embargoes.

Conclusion

If the scholarly journals market grows at around 2%-3% per year , even small shifts become significant. For example, if anticipated market growth fell by 0.5%, consistent with our modest scenarios, projected market growth would decline by 14%. When compounded over a few years, the equivalent of an entire year’s growth could be lost in our mild scenarios; several years could be lost in our more extreme ones.

The average effects are not evenly distributed. They may be more profound for specific publishers. Those with a greater proportion of Plan S-funded papers than average and those with high-impact journals may see much greater variations . They may find it hard to maintain subscription prices in the face of significant shifts in the balance of their content.

All our scenarios suggest we are seeing a realignment of value across the marketplace. Is the market on the verge of imminent collapse? Probably not. But how deeply the value realignment cuts will depend on how publishers, funders, researchers, and universities react. Proactive analysis and scenario planning now is the only way for all industry stakeholders to ensure they are considering their options and acting accordingly.

We recommend organizations contact us if they would like to see models specific for them.

We would like to thank Clarivate for supplying data from its InCites product.

News & Views: Plan S Effects 2021 – Part 1, Article Volumes

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 01:22:00 GMT

In January 2021, the implementation of Plan S began in earnest. This month we take a look at the effect Plan S might have on the volumes of output in the scholarly publishing market. We also examine the potential effects of the OSTP and UKRI agencies adopting Plan S policies. Next month we will look at the effect on market value.

Background

We have previously analyzed the possible effects of Plan S. Given the extensive consultation that has taken place since, and with the roadmap showing the plans of 24 organizations now available, it is timely to revisit our analysis.

Working with the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™ at Clarivate, we analyzed Web of Science™ data to determine the proportions of scholarly papers affected by Plan S funders. We focused on articles, reviews, and data papers, looking at trends over the last 6 full years. The funders implementing Plan S principles have changed since our previous analysis. This time, we took the list of participants which plan to apply Plan S principles from 1/1/2021, as per the cOAlition S Implementation Roadmap .

Plan S

The following table shows a snapshot of output. Plan S funders are shown in the row highlighted in orange.

For the full year 2020, we estimate that:

cOAlition S funders accounted for around 5.2% of all publications (or over 130,000 papers) that would fall under Plan S policy if it had been in place during that year.
The proportion of cOAlition S funded OA papers in hybrid journals is over twice that of the average (12.7% or over 28,000 papers). This represents the proportion of output that would notionally need to be “rehomed” in Fully OA journals once transformative policies expire.

The team at ISI have previously dug into the coverage of various segments of output by Plan S. One notable finding from their analysis was that highly-cited journals were disproportionally affected, with some seeing in excess of 20% of their papers originating from cOAlition S funded research. So, we also examined the top 10% of the most highly cited papers.

Plan S would cover a slightly larger proportion of papers: 6%, compared with 5.2% overall.
This is an average. Specific journals or disciplines will see greater variations.
Although not shown above, we found that the top 15 most high-impact journals had around 12% of their papers funded by Plan S funders.

Other Funders

We also consider what might happen if Plan S principles were adopted globally. The variation in policies around the world suggest that this is unlikely in the short term at least. However a couple of key funding groups stand out.

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which oversees the UK’s highly centralized publicly funded research, is currently reviewing its position on Plan S. It accounts for 1.3% of global output.
Similarly, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is thought to be reviewing its public access policy. Should it adopt Plan S principles, they would cover another 13.4% of global output.
The effects on highly-cited papers are less profound for the UK’s funding bodies, probably reflecting their early adopter position in driving OA. These effects are notably more profound for funding agencies under the OSTP’s umbrella.
Note: The numbers vary slightly compared with previous analyses, as the sample now covers different funders. In 2018 (not shown above), we estimated around 6.25% of output was covered by current Plan S and UK funders, compared with 6.4% of 2018 output in the analysis carried out by ISI in March 2019.
To put this in context, our market sizing suggest that at least 25% of all content is published in fully OA journals. We might deem this as already Plan S compliant assuming things such as licenses and rights retention are appropriate. The remaining three quarters of all papers would be affected if Plan S principles were adopted globally.

Conclusion

Although cOAlition S funders account for less than 1.5% of global spending in R&D, the papers arising account for over 5% of scholarly output. They account for even greater proportions of highly cited papers. At first glance, Plan S’s potential for disruption could greatly outweigh its headline influence.

In 2020, we likely saw a COVID-19 effect. Although not shown here, we saw a significant spike in output from OSTP funders in 2020 when we look at how the numbers change over time. Plan S output grew too, but not by as much, and we see a continued increase in overall output. The spikes affected OA content more so than average.

As we covered last month , high-impact journals that have previously offered no OA options are now offering such options, and there is an active discussion about their involvement in transformative arrangements.

The percentages may be small, but the effects are clearly significant.

We would like to thank Clarivate for supplying data from its InCites product.

Delta Think Welcomes Heather Staines and Meg White to the Team

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 14:00:00 GMT

Philadelphia, PA (March 30, 2021) – Delta Think, a consulting and advisory firm focused on innovation and growth in scholarly communications, today welcomed two additional team members – Dr. Heather Staines and Meg White - to help better serve our valued clients and the community as a whole.

“We’re so excited to expand our team with these two industry experts,” said Ann Michael, Delta Think Founder and CEO. “I have personally worked with both Heather and Meg over the years, and know first-hand how much knowledge, experience, and drive to innovate that they bring to the table!”

Dr. Staines joins the team as Community Engagement Director and Senior Consultant. She comes to Delta Think with extensive experience in strategy and business model creation for established and startup organizations. Prior to joining Delta Think, she’s held positions with both not for profit and commercial organizations including Hypothesis, MIT Knowledge Futures Group, Springer Nature SIPX, and Proquest. As part of her new role at Delta Think, Heather will focus on business development and community support for the Delta Think Open Access Data & Analytics Tool (OA DAT), fostering relationships with publishers, libraries, consortia, service providers, and aggregators. As Senior Consultant, she will use her expertise to support consulting engagements focused on analysis, strategy, and industry infrastructure in scholarly communications.

“I’m so looking forward to my new role at Delta Think,” said Dr. Staines. “I have worked with many members of the team in a volunteer capacity for years and have always known them to be dynamic thinkers and generous in sharing their expertise with the community. Now working side-by-side in this capacity, I’m eager to contribute my expertise as part of this vibrant team.”

Ms. White joins Delta Think as Senior Consultant bringing with her deep experience in content, technology, and education. Her experience includes developing and implementing strategies to launch and manage ebook and journal portfolios, translating strategies into creative technology approaches, and optimizing content revenue opportunities. Her expertise in book publishing, book portfolio management, and education further enhance the Delta Think team’s expertise in strategy and execution. Prior to joining Delta Think, Ms. White held numerous executive-level positions with leading publishers and distribution companies including Mosby, Wolters Kluwer, and Rittenhouse Book Distributors.

“Delta Think is a leader in holistic management of content assets – a critical strategy for scholarly organizations right now,” said Ms. White. “The ability to leverage content as a component of customer-centric strategy is a huge challenge in this changing environment. I’m eager to add my expertise in these areas and help my Delta Think colleagues and our clients move from immediate operational priorities to long term strategy definition and execution.”

Please join us in welcoming Heather and Meg to Delta Think. For more information about the Delta Think OA Data & Analytics Tool and our consulting services, please contact us at info@deltathink.com .

ABOUT DELTA THINK, INC.

Delta Think is a consulting and advisory firm focused on helping publishers, societies, and information providers anticipate, create, and manage change. Since 2005, Delta Think has served more than 120 organizations across the scholarly enterprise to analyze market intelligence, develop customer insights, and create effective business strategies as related to products, services, and full portfolios.

Delta Think engagements are as varied as our clientele, but are always grounded in carefully curated market data and trend analysis. To support data-driven decisions surrounding Open Access, in 2017 Delta Think launched the Open Access Data and Analytics Tool (OA DAT), a subscription-based product which allows users to stay abreast of the continually evolving market through carefully curated data, visualizations, and expert commentary on APCs, funding, market sizing and dynamics, and more.

Learn more at www.deltathink.com and https://oainfo.deltathink.com/

For more information, please contact:

Lori Carlin

Chief Commercial Officer

Delta Think, Inc.

lori.carlin@deltathink.com

phone: +1.215.402.7225

News & Views Webinar: Open Access Charges Update

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 15:13:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our March News & Views companion online discussion forum!

In our fifth online discussion, we focused on breaking down the Open Access Charges update released earlier this month. If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

News & Views: Open Access Charges – Consolidation, Increases, and Breaking Through the $10k Barrier

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 06:00:00 GMT

Each year we survey the list Article Processing Charges (APCs) of a sample of major and significant publishers. Covering over 18,000 titles, this represents one of the most comprehensive reviews of open access pricing.

Our market sizing has previously suggested that fully OA and hybrid prices are converging and consolidating. The latest analysis of list prices suggests that these patterns are continuing. Prices in general are increasing.

Headline Changes

To compare like for like, we analyze non-discounted, CC BY charges. Overall, list prices are increasing slowly, but with some outliers:

The big headline is the high-impact journals now offering OA options. This has pushed maximum APCs for hybrid journals to well above their previous limits of $5,900. This year, the maximum is now $11,390 (from the Nature research journals ), with the Cell titles mostly coming in at $8,900 ($9,900 for the flagship Cell).
The highest prices for fully OA journals have risen from $5,435 to $5,560.
Fully OA journal APCs are less expensive than hybrid, averaging around 58% of hybrid average APCs. This difference has increased a few percentage points over previous years, representing a small convergence.
The average hybrid APC has increased by just over 5%. This is significantly larger than the 1% or so increases over the previous few years.
The average fully OA APC has increased by 8.5% over the last year – more than twice that of previous years.

Shifts Within Portfolios

The following figures show how this plays out in the market across our sample of publishers. The figures are histograms, showing how many titles sit in various price bands over the six successive years of data that we have. For illustrative purposes, we have outlined the trends. The red line shows the most recent year’s prices. The lines become greener as they go further back in time. Subscribers to Delta Think’s Open Access Data and Analytics Tool can see full details of axes.

For hybrid journals – as shown in figure 1 below – the overall spread of prices has remained relatively constant over time. A few years ago, the most popular price band shifted slightly towards the lower end of the market (1) and has remained there since. The highest prices have increased (2 – note, for clarity, the chart combines the very highest APC bands). However, there are increasing numbers of journals at mid to high prices. Also, notice how the right-hand side of the curve is becoming shallower (3), and its tip wider. This will have the effect of increasing average prices paid, as higher APCs are becoming more prevalent.

The fully OA landscape is more complicated, as shown in Figure 2. The extreme left shows journals without APCs ($0). This significant proportion of journals are sponsored, or their APCs covered in some way that does not rely on authors arranging payments. Moving to the right, a few years ago (green lines), there was a double hump in the curve, suggesting two popular price bands. Over the last three years, the bands have merged into what amounts to a broad range of prices, with averages getting cheaper over time. As with hybrids, the popular band is widening, which will drive up the average APC paid.

Conclusion

The headline this year has been the highly selective journals offering paid OA options for the first time – and bringing with them some very high APCs. However, these outlying headlines don’t shift the market. The widening spreads of popular price bands do. As we explored at length in our analysis “APC Price Changes – When does up mean down?” , headline price rises can lead to falling overall spend or vice versa, depending on the numbers of papers published and spread of price rises across a portfolio. An important variation of this is that making a few journals slightly more expensive could drive significant extra revenues for publishers.

We should also note again that these are list prices. As mixed-model deals (RAP/PAR deals) become common, we will likely see bundled discounts emerge. In a few years, the APC market may echo the subscriptions market, where few pay the ticket price.

When we first started looking at the OA market, we noted that it was immature. The low revenues relative to subscription revenues were, we speculated, partly due to artificially low prices being deployed to promote this newer form of publishing.

The market appears to be slowly maturing and the price increases we are seeing may simply be a symptom of a market coming of age.

Answering the Call of Disruption in Education

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 15:08:00 GMT

Disruption creates challenges. It instigates uncertainty, frustration, and question. But, disruption – when productively channeled – demands innovation, collaboration, teamwork, and creative thinking. Ultimately, disruption can lead us to our ‘next new normal.’

Over the last year, we have faced significant disruption within the education sector. From K-12 to higher education to professional life-long learning, educators and students adjusted on the fly. Learners had to quickly adapt to a virtual environment, and educators had to instantaneously pivot to adopt new, unfamiliar technologies, modify learning approaches and methods, and hope their teaching would yield similar impact with their students.

To many, the COVID-19 pandemic served as an accelerator for much needed disruption. A recent Forbes article, “ COVID-19 Accelerates 3 Disruptive Trends Facing Higher Education ” contemplates that, along with reinventing its cost-to-value financial model, institutions of higher education will take a ‘tech-first approach’ enabling them to adapt to student’s changing needs and improving their learning options. Institutions are also likely to consider the transition from degree-based to skills-based learning, thereby harnessing learners ready to jump-start into practice or new skills.

How are we in the scholarly publishing and society sector answering the call of this current disruption? It is critical that we too adapt and pivot. We must evolve our strategies and competencies to address these accelerated needs. Understanding and accepting our role in support of a tech-first and skills-based learning environment demands innovation, forward-thinking, and timely response and action. To answer the call, we must:

Innovate Content – High-quality, peer-reviewed content is and will continue to be the mainstay of education. Educators trust in our resources and students gain confidence knowing their learning is steeped in evidence and accuracy. As we innovate the experience educators and learners have with our solutions, we must ensure our content assets continue to reflect the call of our educator and student users. This requires taking a hard look at your content development processes to address a number of key questions. How are you evolving your range of content assets to address skills-based topics? Are you considering approaches that will combine and integrate content in meaningful and innovative ways? Are you leveraging opportunities to deliver increased value for your educator and student user base while simultaneously creating enhanced revenue for your organization?
Amplify Engagement – Skills-based learning amplifies the need for content and resources to be interactive and dynamic. Solutions must be very flexible, allowing for ease of application across emerging teaching methods which strive to enhance learner engagement and applied knowledge. To be successful, think about what approaches you are taking to make your education resources more dynamic, interactive, and flexible. What innovations are you introducing that will uniquely engage the learner and provide opportunities for educators to interact with their students in impactful ways?
Embrace Technology – When faced with recent disruption, institutions, educators, and learners with a vibrant technology landscape were more readily able to pivot. To answer the call of an increased tech-first market, we too must place high priority on embracing technology and establishing innovation competency. Ask yourself, do you have full understanding of your users’ technology needs, expectations, and requirements? How are you utilizing technology to enhance and innovate current and new solutions? Are you embracing alliances and partnerships that advance your technology capabilities?

As we continue to support the changing, emerging needs, and evolution of the education sector, it is imperative that we embrace the positive impact of disruption, productively explore, and channel the possibilities, and actively answer its call.

Delta Think will continue the exploration of this evolving conversation with a second installment and webinar invitation in mid-March. Our webinar will bring together an expert panel of educators, administrators, and students to review available research into emerging teaching and learning models, Each panelist will share insights regarding their evolving challenges, needs and opportunities, and discuss ideas about how you can support their mission.

News & Views: Open Access Mandates and Open Access Adoption

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 03:41:00 GMT

As more funders implement or consider mandates, we were curious whether the data show any connection between funders’ open access policies and open access uptake.

Introduction

The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP) is a searchable international registry charting the growth of open access mandates and policies adopted by universities, research institutions, and research funders. It tracks the policies requiring or requesting researchers to provide open access to their peer-reviewed research article output. It focuses on policies about use of repositories, but also captures information about OA publishing.

By comparing the number of policies in ROARMAP with proportion of output that is open access, we can see whether a relationship exists between policy activity and OA uptake. We define OA to include articles that are both free to read and reuse, in all journal types. We exclude public access (“bronze”). As we want to examine market activity, we also exclude repository-only versions of articles.

Policies and Uptake

Figure 1, below, shows how numbers of policies and the proportion of output that is open access track over time. The blue bars show the cumulative number of policies (left axis). The orange line shows the proportion of articles that are OA (right axis).

Sources: ROARMAP, Crossref, Unpaywall, Delta Think Analysis.

Clearly both are growing and there is a strong correlation overall. However, the two sets of numbers follow slightly different trajectories:

The numbers of policies appear to follow a classic S-shaped curve. A burst of steep growth from around 2009 to 2018 is flattening off. For example, in 2013 and 2014 growth was around 20% per year. Last year it was 1%.
The proportion of OA articles appear to follow more of a shallow hockey stick. Its initial growth curve has given way to a straighter line.

Although both curves are broadly similar, it seems that they diverge in the detail. The number of OA policies grew faster than OA uptake around 2001 to 2017. But we have since seen a turnaround. The proportion of OA continues to increase apace, even though the numbers of policies have almost reached a steady state.

Growth can be hard to judge from absolute numbers. For example, the straight line above actually points to slowing growth. (Constant growth compounds and would show as an exponential curve.) Figure 2 below compares the annual changes in both measures.

New Paragraph

News & Views: Breaking Out Open Access License Types

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 04:29:00 GMT

This month we look at the types of licenses attached to open access publications. We examine the balance between more or less permissive licenses, and the patterns make for interesting reading.

Introduction

Definitions matter when quantifying Open Access. Formal definitions of open access require that articles are both free of charge and of reuse restrictions. While Creative Commons licenses have become the de facto standard for open access publications, these licenses offer a range of permissions. Given that some funders insist on the most permissive license types, while more restricted licenses, such as those prohibiting commercial or derivative use, are also widespread, we thought a deeper look was warranted.

As part of our 2020 market sizing, we added a layer of analysis to our data which examines how prevalent different license types are. Additionally, working with OASPA on their annual members’ survey has yielded further insights into license usage.

License Usage

Licenses for reuse may be subject to different levels of restrictions. For our analysis, we define these as:

“Permissive” refers to articles published under CC BY (attribution only required) or CC0 (no restriction). CC BY is typically the license required by major funders of OA, such as Plan S, Wellcome, HHMI, etc.
“Restricted” refers to articles published under other licenses that allow restricted reuse, such as CC BY-NC (non-commercial), CC BY-ND (no derivative), or publisher-specific licenses. Although not conforming to the strictest OA mandates, such licenses are widely used and are consistent with many OA requirements. Publishers sometimes charge lower APCs for these more restrictive licenses compared with their permissive counterparts.
Although its impact is minimal, we include the CC BY "ShareAlike" license in the Restricted category, as it effectively imposes restrictions on use of derived works.

The use of these license types in open access is shown in the following figure.

The chart splits these licenses between content in fully OA journals (in yellow), and the OA content in other journals (“hybrid” – in blue).

Overall, the Permissive licenses (CC0, CC BY – the paler colors) are most commonly used, outnumbering more restrictive ones by around 3:2.
Within fully OA journals, the ratio is nearer 2:1, compared with an even split in hybrid publications.

Variations by Discipline

Looking at our full data set, which allows for deeper analysis, breaking the data out by publisher and discipline shows that patterns of use vary. For example:

Larger publishers with mixed portfolios of fully OA and hybrid journals publish a greater proportion of their output in hybrid journals. They also publish a significantly greater proportion of their output under more permissive licenses.
Health Sciences show a greater leaning towards more restricted licenses. In Fully OA journals there is roughly a 50/50 split between license types. In Hybrid journals, restricted licenses outnumber permissive ones by around 2:1. This is driven by Medicine in particular. Nursing ratios move closer to the market averages.
Social Sciences show a slightly greater use of restricted licenses compared with market averages.
Physical Sciences make the greatest use of permissive licenses. In Fully OA journals, permissive licenses outnumber restricted licenses by over 3:1 (compared with the 2:1 market average). Within Engineering this increases to 3.5:1. In hybrid journals the ratio is almost 2:1 (compared with just over 1.1:1 Market average).

This year, we have worked with OASPA on their annual survey. Figure 2 below shows an excerpt from a longer blog post we put together to show the results. The chart further supports the difference of patterns between different samples of publishers. The dominance of CC BY usage in fully OA journals reflects the make-up of OASPA members.

Conclusion

The data support what many of us know from anecdotal discussions. The majority of OA output is published under more permissive licenses. In particular the CC BY license dominates, especially in fully OA journals. It’s useful to see this confirmed across the market, and also to see how the figures differ for the large publishers.

However, licenses that allow sharing with some restrictions remain significant, and show no signs of collapsing. Many publishers continue to make use of them. In fact, restricted licenses cover the majority of output in some disciplines. Subscribers to our database can examine this in more detail and also look at longer term trends.

Of course, we have yet to see the effects of large-scale mandates such as Plan S, or the UKRI’s newer policies , on the numbers. Common sense suggests that the proportions of CC BY licensed output are likely to increase, and we look forward to revisiting the data in the coming months and years.

News & Views: China’s New STM Policies: By the Numbers

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 23:13:00 GMT

A series of new plans and policies that could potentially impact STM publishing in China in a major way over the next few years have attracted a great deal of global attention. In this article, we take a look at the financial forces driving these policies to better understand their impact. As the vast majority of stakeholders (i.e., researchers, publishers, libraries) in the Chinese STM publishing industry are publicly funded, we treat China as one entity. The assessment looks at online publications only as the mainstream format.

Expenditure on Reading

According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, a total of 2,663 higher education institutions (HEIs) were registered in China at the end of 2018. The Steering Committee for Academic Libraries (SCAL) maintains a database and encourages members to submit data on their annual spending. According to the latest SCAL University Library Development Report , 964 libraries spent a total of $473.5m USD in 2018 to purchase electronic content, with a median spending of $155k USD. This list includes most of the top schools (66%) offering graduate programs (Tier 1) as well as some colleges (26%) without these programs (Tier 2). Assuming that all the Tier 1 schools not included in this list had spending above the median, and that all Tier 2 schools not included spent below the median, 75% of Chinese universities had less than $155k USD to spend on electronic content.

Electronic content includes everything from databases, e-journals and e-books to proceedings published both locally and by foreign organizations. For the majority of Chinese schools, the library budget is allocated first to purchase domestic Chinese language databases such as Chinese National Knowledge Interface (CNKI), which carries a price tag of 100k to several million Ren Min Bi (RMB – the official currency of China). In the case of a school with a budget below the median, once Chinese journal databases have been paid for, there is not much left to buy foreign publications. In fact, we estimate that less than 20% of Chinese university libraries buy foreign language databases.

To verify this estimate, we checked the Chinese university library consortium DRAA ’s website and found that the largest consortium deal (in terms of number of members) organized for foreign language journals included 497 participants, or less than 19% of Chinese universities. This means that over 80% of Chinese universities may have access to little or no content behind a paywall, including content they themselves produced as researchers. With library budget increases at less than 3% annually (anecdotally), there is no reason to believe that this picture would change in the foreseeable future. With this in mind, it appears Open Access (OA) STM publishing would significantly benefit China.

Expenditure on Publishing

The benefit of access to research published OA is only one side of the equation. In a 2016 article , Weihong Cheng and Shengli Ren estimated that China expended a total of $72.17m USD on Article Processing Charges (APCs) in 2015. The “2020 Blue Book on China’s Scientific Journal Development” (the Blue Book ¹ ) includes an estimate of China’s APC spend in 2019 using the same methodology; it shows that China spent a total of $140m USD (average: $2,054/article) to publish OA articles in pure Gold or Hybrid journals. Although these charges may be paid by the funder, the author’s institution, or the author, this estimate assumes that the APC is paid in full at list price and that only articles with at least one Chinese funder are counted.

The Blue Book ¹ also reveals that the number of Gold OA articles produced by Chinese authors increased by 101.7% between 2016 and 2019, faster than the increase in total number of articles published by Chinese authors (65.9%). The share of Gold OA articles as components of Chinese overall research output has increased slowly but steadily over the last 5 years, as shown in the figure below.

Source: Dimensions.ai/Digital Science.

In an annualized projection (based on data from Dimensions ), China is on track to publish 683k research articles (at least one of the authors’ organization is located in China) and fund more than 393k of them (at least one of the funders is a Chinese organization) in 2020. Of the 393k funded articles, fewer than 20% will likely be published in Gold and Hybrid journals.

Assuming the average cost per article remains the same as 2019, the total APC cost would be $159m USD. If all of these 393k 2020 China funded articles were published in Gold and Hybrid journals, total APC cost would surge to $808m USD. (Note: it is likely that funding information is not available for some articles and the actual number of articles funded by China is more than 393k.)

Revenue from Publishing

The third piece of this picture is publishers – specifically, publisher revenue. The bulk of English language STM journals published by domestic Chinese publishers are done so under a co-publishing agreement with an overseas publisher2, with revenue shared between partners. As revenue information remains unavailable, we make an educated guess on the basis of the number of published articles. A total of 359 English language titles were registered in China in 2019, of which 204 were indexed in SCI1. All the SCI indexed titles published a total of 26,754 articles1, or an average of 131 articles per title. If we do the math, the estimated total number of articles published by Chinese domestic English language titles was approximately 47k. We also know anecdotally that most of these titles are OA and, according to the Blue Book, more than 85% of the articles they published were written by Chinese authors. Again, basing our estimate on an average APC of $2,054 USD, the total revenue these titles would generate is $96.6m USD, to be shared between Chinese publishers and the international publishers they partner with.

Despite an increase in English language titles, the annual number of articles published by these titles remained nearly the same over the last decade (and decreased in some years). In contrast, articles produced by Chinese authors has been increasing rapidly, at an average annual rate of 15.7%. According to Dimensions, Chinese authors produced a total of 524k articles in 2019, resulting in a total number of articles published by domestic Chinese English language journals of less than 9% of this overall total.

The capacity of Chinese journals contrasts sharply with research output, as demonstrated by the figure below taken from the Blue Book. As the Blue Book is available in print only, the graphic above is a reproduction of the original with permission from the publisher, and with captions translated into English. Numbers shown in the graph were the numbers of articles indexed in SCI.

Source: 2020 Blue Book on China’s Scientific Journal Development (the Blue Book1).

Conclusion

Taking into account the cost of reading and publishing, compared to revenue from publishing, it is clear that while China will benefit greatly from Open Access, sufficient funding is currently not available to cover the costs of all articles when using an APC-based OA business model. Although there is great potential to increase China’s share of the global STM publishing market, it remains unclear just how to solve the inherent funding situation.

New plans and policies introduced in China recently have aimed to control and decelerate growth in article publishing cost on the one hand (setting limits on the number of qualified publications, capping publishing cost at 20k RMB per article, etc.), while growing domestic STM publishing capacity on the other (through continual financial support). The most eye-catching of these results is the mandate to publish one-third of representative articles in domestic Chinese journals, which could have the greatest impact on distribution of Chinese research by non-Chinese journals. However, China’s continued growth in R&D spending and research output could mitigate some of this reduction in distribution of research through non-Chinese publishers if overall volume continues to increase.

Dimensions shows that 2020 year-to-date article output by China is 584k and projected annual output is 683k. If Chinese 2021 output is just 600k, and one-third of these articles are published in domestic publications (assuming there is enough capacity) with a 20k RMB publishing cost cap ($3k), China could save $600m USD by publishing more of their research in domestic publications. This may be one mechanism to manage the cost of publication while also encouraging Open Access publication.

References:

1. 2020 Blue Book on China’s Scientific Journal Development, September 2020, published by Science Press on behalf of Chinese Association of Science and Technology

2. Zhang Y, Bao F, Wu J and Lin H, Reflections on the international impact of Chinese STM journals, doi: 10.1002/leap.1203, Learned Publishing 2019; 32: 126–136

This article is © 2020 Delta Think, Inc. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . Please do get in touch if you want to use it in other contexts – we’re usually pretty accommodating.

Celebrating the launch of SSP’s Journals Quickstarter

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 21:38:00 GMT

As proud participants and supporters of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), Delta Think is excited to share our team’s contributions to a brand new training course, now available exclusively in the SSP OnDemand library.

The newly launched  Journals Quickstarter Training  provides a robust overview of the scholarly journals ecosystem, designed to give earlier to mid-career professionals the “quick start” needed to understand and navigate our industry. 

The various modules focus on the major facets of journals publishing, including financial skills, business models, marketing, editorial and production, data and decision making, and tools and technology. The overarching goal is to provide participants with an understanding of the various components of journal publishing and how they work together, as well as some food for thought when considering a potential career path.

Chief Commercial Officer Lori Carlin shares her many years of expertise as Marketing module co-presenter, while Founder and CEO Ann Michael contributes to Data and Decision Making .

Visit the registration page to see a full list of speakers and more detail for each module .

News & Views Webinar: Market Sizing Update

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 13:56:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our October News & Views companion online discussion forum!

In our fourth online discussion, we focused on breaking down the Market Sizing Update released earlier this month. While the interactive discussion component of the topic is new, Delta Think has been releasing Market Sizing Updates annually since the launch of the Open Access Data and Analytics tool in 2017, If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

News & Views: Open Access Market Sizing Update 2020

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 05:16:00 GMT

Overview

Delta Think's OA Market Sizing (i.e., revenue generated by providers or, conversely, costs incurred to buyers of content) shows that the open access market continues to grow faster than the underlying journals publishing market. Based on current trends, we estimate it to have been worth around $763m in 2019 and on track to grow to around $850m in 2020.

Headline numbers

We estimate that the OA market grew to around $763m in 2019.

The 13% increase over 2018 is larger than the growth in the underlying scholarly journals market, which is typically low to mid-single digit.
Trends in the data suggest that the growth rate in open access has been falling over previous years and will fall over the coming years to around 12% annually, but will remain above the underlying market rates. The open access market is on target to be over $850m in 2020.
Just over 30% of all scholarly articles are published as paid-for open access, accounting for just over 7% of the total journal publishing market value.
We anticipate a 2019-2022 CAGR of just over 10.5% in OA output and 11.5% in OA market value.

A note about our method

We aggregate data from our exclusive annual publisher survey – which now covers around two thirds of indexed global output, and just under half of everything in Crossref – and project it against patterns in the Unpaywall and OpenAPC data sets to model the entire market. As so few publishers account for such a large proportion of our market’s output and value, we need to compensate for variations exhibited by individual publishers to focus on underlying trends.

We base our estimates on the extrapolation of previously established trends. If these trends were to change (e.g., COVID-19 impact, accelerated transformative agreements, etc.), there would be a corresponding change in the 2020 and forward estimates.

As algorithms in the underlying data sources improve, they continue to discover more content. This means that the apparent volume of output (OA or not) is appearing to grow retrospectively. This may not indicate “more stuff” – just that we are better at finding it. We continue to refine how we estimate open access as our underlying data sources evolve, and our survey sample continues to increase.

Patterns of open access output vary considerably depending on how open access is defined. For the purposes of estimating market size, we focus on articles published under any Creative Commons (CC) licenses. We feel the trends in CC licenses represent a reasonable view of the reality of commercial OA activity, even though not all comply with all OA mandates or definitions. We have discussed this in other venues and will explore it in more depth in our upcoming webinar.

Trends

Growth is slowing, although it remains in double digits, and is still well ahead of the underlying journals market.
The growth curves show signs of flattening out to a steady state of just over 10% annual growth in both volume and value of OA.
Hybrid revenues realized per article published are higher than those published in fully OA journals, but the gap is narrowing. Those for articles in fully OA journals show signs of long-term increases, whereas those for hybrid appear to be flattening. This may partly be due to how revenues are allocated with mixed-model deals.

The trends mask important nuances. Individual publishers exhibit different dynamics, which is not surprising given how varied their portfolios can be.

Annual phasing varies between publishers. Some publishers in our sample produced less than their trend in one year but make up the shortfall in the following year, or vice-versa. Others saw accelerated growth in a particular year, driven by increased publication volumes and/or increased prices. As a result, we see fluctuations in the overall numbers for year to year. However, the underlying trends appear to remain consistent.
Hybrid proportion and growth varies considerably among publishers and can reflect timing in output or acquisitions.
Payments per article vary wildly depending on the sample. For example, the Open APC data suggest higher-than average numbers, reflecting their focus on high-output and European institutions. Meanwhile, some segments of the market may see fully OA APCs that are higher than hybrid APCs (counter to the overarching market averages).
Regions vary greatly. Waivers offered to low-GDP countries and how OA is funded are highly variable.

Conclusion

Based on current trends, the open access market remains buoyant and set to grow significantly faster than the underlying scholarly journals market.

Open access output now accounts for at least 30% of publications when looking at any CC license, but that drops markedly if focusing on only the most permissive licenses. Likewise, by counting anything that is open to read (but not necessarily to reuse), then over half of output is open.

The proportion of money spent on open access continues to lag the proportion of output, but it continues to gain ground. It is driven principally by increasing volumes of output, although pricing policies can help drive revenues for some .

In our view, the drivers of cancellations of big deals, the rise of transformative agreements, and perhaps the emerging growth of non APC-based subscription models, will continue to accelerate the spending on open access. Subscription access payments will inevitably be squeezed, and fully OA activity is taking an increasing share of value. Meanwhile, many areas of the world with high OA adoption have low GDP and therefore limited effect on global payment averages. Funder mandates, transformative agreements, and cancellations of big deals may have a lesser impact on the OA landscape outside of Europe and North America.

The reality on the ground may change compared with the mathematical models we use. Once OA adoption in the vanguard regions reaches saturation, we may see growth of OA slow significantly as the remaining regions show weaker drivers. Additionally, our models do not account for COVID-19. Anecdotally, we know that submissions and publications have both increased over the past seven months for many journals. However, acceptance rates on these submissions are often reported at much lower levels than normal. Most publishers prudently anticipating a submission slow-down have not yet experienced it. Even if that research slowdown does not occur, the effects of shrinking GDP may dampen publishing revenues regardless of business model .

We have highlighted just a few of the trends that our Open Access Data and Analytics Tool explores in depth. We will be rolling these out for our subscribers shortly, including projections of spending and output over the coming 3-5 years.

Thriving within the ‘new normal’: SSP Sessions

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 14:29:00 GMT

Nobody expected the cancellations of so many meetings this year. The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) 2020 Annual Meeting was one such casualty, though the Society's leadership acted quickly to pivot content meant for in person to digital and on demand. Our team contributed several sessions as part of this effort:

Ann Michael contributed within 'From Here to Data Maturity' a pragmatic discussion-based session focused on leveraging data to drive business and customer value.

Lori Carlin contributed to the 'The Changing Academic Publishing Landscape in China' session which focused on Chinese researcher viewpoints and publisher strategy with regard to the challenges and opportunities in the region.

Alison McGonagle-O'Connell participated within '"Revolutionary" Standards- An Oxymoron or Reality?' a NISO-organized session on community supported standards and their power in workflow transformation.

We remain committed to growing the ecosystem through sharing knowledge, and are very happy to share expertise by participating in community events virtually, in person (when it's safe) and everywhere in between. Check our events calendar to keep up on our activities!

Flashback to another world: Recollecting NISO Plus

Sun, 04 Oct 2020 22:20:00 GMT

This year, complete with all its challenges and silver linings, has come at us fast. It feels like just yesterday, we were shaking hands and hugging colleagues and friends ‘in person’ at NISO Plus in Baltimore. Of course, that was late February, and in many ways, a very different world from the one we live… Read More

The post Flashback to another world: Recollecting NISO Plus appeared first on Delta Think .

News & Views: Preprints and COVID-19: Findings from our PRW Survey

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 01:42:00 GMT

In anticipation of Peer Review Week 2020 , and in consideration of the theme ‘Trust in Peer Review’, Delta Think surveyed broadly across a two-week period in August to determine whether COVID-19 has impacted perceptions of preprints. The survey was open to everyone – from Publishers to Librarians to Researchers to the Lay Public with an interest in scientific output.

We entered into the survey with open minds, though a few recurring themes circulating in news outlets were on our minds including: the idea that both traditional journal submissions and articles posted to preprint servers have spiked in the last six months, owing to COVID-19; and the hunch that perhaps increased traffic indicated a correlated spike in trust, or conversely, that challenged findings making their way into mainstream news might have reduced trust. Was the reputation associated with preprints in jeopardy? Or could they play a critical role in speeding up science at a time so critical for the global health community? With these early loose hypotheses and questions, we launched the survey.

We explore the survey results below. In the spirit of transparency, we have posted the underlying data to Zenodo . It’s also important to note that while this was a quick survey, and is not meant to include a representative sample from the participating audiences, it provides interesting top-level findings and points to areas that may be ripe for a further investigation or a deeper dive in future.

Survey Population Demographics

In total, we collected 371 responses to the survey. Of this population:

Over 72% identified as either a Publisher, Librarian or Researcher
A majority of responses came from North America (over 55%)
Second-highest participation from Europe and Central Asia (25%)
East Asia and Pacific and Rest of World account for close to 20% of responses

Of this multi-disciplinary population:

Nearly 85% work in Biological Sciences and Medicine
53% are affiliated with Engineering, Physical Sciences, or Chemistry
Over 40% claimed association with Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences

Note: Respondents could select multiple disciplines.

We limited the survey to respondents who were already familiar with preprints by offering an initial question to gauge familiarity. Those who were unfamiliar exited the survey at this point (6% of those starting the survey).

Trust Balances

When it comes to the question of trust in preprints, the average trust level came in almost exactly at the midpoint at 51 out of 100, where 100 indicates the highest trust and 0 indicates no trust. But a few notable variances stand out in the details. Taking a closer look at Authors vs. Non-Authors, we find Authors overall more trusting of preprints, and if we look by role, those who identified as Researchers are the most trusting group of all. Publishers, on the other hand, are the least trusting.

Figure 1: All responses to, “How much do you trust the findings presented in a Preprint manuscript?”

COVID-19 Impact on Behavior & Trust

Next we asked how the COVID pandemic has changed their perspectives on preprints. About 60% of all respondents reported that their trust has remained unchanged despite COVID-19. Still, Non-Authors were more likely than Authors to report a decrease in trust, and Publishers were more likely than Librarians and Researchers to report a decrease in trust.

Looking at specialties, Arts & Humanities and Social Science affiliated respondents were slightly more likely to report a trust increase, while Engineering, Physical Science & Chemistry, and Biological Sciences and Medicine were more likely to report a decrease in trust.

Figure 2: Specialty responses to: “In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, has your trust of Preprints increased, decreased, or remained the same in the last year?”

When asked why their trust increased, those with increased levels primarily reported that speed became more important than pre-publication peer review.

When respondents reported that trust had decreased, overall they pointed to a perceived quality problem and worried that many preprints being published now do not present well-constructed studies or findings. They also noted that traditional pre-publication review is necessary now more than ever.

Overall Benefits of Preprints

The greatest benefits of preprints, according to all respondents, are:

Speed
Openness
Connection to facilitating open peer review

A deeper dive into filters by author status, specialty, role, and region mostly showed speed and openness as the top two benefits. Different groups, however, picked various options as their third most important benefit. Authors wanted increased visibility for their research; Engineering, Physical Sciences & Chemistry chose increased cooperation in research across labs; Biological Sciences and Medicine wanted to facilitate open peer review.

Some interesting findings appeared in the regional breakouts as well. Those from the Rest of World countries selected increased visibility of their research as well as the researcher as the #1 benefit, and East Asia appreciated that it was cost-efficient or free more so than other regions.

Figure 3: Region specific breakdown of top Preprint benefits (respondents could chose up to three)

Conclusion

Nearly seven months into the COVID-19 pandemic, trust in Preprints mostly holds steady for the majority of respondents to this survey, although respondents in Engineering, Physical Science & Chemistry, and Biological Sciences and Medicine had higher levels of doubt, and those in Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences were more likely to express an increase in trust.

And overall, Authors & Researchers were the most positive about preprints of all the groups.

Shoring up preprint review quality, increasing preprint reviews, and increasing awareness of checks already in place on preprint servers, could go a long way toward increasing trust in preprints and growing activity. While the speed and openness of preprints emerge in the data as clear, universally agreed benefits, improving review seems the prudent path forward toward enticing the research community to wholeheartedly embrace these benefits.

Delta Think wishes to thank all those who participated in the survey. For each survey completed, we donated $5 to Project HOPE , up to $1,000.

News & Views Webinar: Sustainable Open Access

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 18:20:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our August News & Views companion online discussion forum!

Following on from our inaugural sessions on Market Predictions During Economic Uncertainty in April , and on balance of business models across content types in June , our August News & Views discussion webinar focused on Sustainable Open Access - including Collective Action models. This is the first time we've invited guests to our discussion: Sara Rouhi, Director of Strategic Partnerships at PLOS, and Raym Crow, Managing Partner and Senior Consultant at Chain Bridge Group, and SPARC, respectively. If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

News & Views: Sustainable Open Access – What’s Next?

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 00:57:00 GMT

This month we look at some factors driving publishers to consider a move toward Open Access publishing, explore business models to support OA beyond the now ubiquitous Article Processing Charge (APC), and share an interview with Raym Crow, an industry expert working with not for profit and commercial publishers to define alternative business models for OA publishing.

Is OA gaining momentum?

Several factors appear to be converging to accelerate the move toward Open Access. To start, as many publishers made their COVID-related content freely available, participants in the scholarly publishing ecosystem began to question why this content was not open from its inception , adding perceived pressure to move to open access publishing.

Then there is the perception of Plan S. While the reach of Plan S may be debated, it is difficult to deny the impact it has had on publishers, many of whom have considered funder mandates to foreshadow the industry “direction of travel.” When Plan S refined its criteria for Transformative Agreements , for example, there was an immediate response by Springer Nature to not only commit “the majority of our non-OA journals” to a transformative path, but to also include its flagship journal, Nature.

Additionally, earlier this year the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) held several discussions with publishers about how changes in their policies could impact U.S. academic publishing. One potential element of the OSTP policy was promoting zero-day embargo Green OA as a path to compliance with a policy requiring immediate OA. While OSTP has not taken any official positions, their consultation process triggered many publishers (several of our consulting clients included) to rethink (or move to establish) their OA strategy.

Business models 101

Delta Think tracks a multitude of business models. Most of the widely used business models are variations on a few core approaches.

There is subscription for access to content, with all its variations in bundling and deal sizes.
There are various Open Access models, but most (not all) rely on some payment or tracking of an Article Processing Charge . With few exceptions, what often varies is who pays the APC and how they pay it.
There are some sponsorship or subsidy models where a reader (in the subscription world) or an author (in the OA world) is not paying for their access or publication fees directly, but some other entity is funding the publication.

These issues and others have led some publishers to explore collective action models, most notably the “Subscribe to Open” model pioneered in academic publishing by Annual Reviews . Subscribe to Open was structured to retain subscribers while flipping Annual Reviews’ publications to a fully open model. It is based on collective action principles, but it is a specific instantiation of those principles for journals that have an existing subscription base.No business model is without limitations. While charging an APC is currently the most prevalent model used to sustain open access, its limitations are apparent. Depending on funding source, APC’s can be a barrier to participation in open access for some authors and research topics. Shifting to an APC funded OA model also means that the full burden of the cost of publication rests with producers (authors and/or those paying APC’s on their behalf). Consumers of research bear none of the cost burden but experience no reduced benefit.

Publishers experimenting with collective action models

Publisher

Collective Action Announcement

Annual Reviews

https://www.annualreviews.org/page/subscriptions/subscribe-to-open

Berghahn Books

https://berghahnbooks.com/blog/open-access-week-is-here

Brill Publishers

http://libraria.cc/program-areas/subscribe-to-open

EDP Sciences

https://www.edpsciences.org/en/news-highlights/2072-successful-subscribe-to-open-pilot-paves-the-way-for-a-ground-breaking-roll-out-across-the-edp-sciences-maths-portfolio

EMS Press

https://ems.press/subscribe-to-open

An interview with Raym Crow

We were interested in finding out more about the principles of collective action and how they can be applied to academic publishing. Do they require a subscriber base to be successful? Can a new journal be launched with a collective action model? Can a journal that is already open access “flip” to a collective action model? What are the limitations?

To explore these questions, we spoke with Raym Crow of Chain Bridge Group.

Raym Crow has over 30 years' experience in academic publishing and library information services, specializing in strategic business planning. He supports the development and ongoing operation of all types of nonprofit publishing and information initiatives by making them mission relevant and financially self-sustaining.

For over a decade, Raym has focused on collective models to support the provision of open access services. Here’s what we discussed.

1) How long have you been working with publishers to flip journals using a collective action model?

I’ve been consulting for about 20 years, working independently and—since 2002—as a consultant with SPARC. During that time, I’ve explored various models for opening access to research outputs, especially those sponsored by scholarly societies and university presses. Some collective-support models focused on launching new open access journals and others—like ‘Subscribe to Open’, developed with Annual Reviews—focused on flipping existing subscription journals.

2) Some folks wonder if a collective action model is sustainable. Why would someone pay for something they can get the benefit of for free? How would you address that concern?

That’s the gist of the collective funding problem: How to get institutions to contribute to the support of an open resource when it’s in their individual self-interest to let others pay to provide it.

Most public goods are provided by government via compulsory taxation, but that’s not really an option—at least, not directly—for many of the open resources we want to sustain.

Sometimes, small groups of institutions will come together to fund an open resource, such as an open-source software application. In those cases, the benefit to the contributing institutions, including direct influence on the end product, may be sufficient to justify the investment, even if the resource is eventually open to all.

Other initiatives rely on institutional altruism and social incentives to motivate contributions. While this approach can work on a limited basis—some portion of institutions might contribute—it can be cumbersome (and expensive) to coordinate and unstable over time. As a result, altruism alone tends to be a weak model for journals and other serial resources.

Another common approach is to provide some type of private benefit, exclusive to institutions that contribute to the open resource, as an inducement to provide support. This can work, as long as the private benefit is of sufficient value and doesn’t add appreciably to the cost of providing the open resource, not always an easy balance to achieve.

Another challenge when providing private benefits is that the offer may resemble a market transaction and be treated as such by libraries. This perception can undermine pro-social motivations for contributing, limiting the funds available for the resource.

Most collective support models probably fall somewhere on the continuum from pure altruism to compelling private benefits.

3) Are there any mature examples of this type of model in scholarly publishing or other industries?

Collective activity is everywhere—including cooperatives, credit unions, scholarly societies, and advocacy organizations. Again, much of this activity is driven by exclusive benefits to contributing members. There’s an additional challenge when collective action targets provision of open resources.

The small-group collective action I mentioned before represents one of the most common and successful approaches for developing open scholarly infrastructure resources. These initiatives often morph into user-based membership models for long-term operating support, with varying degrees of success.

4) It seems as though many of the applications of collective action are for "flips" where there is an existing subscriber base. Can this model be applied to a publication without existing subscribers?

Collective models can certainly be applied to publications without existing subscriber bases. Perhaps the simplest example would be the ‘conditional provision’ of a new journal, where the publisher makes publication of the journal contingent on securing sufficient long-term support. It’s a little more involved than that in practice, but the concept is simple.

Although its design was informed by collective action issues, ‘Subscribe to Open’ or S2O isn’t really a collective model, as it relies on subscribers acting in their economic self-interest and on existing subscription sales and procurement processes. As a result, S2O is more suitable to mature journals with readily identifiable subscriber bases.

5) What's next? How might collective action models evolve? Are you contemplating other business models for flipping or starting open publications?

There are several promising possibilities that we’re working on.

One is to coordinate ‘Subscribe to Open’ offers across multiple journals. The idea here is that multiple S2O offers can be linked so that participants in one offer can also enjoy the benefits of parallel offers. A major aggregator of nonprofit journals has expressed interest in exploring such an implementation, and that could provide an opportunity to extend S2O to a large number of society and university press journals that might not be in a position to act on their own.

Also, we’re working with Annual Reviews to help launch a community of practice for S2O . We hope that will provide publishers a channel for sharing their specific experiences with the model and provide a resource to encourage other publishers to explore S2O. That site will be launching soon.

SPARC continues to support efforts to design and implement a collective funding framework capable of providing ongoing operating funds for open resources. The framework’s objective is to maximize participation in collective funding initiatives, while reducing the costs of coordinating each funding action.

Conclusions (and Observations)

It will be interesting to see how these deals progress. Not only might 'Subscribe to Open' prove a viable model for certain publications, but collective action more broadly may be a model that supports flipping to Open Access or converting an existing Open Access publication from APC-based to an open subscription model.

With the diversity that exists in academic publishing on so many dimensions (subject area, geography, funding models, etc.), it is reasonable to believe that a variety of approaches to sustainability will be required. We look forward to following collective action models to understand what their contribution might be to the sustainability landscape.

TOP HEADLINES

PLOS and LibLynx partner to develop Open Access Analytics – August 11, 2020

"[LibLynx is] delighted to announce that we’re partnering with the Public Library of Science (PLOS) to develop ground-breaking analytics that better communicate the usage and impact of Open Access (OA) content… These new approaches will provide stakeholders with reports customized to meet their changing needs and underpin the development of new business models."

cOAlition S response to the ERC Scientific Council’s statement on Open Access and Plan S – July 21, 2020

"cOAlition S has taken note that the ERC Scientific Council wishes to pursue their joint efforts towards Open Access in a more independent way. The European Commission continues to support cOAlition S and Plan S. cOAlition S remains firm in its view that support for hybrid journals has failed to accelerate the transition to full and immediate Open Access over the past two decades."

ERC Scientific Council calls for open access plans to respect researchers’ needs – July 20, 2020

"During the past six months, the ERC Scientific Council has intensified its internal debate and reached a unanimous decision to follow a path towards Open Access implementation that is independent of cOAlition S activities. Therefore it has decided to withdraw as a supporter of cOAlition S."

Leaders agree on slimmed-down €80.9B for Horizon Europe – July 20, 2020

"EU leaders agreed on a pared-back budget of €80.9 billion for the Horizon Europe research programme, in the fifth day of a marathon summit to debate the EU’s long-term budget and a post-pandemic economic recovery plan. The final figure – a big blow to research advocates - is significantly lower than a proposal of €94.4 billion put forward by the European Commission in May."

ACS Publications announces new open science resource center – July 16, 2020

"Researchers, librarians and administrators who visit this resource will find information on open science and open access publishing, will learn how to comply with funder requirements and will be able to search ACS’ open access agreements to find out if they are eligible to have article publishing charges (known as APCs) waived. These new tools will speed the transition to an open science future by effectively communicating how open access publishing works for ACS’ extensive community of authors."

cOAlition S develops “Rights Retention Strategy” to safeguard researchers’ intellectual ownership rights and suppress unreasonable embargo periods – July 15, 2020

"Publishers commonly require authors to sign exclusive publishing agreements which restrict what authors can do with their research findings, including making articles Open Access in line with their funders’ requirements. To address this problem, cOAlition S has developed a Rights Retention Strategy, which will empower their funded researchers to publish in their journal of choice, including subscription journals, and provide Open Access in compliance with Plan S."

Simba Report: COVID-19 to Accelerate Transition to Open Access Publishing – July 7, 2020

"As the world grapples with a pandemic that has brought death and economic devastation, the crisis has demonstrated the value of open access (OA) to research articles, but also the need for a larger open infrastructure to share methodology, data and results more broadly—this according to the most recent report from media and publishing intelligence firm Simba Information."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

August 17, 2020

Royal Society of Chemistry launches new open access atmospheric science journal

"The new journal, entitled Environmental Science: Atmospheres, is a cross-disciplinary journal spanning all aspects of atmospheric science... The new journal is fully gold open access, and article processing charges have been waived until mid 2023, meaning it is both free to read and free to publish in."

August 13, 2020

The Geological Society of London and Frontiers: Publishing Partnership Announcement

"Frontiers and the Geological Society of London are thrilled to announce that they have formed a publishing partnership to facilitate the launch of a new Gold Open Access journal Earth Science, Systems and Society (also known as ES3). Earth Science, Systems and Society (ES3), will publish timely and topical research of high importance across the breadth of the geosciences."

August 4, 2020

SAGE, Association for Computing Machinery Announce Collective Intelligence, New Open Access Journal in Collaboration with Nesta

"Collective Intelligence will be co-owned by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and SAGE Publishing with support from and in collaboration with the innovation foundation Nesta. The online-only, gold open access journal...will provide a home for theoretical and empirical results from many disciplines that can contribute to this cross-disciplinary body of knowledge about how, why, and when collective intelligence works and how it can be improved."

August 4, 2020

Oryx to become open access from January 2021

"Oryx – The International Journal of Conservation, is to become fully open access from 1 January 2021, making it free to read by anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world. New research submitted after 1 August will be published Open Access from next year. Thanks to a grant from long-time supporter, The Rufford Foundation, unfunded authors will benefit from a generous APC (article processing charge) waiver policy."

July 31, 2020

ACS announces nine gold open access journals launching in 2021

"ACS is announcing the expansion of the ACS Au portfolio with nine new fully open access journals to be launched in 2021. This expansion is a further example of ACS Publication’s commitment to open science and to improving the world through the transformative power of chemistry."

July 22, 2020

ScienceOpen and Compuscript collaborate to feature new open access journal, BIO Integration

"The interactive research and discovery platform, ScienceOpen, and publisher, Compuscript Ltd, have partnered to showcase a newly launched open access, biomedical sciences journal: BIO Integration (BIOI). As an open access journal, BIOI is an inclusiveforum that promotes communication between scientific ideas and clinical needs."

July 20, 2020

University of Buckingham Press launches The Buckingham Journal of Education

"University of Buckingham Press (UBP) has published the first Issue of The Buckingham Journal of Education, a new academic journal focussed on the evolution and future of education, published in association with the School of Education at the University of Buckingham. The Journal is available to all on Open Access."

Zooming in to Open Access in the CHORUS Forum

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 16:49:00 GMT

On July 30, Delta Think Chief Digital Officer Dan Pollock participated in a CHORUS Forum on Open Access Policies and Compliance in a Global Context. Dan’s talk was part of the webinar session moderated by David Crotty of Oxford University Press, and also included presentations by Alicia Wise from Information Power and Yasushi Ogasaka from Japan Science and Technology Agency.

Dan’s talk focused on the global landscape, shedding light on some of the meaningful differences between nomenclature, regional differences in mandates and uptake, and discipline, and whether these variables need to be considered when contextualizing open access data in relation to a specific organizational or regional interest. With permission from CHORUS, we are sharing the presentation video below.

Have five minutes? Participate in our survey on Preprints

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 11:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of Peer Review Week 2020 , and in consideration of the theme Trust in Peer Review, Delta Think is currently surveying broadly to determine whether COVID-19 has impacted perceptions of Preprints.

The survey is open to everyone – from Publishers to Librarians to Researchers to the Lay Public with an interest in scientific output. The survey will remain open for two weeks. As a thank you, Delta Think will donate $5 to Project HOPE for every survey completed, up to a total contribution of $1,000. The survey takes less than 5 minutes to complete .

Following the survey, our team will collate and analyze the responses, and results will be released publicly in our September News & Views on September 21 – the first day of Peer Review Week! We hope that you will complete the survey , and sign up to be notified when the analysis is released.

News & Views: APC Price Changes – When does up mean down?

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 01:30:00 GMT

In the wake of COVID-19, publishers and librarians alike are experiencing and anticipating budget cuts. Understanding the true effects of price rises is now more critical than ever. However, understanding what price changes mean is not straightforward. This month, we explore why headline APC price increases can be misleading…and could even lead to less spending.

General principles

Our analysis was inspired by a recent study which called out some large increases in APCs by one publisher. Our intention is not to single out the publisher, nor to criticize the study. Looking at headline price increases is always a key step in planning budgets. If a large proportion of a publisher's journal APC prices increase, then on the surface this suggests buyers will pay more overall.

However, headline APC increases do not show the whole picture. As we have explored previously , it is important to put numbers in context.

We analyzed APC changes across our data set of 30+ publishers, covering about two thirds of indexed output, to see how the patterns scale across the market. We have chosen results from three publishers which illustrate how different data points can lead to different conclusions. In the spirit of neutrality, we have anonymized the results, we avoided the publisher referenced in the study, and we have omitted measures of scale. All the publishers in our sample publish significant numbers of journals and volumes of content. Table 1 shows the results, which we explain below.

Sources: Publishers’ price lists, Unpaywall, ISSN.org, Delta Think analysis.

Choosing the right measure

Let’s look at Publisher A and consider each of its measures.

The % APC increase for each of its journals averages to an inflation-busting 17.6%. At first glance this appears to be a significant price increase.
But APCs are charged per article. By factoring in the number of articles, we can see how much more might be paid for any given paper. The average APC of a paper increased by 10.3%. In other words, a relatively large volume of papers for this publisher are published in journals with more modest price increases. This is still large, but much less so than the headline increase.
Of course, percentages are relative. A large % increase on a small price may have only a mild effect on total spending and vice versa. If we scale our averages to prices, we see prices on average shifted by 10.6%. The high journal price increases are likely skewed across the lower-priced journals. This has the net effect of reducing the impact of the headline increase.
Finally, if we combine article weightings with price weightings (items 2 and 3), we get the final column. This is indicative of the change in spending across the publisher’s entire portfolio. It shows a net increase of a much more modest 3.9%. We see a multiplier effect between article and journal weightings.

What does this mean for you?

The distributions and papers published can make a huge difference to how much money might be spent. The principles can be applied to other publishers, and to libraries or consortia analyzing their submissions. To illustrate this, we look at the other publishers’ figures in the table above.

A. Publisher A (as we saw above) showed how high headline per-journal increase may translate to something more modest when scaled up.

B. Publisher B shows a variation of this. A modest price increase of 2.1% on average translates into a significant decreasein spending of almost 8%. Why? Our averages may include journals whose prices have reduced too. If a significant proportion of papers are published in these journals, then their combined savings more than offset the price increases across the other journals.

C. Publisher C shows the reverse. A modest price increase of 2.0% on average this time translates into an almost 8% increase in potential spending. The modest increases are likely spread across the publisher’s pricier journals.

Conclusion

Headline APC price changes can belie the true impact of pricing on total spend.

As we have mentioned in previous analyses , the spread of prices within a given publisher’s portfolio is an important factor in understanding total spend. So too is the volume of papers affected by the price change. We need to combine different data to unpick how headline price increases might translate into total expenditure or revenue (for buyer or seller respectively.)

This all requires good data of course. By combining multiple data sets at scale, we can see what price changes mean for a publisher, or across an institution. Given data specific to an organization, we could further tailor the analysis to meet its specific situation. Canny operators can use the principles to optimize their pricing positions – whichever side of the negotiating table they sit.

Participants in negotiations of course want to present themselves in the best possible light. By combining neutral data at scale, we try to look behind the headlines and arrive at an objective conclusion that could be used as evidence acceptable to all.

Responding to challenge with increased collaboration: Announcing the C19 Rapid Review Founders Roundtable

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 12:08:00 GMT

We are all about helping organizations adapt to dynamic environments whether within the publishing sector or the funder landscape. When asked about navigating uncertainty during our April News and Views discussion , Founder Ann Michael pointed to cross-publisher and cross-organization collaboration as the way forward.

One stellar example of this kind of pragmatic collaboration to advance outcomes is the C19 Rapid Review Initiative between publishers, engineered to fast track critical Coronavirus related research by sharing reviewers and submissions. Members of this initiative include PLOS , Hindawi , Royal Society , PeerJ , and more, and supporters include OASPA and others.

We are very pleased to announce our participation in the upcoming C19 Rapid Review Founders Roundtable discussion , facilitating publishers to test the limits of this collaboration. To explore future scenarios for continued work together in a post-Coronavirus environment.

Delta Think CCO Lori Carlin will moderate the discussion, which will include Hindawi's Sarah Greaves, PeerJ's Pete Binfield, PLOS' Joerg Heber, and Royal Society's Phil Hurst. Please join us , as the discussion will include an opportunity for live Q&A. See you there!

News & Views Webinar: Open Access is not just for Open Access Journals

Sat, 13 Jun 2020 11:08:00 GMT

We are proud to share a video recording of our June News & Views companion online discussion forum!

Following on from our inaugural session on Market Predictions During Economic Uncertainty in April , June's session is our second webinar and a companion to our June News & Views Newsletter on the same theme. If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!

Enjoy the discussion, and we hope you’ll join us for our next online discussion forum, which will take place in September. Hope to see you there!

News & Views: Open Access is not just for Open Access Journals

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 04:37:00 GMT

As we start preparing for our annual market sizing survey, we take a look at the data on open access uptake we have seen so far in 2020.

In this article we will explore how open access compares with other types of access and how the balance of output between access models is shifting in unexpected ways.

Background

As we have discussed previously , we use data from Unpaywall ¹ to analyze per-article information about Open Access. The other major indexes use this data too. To perform a full analysis of the publishing landscape, we must also look at journals’ business models. As has also been discussed, there is no definitive index of journals available . Those that focus on OA journals focus only on fully OA . So, we finesse the per-article information by overlaying our own data about journal business models. Our data covers around 70% of articles indexed in Crossref since 2014.

We also need to define clearly “open access” which is used by different sources to mean different things. For our analysis, we use the “formal” definition of Open Access, as coined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002. “Open Access” requires that peer-reviewed articles are BOTH free of charge to read AND have permissive usage rights. Articles that are ONLY free to read, with NO permissive reuse rights we consider to be “Public Access” (sometimes called “Bronze”). We discuss the various definitions in a supplement to this article and note some further nuances below.

Open access uptake

Figure 1 shows our estimates of OA uptake across all scholarly output, based on data from April 2020.

Sources: Crossref, Unpaywall, publishers’ pricelists, DOAJ, ROAD, Delta Think analysis.
© 2020 Delta Think, Inc. Published under CC BY-NC license; please see footnotes for details.

At first glance, this gives us a view of OA adoption. It uses Unpaywall’s OA status indicator . For example, in 2019 the % of total output accounted for by:

“Gold” (articles in Fully OA journals, shown in yellow) was around 32%.
“Hybrid” (articles other journals, with open licenses, shown in blue) was around 7%.
“Bronze” (articles in other journals, without open licenses, shown in bronze) was around 9%.
“Green” (articles only available via legitimate repositories, shown in green) was less than 5%.
"Closed” (articles which are not open to read from any legitimate source, in grey) form the balance.

Under our nomenclature, we might conclude that Open Access output – articles that are free to read and include permissive reuse rights – accounted for 39% of total output in 2019 (the 32% Gold OA plus 7% Hybrid OA). Public Access – free to read, without permissive rights – refers to the 9% Bronze.

The notable trend in the chart is that the growth in both Open Access and Public Access output appears to be slowing, with the curve of these appearing to flatten over time. Repository-only access (“Green”) appears to reach a steady state after a couple of years. We would expect this, given its commonplace connection to embargo periods.

But what exactly are we measuring?

Good though they are, the numbers above miss important details. For example, the Hybrid numbers include open access articles published both in hybrid journals, and in journals that offer no advertised open access option. We term these latter journals “not OA” but of course their publishers may choose to make selected articles in them open access (free to read and reuse), or public access (free to read only).

Similarly, articles which are “Closed” – which we take to be Paid Access – could appear in both sorts of journals. Such articles form the subscription part of hybrid journals, or the core part of not OA journals.

So, to uncover more detail concerning market dynamics, we need to separate the two sorts of “not fully OA” journals. Figure 2 below shows this separation and tells us what happens when we determine the proportions of article output within each type of journal.

Sources: Crossref, Unpaywall, publishers’ pricelists, DOAJ, ROAD, Delta Think analysis.
© 2020 Delta Think, Inc. Published under CC BY-NC license; please see footnotes for details.

Here we analyze just 2019’s data and have not shown fully OA journals for clarity. We have also replaced the color-based nomenclature with names describing access type.

We can see that the Open Access option (in blue) accounts for just under 10% of the output in hybrid journals compared with the 7% or so we saw across the market.
Around 75% of output in hybrid journals is Paid Access (in grey), compared with 50% or so across the market.
Given this, we might conclude that hybrid has just under 10% uptake of Open Access.

We can also use this break-out to assess what might happen if hybrid journals flipped. Assuming submissions stay constant, the currently Paid Access proportion gives us our maximum additional APC-based income. The economics of the Public Access content depend on how much the market would pay to flip the license to an open access one given the content is already free to read. Pressure to reduce subscription prices (and even flip to OA) could be determined by adding the open and public access components, as neither require subscriptions. At a little over 20%, this is not insignificant.

Perhaps the most surprising finding in content outside fully OA journals, is that journals with no OA option make proportionally more content Open Access and Public Access than their hybrid counterparts. The full data set in Delta Think’s OA Data and Analytics Tool allows us to analyze this over time; although not shown here, this seems to be a trend over time.

Conclusion

Literature search strategies focus on finding articles, and so looking at per-article access options is useful and relevant for researchers. Here we see that the proportion of content that is Open Access and Public Access is growing, although the growth appears to be slowing.

However, for publishers and librarians, more information is needed about parent journal types and different access models. Without this, it is not possible to understand trends in the market. With it, we can quantify the uptake of Open Access options in hybrid journals and tease out nuances between journal types.

The analysis above just scratches the surface of what we can achieve by combining multiple data sets and performing a joint analysis. Are things different for society-owned journals? What about for major publishers compared with the market average? Or for the very largest publishers? How do different disciplines compare? Might trends change in response to emerging policies and activities?

The answers to these questions will vary among organizations, of course, and require further analysis. Meanwhile, we leave you with the following (perhaps counterintuitive) finding. Across the market as a whole, it seems that you are LESS likely to find OA content in a hybrid journal which offers OA options, than in a journal with no advertised OA options at all.

Stay well and have a good month.

1 “ Unpaywall is an open source application that links every research article that has been assigned a Crossref DOI (more than 100 million in total) to the OA URLs where the paper can be read for free. It is built and maintained by Our Research (formerly Impactstory), a US-based nonprofit organization.” – The Future of OA: A large-scale analysis projecting Open Access publication and readership. Piwowar, Priem, Orr. Oct 2019. https://doi.org/10.1101/795310 .

News & Views Supplement: Defining Open Access

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 04:26:00 GMT

Analyzing any data about open access uptake – and by implication what’s not OA – can fall foul of different definitions and interpretations. In common with major indexes, we use data from Unpaywall to help us understand the access models in use across the literature. Here we unpick the definitions and color-coding in use (such as Gold and Bronze) so we can clarify the parameters of our market analysis. This discussion was originally posted as a companion to our preliminary 2020 OA uptake analysis, but supports terms used throughout our Open Access Data and Analytics Tool (OADAT).

What's in a name

The formal definition of Open Access was coined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002, which defines it as [scholarly] research literature's free availability on the public internet “without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” This is roughly equivalent to the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

The combination of free of charge to read AND of permissive usage rights form the essence of the formal definition of Open Access. However, the contemporary use ¹ of “open access” can also cover just the “free of charge to read” subset of the formal definition, excluding permissive usage rights beyond fair use or similar.

More than mere pedantry

As we have discussed previously , we use data from Unpaywall ² to analyze per-article information about Open Access. The other major indexes (such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions) also use this data too.

In their paper ³ examining OA uptake from an early data set, the Unpaywall team explore various definitions of open access. They state their use of open access to mean “free to read online, either on the publisher website or in an OA repository.” Given their aim to direct researchers to legitimately “open to read” articles, this definition is understandable. However, as it underpins their algorithms, and we need to take a different approach to fully analyze the market, we need to unpick it. Table 1 shows how Unpaywall classifies OA.

Table 1: OA status - Unpaywall detection model

The table below summarizes how Unpaywall sets its article OA status indicator .

The table separates the article types (rows) from the journal types (columns). The algorithm checks articles in a series of steps to determine their OA status. Note the use of colors to identify status and – as explained below – how licenses may not always be analyzed.

Unpaywall’s definition of “open access” covers anything that is “open to read”, as highlighted in the heavy outline.
Green : “Toll-access on the publisher page, but there is a free copy in an OA repository.” This would therefore exclude papers which are embargoed and not deposited in repositories (“Delayed OA”). This is an important subset, as papers would be affected under the zero-embargo rules such as those put forward by Plan S. The license is not checked, so “green” papers may not have permissive reuse terms.
Gold : “Published in an open-access journal that is indexed by the DOAJ [or in its own its own list of journals and fully OA publishers ].” If the article is in such a journal, the license is not checked. For our purposes we assume a permissive license.
Hybrid : “Free under an open license in a toll-access journal”. Technically, this is any journal which is NOT identified as being in the fully OA list used for the Gold status. This will include hybrid journals, which offer authors a choice of open access options. However, it also includes fully closed journals, which do not offer authors a choice, but in which the publisher may occasionally and unilaterally choose to make content open access. The licenses span various CC licenses, and others; we assume they offer fully permissive reuse rights.
Bronze : “Free to read on the publisher page, but without a clearly identifiable [ open ] license.” “Bronze” is a term that appears to have been coined by Unpaywall – it most closely corresponds to public access, such as that currently required by the US OSTP. As with hybrid, this will mix genuinely hybrid journals with fully closed ones which make selected content free to read.
Closed : “All other articles, including those shared only on an ASN [Academic Sharing Networks, such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu] or in Sci-Hub.” Technically, legitimate access to an article is the first thing the Unpaywall algorithm looks for when classifying articles . If none is found, the article is considered closed. This means articles made open by ignoring copyright (“Black OA”) are ignored.

This gives a reasonable view of “open to read” articles. By focusing in on the “gold” and “hybrid” subset we can get to formally “Open Access” articles which include permissive reuse rights. However, as journals in this model are classed as either “fully OA” or “not” there is no separation of hybrid journals. So understanding hybrid take-up is not possible without further analysis.

Formally "Open Access" and Hybrid

To get to uptake of OA in hybrid journals, we need to separate out the journals that offer no OA options. We infer this from Delta Think’s own lists, which cover 70% of the articles indexed by Unpaywall since 2015. We can also look for patterns in Unpaywall data and make some intelligent guesses about the unknowns – e.g. we can infer a journal has no OA options if there is no OA output in it at all. We also have to correct errors in the fully OA journals. Unpaywall does a good job against a complex data set, but still we found cases where articles in supposedly fully OA journals that were classified as “hybrid” and vice versa.

The 12 combinations of article type and journal type mean we have to take decisions about how we categorise articles. Table 2, below, shows how our analysis adds formal Open Access classifications to the raw Unpaywall data.

Table 2: Open Access = free to read and free to reuse

The table separates the article types (rows) from the journal types (columns). It further splits “not fully OA” journals into “Not OA” journals (those with no OA options) from Hybrid journals.

The bolded box shows “formal open access” to cover only openly readable articles with OA licenses.
We can now add descriptive names to our Article Types (2nd column).
The same caveats for fully OA journals apply as before. If a journal is fully OA in our lists, we assume its contents to be permissively licensed. We have not checked license information within the Unpaywall data.
For Hybrid journals, any articles not under an OA license (as checked by Unpaywall) are deemed to be part of the journals’ subscription content.
Finally, there is a third bucket of OA content: OA articles in journals without an advertised OA option. These form a small but notable subset of output – e.g. 1 or 2% of some big-name journals.

Note that our method is not fail proof. Where we cannot identify a journal from a publisher’s price list, we infer its type based on its articles. Where Unpaywall cannot (or has not) identified open licenses, we assume a journal is not OA. We have seen examples of journals which promote themselves as “open access” but do not explicitly specify licenses for their content. In this case a journal would be classified as Not OA.

"Public Access" = free to read

There are some anomalies in the data in the real world. For example, technically, there should be no “Bronze” articles (articles without an OA license) in fully OA journals; in practice we have found some in the data. Formal OA definitions only apply to peer-reviewed content, however the Unpaywall/Crossref data also includes non-peer -reviewed content. It requires further analysis to separate the two. When we apply our corrections, we need to form a view on where to classify the free to read articles. This is shown in Table 3.

Table 3: Public Access Status

Again, the table splits article types and journal types, but this time with a focus on articles that are “open to read” without regard to their licenses.

Unpaywall coined the term “Bronze” to refer to articles not in fully OA journals that are free to read but without a verifiable OA license. We extend Bronze here to cover articles in any type of journal that are free to read but without a verifiable OA license.
This is important for understanding possible impacts on subscriptions. The more that’s free to read, the more downward pricing pressure on subscriptions. Our underlying data allows the separation of Bronze be journal type, so users of the OA DAT can further analyze free to read content in journals with subscription components.
The “in Fully OA” & “in Hybrid” numbers look at output “that might reasonably have an APC.”

Conclusion

For our analysis, we take “Open Access” to mean that articles can be read both free of charge and free of major restrictions on reuse. We use “Public Access” to refer to articles which are available free of charge, but which have restrictions on reuse.

Other sources may use “open access” to span both definitions as suits their purpose. We advise that readers seek clarity about which definitions are being used when interpreting data.

The role of licenses is crucial in a market context. APCs may vary depending on license type, and funder OA mandates may insist on permissive reuse rights. So we further distinguish “Repository only” for articles not available from publisher’s web sites, and “Paid access” for the paywalled ones. Together our four definitions span what we might term an article’s “Access Type.”

Finally, journals are core to publishing activities and economics. Initiatives such as Plan S take a position on parent journals as well. Our orthogonal “Journal Types” consider the major journal business models, so we can develop a full analysis.

1 Suber P. (Aug 2008) Gratis and libre open access. SPARC Open Access Newsletter, 124. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:4322580

2 “ Unpaywall is an open source application that links every research article that has been assigned a Crossref DOI (more than 100 million in total) to the OA URLs where the paper can be read for free. It is built and maintained by Our Research (formerly Impactstory), a US-based nonprofit organization.” – The Future of OA: A large-scale analysis projecting Open Access publication and readership. Piwowar, Priem, Orr. Oct 2019. https://doi.org/10.1101/795310 .

3 Piwowar, Priem, et al. (Feb 2018) The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375 .

Conference Lessons & Silver Linings: Should COVID-19 provide a push toward lasting change?

Wed, 27 May 2020 23:11:00 GMT

Last month, a group of researchers posted a thought provoking preprint entitled “ Evaluating features of scientific conferences: A call for improvements. ” As part of a client engagement with Morressier , Delta Think was fortunate to interview several of the authors (Drs. Sarvenaz Sarabipour, Humberto Debat, and Fiona Mumoki) about their findings and perspectives on conferences of the future. We were so struck with not only their research, but also their passion in support of the changes they recommend, that we thought it worth sharing the summary of our discussions and their insights. And while this research was begun well before COVID-19, their findings are perhaps more relevant than ever, as societies and conference organizers struggle with making content available in different formats and from virtual venues. Their insights offer our community food for thought as we assess not only current conference content dissemination but future conference program development and services.

Tell us about your article and the impetus for writing it. What prompted you to be advocates for early-career researchers in this space?

Sarabipour : For me, I’m an immigrant researcher, and I have not had access to many conferences. So, it was really important for me to advocate for greater access. I felt that last year was the time to do this as the situation has now changed for researchers, and there is an even stronger need to improve conferences. But even before then, improvements to meetings were long overdue. Early-career researchers face a number of issues, including accessibility to the location of conferences, funds, and gender and career stage equity. This is not an issue that is specific to researchers from the scientific hubs of the world. This inequality and inaccessibility is felt everywhere.

Mumoki : What attracted me to this initiative is the fact that I have experienced almost everything that we talked about in the manuscript. When coming from Africa, attending an international conference is really difficult. Conferences are very expensive to attend, but it’s even harder coming from Africa. Most researchers need to decide whether to use that money for a conference or for your lab. And if I get the opportunity to attend a conference, coming back to my home institute, sharing that information with others here is difficult, because we don’t have recordings of the speakers and there’s no poster to share with others. It then becomes difficult to pass on the knowledge I’ve learned from these meetings to colleagues. One other thing is that the meetings are normally very busy, so when you go there you want to network, you want to attend the symposia, so by the time you leave there, you’ve had to really pick carefully what you are going to attend.

Debat : I too have personal experience with the inability to access conferences. To attend a conference would be more than one year of fellowship salary for a student and the Institute doesn’t have the money to afford that. Those who do go to international conferences are the same few very well-known PI’s, so there is very limited participation in the scientific dialogue. The main goal of our manuscript is to try to focus on the democratization of knowledge using new technologies. Not only are conferences being done in the same way for the last 100 years, but in my opinion, they keep making the same mistakes in terms of inequalities and accessibility.

How do you think conferences should change, especially now in the midst of the pandemic?

Sarabipour : Obviously, researchers can’t go to conferences right now. But from what we see, only a few conferences have gone online and are going to happen virtually. We see a lot of people that haven’t been transforming to virtual meetings – they are just postponing to in-person meetings in 2021. We are not asking for conferences to just transform to virtual ones as they were. Alongside going virtual for environmental purposes and for accessibility, other issues that we discuss in our preprint could be resolved at the same time. We think the case of COVID-19 has brought a real shock to the scientific community, and I think it has made them think deeply about how conferences are held, the necessity of holding them so frequently, and their format.

Mumoki : That’s exactly it. I was to attend three meetings this year – one has been cancelled completely, and two have been postponed to next year, but none have become virtual conferences. However, technically speaking, apart from the cancellations, nothing has really changed. There are still groups that have difficulty physically accessing conferences, groups that don’t have the funds to attend. Actually, online discussion could be more beneficial than in-person discussion, which can be intimidating for early-career researchers especially who may be more comfortable engaging with other researchers by computer. In the article, we suggest platforms that can support chatting and break-out rooms, apart from the seminars that are held online. These can be much more inclusive. Diversity brings excellence to science, and researchers that enjoy conferences need to consider this.

Debat : When you do in-person conferences, you concentrate all the talks in a very narrow period of time. But in a digital context, you can relax that expectation and you can do a more continuous conference that can last weeks…It can promote discussion because you don’t have the time constraints that you have with in-person conferences.

As an Early Career Researcher, how do you disseminate work and promote yourself? What are the challenges?

Debat : We are advocates of the use of preprints. As a personal opinion, I usually try to disseminate our work as soon as we write it down and share it with the community to receive their feedback. This accelerates the dissemination of what we have studied, and at the same time, we are able to contribute to the scientific dialogue in a very public venue. In addition, in terms of conferences, I try to submit my presentations and slides to Zenodo and LinkedIn so anyone beyond the 50 people listening there can download it and see it. And I promote the use of Twitter. Anytime I am able to do it, I promote use of digital repositories and sharing places to try to disseminate more.

Mumoki : Something that I’ve been trying to do of late is create a personal website…I think it’s a nice way for me to consolidate everything that I’ve done in one platform. Also ResearchGate, I use that a lot in trying to disseminate my information, including conference information.

Sarabipour : Preprinting is very effective, having a personal website is very effective. Depositing all the preliminary material – talks, abstracts, manuscripts, data, into Zenodo or preprint servers across various fields. Personal website and Twitter. They are all very important and we discuss these in the manuscript in detail. These platforms are viewed by millions of researchers every month.

What message do you have for the research community?

Sarabipour : We really encourage researchers to read our preprint. We’ve taken great care in researching this and presenting our arguments, to show that there are deep rooted inequalities in how we present science. I would also like to encourage organizers of scientific conferences, universities, senior researchers, early-career researchers, and funding agencies to read this, in all continents, and think about it and have a dialogue about it. If they have data or statistics, they can add it to our database, which is openly available. We welcome all suggestions, feedback, and improvements moving forward. This is not a one-time effort.

Mumoki : As scientists, we always try to look for solutions to challenges that society is facing, so in this case we should practice what we preach. We should be open to change and open to learning new things and improving and making things better, so that the ones who are coming after us will not go through the same things that we are going through right now. We should put in the effort to make the changes that are necessary to move society forward, and this is one such way.

Debat : In-person conferences are very expensive. We analyzed 260+ conferences and calculated that people have spent $1.1 billion on them. To put that in perspective, that is the R&D research budget of Chile for a year. We are spending a lot on in-person conferences and questioning - what are we really getting out of that money? What could we do if we reallocated that money to scholarship or research itself?

Whether the ideas raised by these researchers and their preprint spark your interest or you are considering other strategic changes to your conference program, we are available to offer guidance and support to help you sort through the options and develop an approach that works best for your organization.

Delta Think Launches Education Practice and Names Lori Carlin Chief Commercial Officer

Wed, 13 May 2020 14:06:00 GMT

Philadelphia, PA (May 13, 2020) – Delta Think, a consulting and advisory firm focused on innovation and growth in scholarly communications, today announced two organizational changes to help serve the needs of the community in the current environment.

Delta Think is pleased to launch a new Education Practice, headed by Partner Bonnie Gruber. The new Practice will be focused on helping organizations reimagine educational and learning offerings and programs for a virtual environment. Collaborating with Delta Think to support the new practice is Diane Harnish. Diane comes to Delta Think with more than 30 years of experience in the scholarly publishing and higher education markets, where she has worked extensively to develop and execute growth-oriented market, product, and commercial strategies. Diane has held numerous executive-level positions with leading publishing and educational organizations, including Wolters Kluwer and Informa.

“This is clearly a time of change in education and learning,” said Ms. Gruber. “Necessity is the mother of invention, and we know our clients seek opportunities to reimagine programs, content, and services for a changing environment. With Diane’s help, we hope to provide the expertise our clients need to build and implement strategies to address immediate concerns while also positioning them to serve their educational mission well into the future.”

At the same time, Lori Carlin is promoted to Delta Think Chief Commercial Officer (CCO). Lori has served as Senior Consultant and Director of Marketing for the organization since 2013. As CCO, Lori will be responsible for business development for Delta Think’s consulting practice, supporting client needs in this rapidly changing environment. Together with the extended Delta Think team, Lori will provide support and expertise for associations and scholarly publishers grappling with the unique challenges of today. She will also continue her work with clients on projects focused on Customer Insight, Marketing Strategy, Market Research, and Business Strategy.

“I’m excited for the opportunity to expand my role in serving this community during this challenging time,” stated Ms. Carlin. “From my many years working for individual associations and scholarly publishers, to my work at Delta Think assisting a wide variety of clients, my main objective has always been to support their efforts to evolve. This new role allows me to do even more to help our clients adapt and advance.”

ABOUT DELTA THINK, INC.

Delta Think is a consulting and advisory firm focused on helping publishers, societies, and information providers anticipate, create, and manage change. Since 2005, Delta Think has served more than 100 organizations across the scholarly enterprise to analyze market intelligence, develop customer insights, and create effective business strategies as related to products, services, and full portfolios.

Learn more at www.deltathink.com and https://oainfo.deltathink.com/

For more information, please contact:

Lori Carlin
Delta Think, Inc.
lori.carlin@deltathink.com
p h one: +1.215.402.7225

News & Views: Library Spending and the Serials Crisis

Mon, 04 May 2020 03:55:00 GMT

Academic library budgets are the primary source of revenue for scholarly journal publishing. Given the global economic uncertainty surrounding Covid-19, this month we examine the outlook for academic library spending.

A Core Source of Revenue

Academic libraries are the majority contributor to scholarly publishing revenue streams. Although exact estimates vary, around 90% of scholarly journal market revenues come from subscription (or subscription-related) revenues, and 75% of that from academic libraries.

Libraries have been concerned that rises in the cost of purchasing journal subscriptions has significantly outpaced inflation. This is often referred to as the “serials crisis” by librarians and publishers alike. It has been noted for at least the last 25 years . Although some may suggest that it is specific to the 1990s, others suggest that it is an ongoing phenomenon.

Spending by Libraries

Industry figures are typically reported or gathered annually and stated at current market values. Of course, when analyzing them over time, we need to adjust for inflation. We do this using both the sector-specific Higher Education Price Index ( HEPI ¹ ) and the general Consumer Price Index ( CPI ) . Figure 1 shows the results.

We can see that median spending on journals (“serials”) continues to increase in real terms (regardless of the inflation index used), while overall library spend are now declining. This suggests that budgets, too, are in real terms decline. Note: The sample2 includes 100 universities in the US and 16 universities in Canada, covering many significant academic libraries.

Library Spending vs. Publishing Activity

Actual prices paid by libraries are not available. Deals are usually confidential, and pricing includes a mix of print, digital, bundles, and discounting. However, by comparing library spending on serials with other measures, we can get a read on the challenges at work. Figure 2 shows a mix of measures, indexed to the year 2000 so you can see relative movement over time.

Although spending on serials is growing faster than inflation, the data suggest that this headline masks a complex story.

Serials spending as stated (the pink line) is the fastest growing of the indicators and appears to be outpacing growth in scholarly output and GERD3.
However, when adjusted for inflation (the bottom two blue lines), serials spending is the slowest growing of our measures.
The inflation measures average around 2% - 3% per year, compared to headline price increases exceeding 5% experienced by many libraries.
The numbers of articles in the indexed literature (in orange) roughly tracks inflation-adjusted GERD (in yellow), as we explored last month. Both are growing at 2-3 times the rate of spending on serials.
The unit of purchase for subscriptions is typically the journal (whether bundled or not); the number of indexed journals (not shown) is growing at a similar rate to CPI-adjusted serials spend.
Since 2013, real-terms growth in serials spending has slowed – the HEPI-adjusted amount is flat-lining – while publishing output has continued largely unchecked.

As ever, subscribers to our database can drill into the details and explore further measures.

Conclusion

Analyzing data on library spend can be problematic. At the core of the debate is how value is defined. As well as issues of pricing itself (discounting vs. retail; print vs. digital; current prices vs. inflation-adjustments), many measures can be examined by studies looking at the costs paid by libraries. These include cost per article read, cost per download, cost per citation, costs relative to Impact Factor, or costs relative to selectivity (or “prestige”) of journals.

Whatever the definition, it is clear that in real terms, serials spending is growing, and is taking an increasing share of library budgets (from around 25% share in 1998 to just under 40% share in 2019 in our data). In this sense, there is a “serials crisis.” Trends such as falling costs per download and rising usage add further tension. The argument that libraries are getting “more stuff” is used by many to justify increased prices (and increased costs).

If publishing output has grown faster than serials spending, then the difference suggests publishers have not raised prices commensurate with growth in output. The data suggest that the fundamental problems lie with flat library budgets, which are failing to keep up with increases in spending on R&D in the Higher Education sector. Over the last twenty years , university budgets have almost doubled in real terms, while the proportion spent on libraries has almost halved.

Arguments that an increase of research volume should translate to library price rises are not new. Neither is the question of how sustainable such price increases are, as output continues to outstrip library budgets. Given the current state of the world economy, could this lack of scalability be exacerbated by more rapidly tightening library budgets? Will we see the current configuration of business models finally run out of runway? Is the longstanding way in which research is disseminated becoming strained to the point of obsolescence?

We are sure that the debate about value will continue. However it takes shape, the bottom line is that if libraries don’t have the budget, they can’t spend the money – no matter how good the deal on offer.

1 The Consumer Price Index (CPI) accounts for inflation based on a typical “basket of goods” and will be familiar to many. However, academic spending needs are different to those of the consumer. So we also use the Higher Education Price Index (HEPI), which we think better represents the inflationary pressures on US Academia. The HEPI is increasing on average 20% faster than CPI, suggesting that costs for Higher Education institutions in general are rising faster than those for consumers. We do need both indexes, however, as Macroeconomic Indicators typically use CPI to adjust for inflation.

2 ARL Statistics 2017-18 , Association of Research Libraries, Washington, D.C.

3 GERD : “Gross domestic spending on R&D is defined as the total expenditure (current and capital) on R&D carried out by all resident companies, research institutes, university and government laboratories, etc., in a country. It includes R&D funded from abroad but excludes domestic funds for R&D performed outside the domestic economy. This indicator is measured in USD constant prices and Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs)” It is inflation-adjusted based on the CPI.

News & Views Webinar: Market Predictions During Economic Uncertainty

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 18:59:00 GMT

Delta Think is proud to announce the launch of our News & Views companion online discussion forum!

Our inaugural session on Market Predictions During Economic Uncertainty was held this past week (15 April 2020), as a companion piece to our April News & Views newsletter on the same theme.

For those of you who missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, we’re happy to share the link here .

Enjoy and we hope you’ll join us for our next online discussion forum.

News & Views: Market Predictions During Economic Uncertainty

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 04:04:00 GMT

Watch the companion News & Views online discussion forum here .

Predicting the Impact of Current Events

Scholarly publishers are wondering how the COVID-19 pandemic and the unfolding economic downturn will impact the scholarly journals market. Of course, this is an impossible question to answer definitively, but are there events in the past that we can use for guidance?

This month we look at the impact of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, bringing some longstanding historical analysis linking GDP and publishing revenues up to date. Our aim is to see what factors may act as a barometer of the economic impacts we might expect during this challenging time.

Historical View

The STM Association industry reports have done a great job of assembling figures, albeit from different sources which use different methodologies. The reports only go back to the mid-2000’s. Together, they suggest that:

The broader STM market managed to sustain growth rates of 4%-5% from 2007-2012, dropping steadily to around 3.5% going into 2021.
The Journals market averaged growth of 5%-6% from 2008-2011, dropping to 2.5% from 2013 onwards, and further to around 2.1% going into 2021.
Even the same sources may restate numbers as different analysts form different views, or as definitions change. There have been cases of higher growth figures mentioned but attributed to currency effects.

Despite the variability of historic data, we think it is fair to say that the Journals market has shown low to mid-single-digit growth, regardless of the economic cycle. In particular, the market weathered the 2007-2008 downturn well.

Historically, the volume of output has been driven by the continued real-terms growth in research and development expenditure and the rising number of researchers:

The numbers of articles (published annually) and journals have a long-term annual growth of 3.5% and 3% respectively.
Growth in output has accelerated to 4% per year for articles and over 5% for journals in recent years.
Some studies have placed article growth even higher – at around 6%.

Updating the historical baseline

The industry reports demonstrate a close relationship between numbers of journals, articles, and numbers of researchers. This seems intuitive. It is based on work dating from 2003 ¹ and includes data from 1990 to 1995.

To determine a baseline for comparison, we updated the 2003 view to see if the same factors held now, and if we could form a view that spanned the 2007-2008 downturn. We looked at data for:

Volume of article output – overall and in major indexes.
Gross domestic expenditure on research and development (GERD) and its relationship to GDP.
Population, numbers of researchers, and numbers of all workers in R&D.
Journal market growth (as stated in various industry reports).

We examined various combinations between the variables above to identify the strongest relationships. Subscribers to our Data and Analytics Tool can review the detailed data; below we present the headlines.

In the following results, all data are indexed relative to the year 2000, and CAGR spans 2000-2017. All sources have lead times, with some more recent data falling off-trend as a result.

Factors Related to Growth in Volume of Articles

The figure above examines the factors influencing growth in volume of articles.

Articles in indexed journals2 have a CAGR of 4.3% (the blue line).
Articles in the broader literature3 have a CAGR of 5.7% (the orange line).
This difference in numbers hints at a growing “long tail” of literature which lies outside the mainstream indexes. (Although not shown above, we see a similar pattern in numbers of journals.)
GERD4 (the yellow line) – particularly of the world’s largest economies, as tracked by the OECD5 – shows the strongest relationship with growth in numbers of articles. (99% correlation.)
The total number of workers in R&D in OECD countries (the green line) also shows a very strong relationship with growth in article output (and with growth in journal numbers – not shown, but notable). Note, this is all workers – not just researchers.
The number of researchers in R&D globally shows the strongest relationship with inflation-adjusted journal market value, followed by GERD and then average GDP per capita. (Around 80%-90% correlation.)

Projecting results to the future

Activity remained pretty consistent across the 2007-2008 downturn, with downturns in GDP having little (if any) short-term effect on article volume. The 2003 analysis looking at researcher numbers largely holds true, albeit with the nuance of looking at all workers in R&D in countries with the largest economies.

Subscription revenues have historically weathered downturns well, as mild falls in activity do not lead to a collapse in subscriptions and subscription price is not directly tied to article volume. Price pressures are not new in the subscription market but may increase if institutional budgets are impacted by a weakening economy.

While the majority of scholarly publishing revenue is still derived from subscription models, Article Processing Charge-based (APC) Open Access now has roughly five times the market share it had in 2007-2008. Fully OA journals employing APC-based business models rely on article throughput. Their revenue could be more quickly impacted by article volume changes, putting some proportion of the 6.75% of total journal revenue that is associated with APCs at risk.

Additionally, with COVID-19 threatening to have a profound effect on the global workforce for an unknown period of time, the effective numbers of R&D workers across disciplines may fall at some point in the future. Currently, our anecdotal evidence points to an initial increase in submissions for many journals. We suspect this might be the result of researchers focusing on writing up results from completed research when they are unable to get into their labs.

However, this boost in activity may be short-lived. If significant numbers of researchers cannot continue their work, and we see a reduction in the number of personnel overall, then the data suggest we could see a reduction in article volume and in journal market value.

Conclusion

When we started this analysis, our working hypothesis was that the scholarly journals market could pull off its old trick of weathering choppy waters well.

However, the data suggest that this time things may be different. The key factors related to journal market value look set to fall significantly, and the balance of business models across the marketplace has changed. It seems likely that a fall in the numbers of researchers and global economic activity will lead to a decline in the overall market size for journals publishing.

As is always the case, averages are not distributed equally throughout the market. Fully APC-based Open Access publishers are more at risk, because of their dependency on article volume and the close connection of their cash-flow to throughput. This reality may drive a shift towards non-APC based OA, such as subscription and membership models applied to OA.

Publishers with significant subscription-based income – especially the large ones – are (arguably) in the better position. However, they may see increased pricing pressure from a library market responding to deeper cuts in funding than we saw in 2007-2008. And, of course, any publishers relying on events will have seen these and similar in-person revenues disappear abruptly.

In fact, some mixed-model publishers may look to increased OA activities to help make up lost ground elsewhere. The same headwinds that challenge OA also make it more responsive.

We wish all our readers and their extended families, friends, and colleagues well through these challenging times.

Notes

Please note: since this piece was published, some minor edits were made to remove reference to GDP, and clarify the wording about journal market value.

Mabe, M., 2003. The growth and number of journals. Serials, 16(2), pp.191–197. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/16191
We use SCImago (based on Scopus) for the index. Web of Science will yield similar results.
Dimensions.ai, filtered for Publication Type: Article.
GERD: Gross domestic expenditure on research and development, shown as PPP at constant currencies. The World Bank normalizes to 2011 USD, the OECD to 2015 USD. Both sources experience lead times, and work on 2-year cycles for many countries (sometimes longer), so more recent data is likely to understate numbers. Methodologies have varied over time.
OECD data covers OECD countries and prospective members: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Argentina, Chile, China, Chinese Taipei, Estonia, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa.

Sources

Delta Think, Open Access Data and Analytics Tool
SCImago. (2007). SJR — SCImago Journal & Country Rank. Retrieved July 5, 2019, from http://www.scimagojr.com
Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory, Ulrichsweb.com
The OECD (2020), Research and Development Statistics , retrieved March 2020.
World Bank, World Development Indicators (2020)
Digital Science, Dimensions (2020)

Delta Think’s Global Data Directly Available in Chronos Hub

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 19:22:00 GMT

Chronos Hub and Delta Think have partnered to provide access to select open access benchmarking data via the Delta Think Open Access Data & Analytics Tool (OA DAT). This integration provides admins with seamless insights necessary to make continual, intelligent, data-driven decisions about Open Access.

“We’re excited to give organization administrators the opportunity to compare global statistics from Delta Think with their own organization’s actual data directly in Chronos Hub. For example, you can now benchmark the APCs you pay per journal and publisher with the global averages,” said Christian Grubak, CEO and Founder of Chronos Hub.

“The Delta Think Open Access Data & Analytics Tool helps organizations across the scholarly ecosystem make informed decisions about Open Access,” said Lauren Kane, CEO of Delta Think. “As such, we’re well-aligned with Chronos’ aims and delighted to share this valuable benchmarking data with Chronos Hub administrators.”

The partnership provides all existing Chronos Hub administrators with selected data from Delta Think’s OA DAT as a complementary service. Full access to the OA DAT is limited to Delta Think direct subscribers. For more information about this announcement or more information on how you can benefit fully from Chronos Hub and OA DAT, please reach out to support@chronoshub.io or info@deltathink.com

Delta Think Open Access Data & Analytics Tool

The Delta Think OA DAT provides an independent overview of Open Access uptake, pricing, and impact through visual presentations of market trends supplemented by expert commentary. The OA DAT allows institutions, consortia, societies, publishers, and funders with the information they need to make informed decisions about Open Access. Learn more at https://deltathink.com/open-access/oa-data-analytics-tool/

Chronos Hub

Chronos Hub offers institutions, funders, and publishers a collaborative approach to streamline their open access publishing processes and reporting. Chronos Hub also provides a Journal Finder that guides authors on where to publish in ways that are compliant with the funders’ policies and in line with institutional agreements. Chronos Hub integrates with the main journal submission systems and publishers to ensure compliance, enable easy approval processes, manage invoices and APC payments, provide data analytics, and automatically report back to funders and populate institutional repositories.
Learn more at https://chronoshub.io/

News & Views: Open Access Charges – Consolidation Continues

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 03:33:00 GMT

Each year we survey the list Article Processing Charges (APCs) of a sample of major and significant publishers. Covering over 16,000 titles, this represents one of the most comprehensive reviews of open access pricing.

Headline Changes

To compare like for like, we analyze non-discounted, CC BY charges. Overall, list prices are increasing slowly:

Maximum APCs for hybrid journals have risen noticeably, from $5,200 two years ago, to $5,650 last year, to $5,900 this year.
The highest prices for fully OA journals have risen from $5,200 to $5,435.
Fully OA journal APCs are less expensive than hybrid, averaging around 53% of hybrid average APCs. This difference has not changed significantly over the last few years.
Average hybrid APCs continue to increase steadily, at very low single-digit percentages. Increases are accelerating slightly – from around 1% per year two years ago, to around 2% this year.
This is contrasted with fully OA average price increases of 4% over the last year.

Shifts Within Portfolios

As is always the case, market-wide headlines mask nuances per publisher. Most – but not all – of the larger organizations have increased both fully OA and hybrid average APCs.

However, the most important nuance lies in the spread of prices within a given publisher’s portfolio. For example, if the bulk of a publisher’s journals lie towards the lower end of its pricing, with just a few journals priced much higher, the average (mean) price will be higher than most people actually pay.

The following figures show how this plays out in the market across our sample of publishers. The figures are histograms, showing how many titles sit in various price bands over the four successive years of data that we have. For illustrative purposes, we have outlined the trends. The “more orange” the lines, the more recent the prices. As usual, subscribers to Delta Think’s Open Access Data and Analytics Tool can see full details of axes.

For hybrid journals – as shown in Figure 1 below – the overall spread of prices has remained relatively constant over time. But, the most popular price band has shifted towards the lower end of the market to a steady state over the last couple of years (1). This means the average author is likely to pay a lower price compared with a few years ago. However, there is also a small but increasing likelihood authors attracted to the mid to higher range journals will pay increasing prices (2). Notice how the righthand side of the yellow curve becomes more shallow, suggesting an increase in popularity of mid to high range pricing.

The fully OA landscape is more complicated, as shown in Figure 2. The extreme left shows journals without APCs ($0). Their number appears to have fallen over the last couple of years. Moving to the right, a few years ago (green lines), there was a double-hump in the curve, suggesting two popular price bands. Over the last couple of years, the bands have merged into what amounts to a broad range of prices, with averages getting cheaper over time.

Conclusion

With almost 55,000 APC data points in our database, we are able to identify emerging trends in pricing. Hybrid prices appear to be holding steady, although – as we predicted this time last year – we see higher charges at the higher end of the market. Meanwhile, the lowest fully OA APCs are getting lower, and there seems to be a downwards move in prices of fully OA journals – a reversal of what we saw last year.

It appears that a two-tier market is emerging, with hybrid prices holding their own, and fully OA prices decreasing. We know from the detailed analysis we have previously run via our Data and Analytics Tool that authors are not particularly price sensitive when choosing journals. So, it’s likely that changes in pricing are more due to publishers’ proactive choices, than to market forces. Of course, this may change as the effects of Plan S and the possibility of a US executive order become apparent.

News & Views: Curate or Perish?

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 01:55:00 GMT

Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) recently announced the launch of the “Learned Society Curation Awards,” a new funding initiative designed to reward societies who are looking beyond publishing when thinking of their future contributions.

What might this statement tell us about the vision these funders’ have for learned societies in an open future?

Background

The awards—up to £200,000 over three years—are for those who “want to explore new ways of signaling the significance of published research outputs in an open and transparent manner.”

Wellcome offers a great deal of information on their website about society eligibility, potential projects that will be considered, and grant coverage. They are also hosting webinars that will allow for questions from potential participants and community members. To summarize, their three key messages include:

1. Societies are at the center of academic publishing, but they need to rethink their role

Wellcome acknowledges the importance of societies to the scholarly ecosystem, and states that they are looking for societies who want to explore “a move from the role of publisher to that of curator.” Curation in this context would include “value-added services that could facilitate research assessment.”

2. Societies’ new role might include fostering transparent peer review and curating research across platforms and content types

While Wellcome states that they don’t want to be “prescriptive” and limit submissions, they indicate a preference for two core ideas: those that foster a more open and transparent peer review process, and those that curate disparate forms of research, such as gathering preprints across a field of expertise or creating an “overlay” journal. They also specifically call out the ability to use funds to move to an open publishing platform….such as Wellcome’s own such platform, Wellcome Open Research.

3. There is support for Plan S, but not for APCs

If you are applying from a society with an “active journal publishing operation,” then you must have published research articles funded by Wellcome or published by HHMI PIs/group leaders within the last two years.

Most critically, society publishers must offer a Plan S-compliant publishing option. At present, there are three routes to Plan S compliance: 1) publication in a fully OA journal or on an OA platform; 2) article deposit in an open repository without embargo; and 3) OA publication in a subscription journal under a transformative agreement. OA publication in a hybrid journal is not a compliant option.

Societies across the world are encouraged to apply, though the lead applicant cannot be based in mainland China. Grant funding usage is comprehensive, covering new salaries and overheads, development costs, evaluation costs, dissemination and engagement costs, and more. With one notable exception—you cannot use funding for APCs or any other publication costs.

It will be interesting to see which societies and what ideas make the final cut.

Analysis

Most societies derive the majority of their income from publishing. While there are exceptions (e.g., societies with a profitable meetings arm or a large donor population), a move away from publishing to some other revenue source will be difficult for many and, perhaps, impossible for some. Beyond the financial implication, many societies consider publishing to be a core part of their mission and raison d'être. A shift to curation would represent a drastic change in their very identities.

Funder mandates, and Plan S in particular, have brought this issue to the foreground. Is it reasonable for a society to derive the majority of its income from scholarly publishing?

Some would argue that it is . Societies are community based, run by researchers for researchers. It is only reasonable that research supports the other valuable services a society offers.
Some would argue that it is not. Libraries and funders funding research publication (whether via subscriptions or APCs) should not also be expected to support other society activities with their limited budgets.

While there are persuasive arguments on both sides of this debate, what is not in question is that publishing does provide a major revenue stream for most societies, especially in STM.

In a 2018 Delta Think analysis based on our own experience and data from Universities UK’s Monitoring the Transition to Open Access , we looked at the impact of Open Access on societies. Health & life science societies showed a 40% revenue contribution from publishing, while physical sciences & engineering (which often derive substantial revenue from their professional meetings) showed a 20% contribution.

Conclusion

Wellcome and HHMI are interested in supporting a curatorial role for learned societies in the future scholarly ecosystem. Without using the word transformative, they show interest in just that— transformation of societies themselves versus a journal or publishing portfolio.

Societies dependent on publishing revenue to sustain their operations and fund other critical programming might cringe at the idea of a full transformation to curator. However most would acknowledge that there is value in experimentation, particularly in areas that may lead to viable new sources of revenue. For example, a society already committed to Open Access might use this award to develop a new service designed to supplement the declining revenue often associated with transitioning a subscription publication to fully OA.

How often do substantial grants and awards become available to fund society experimentation? The Learned Society Curation Awards offer eligible societies the chance to fund pilot projects that may provide for new sources of revenue in the future. This should be welcome news for societies seeking to explore non-publication-based revenue and to diversify for improved financial sustainability.

TOP HEADLINES

IEEE introduces TechRxiv™, a new preprint server for unpublished research – January 29, 2020

"IEEE announces the launch of TechRxiv.org, a preprint server for the global technology community. TechRxiv.org is a collaborative multidisciplinary hub that will facilitate the open dissemination of scientific findings in electrical engineering, computer science, and related technologies."

Journal transparency index will be ‘alternative’ to impact scores – January 29, 2020

"A new ranking system for academic journals measuring their commitment to research transparency will be launched next month – providing what many believe will be a useful alternative to journal impact scores. Under a new initiative from the Center for Open Science, more than 300 scholarly titles will be assessed on 10 measures related to transparency, with their overall result for each category published in a publicly available league table."

Funders launch curation awards for learned societies – January 21, 2020

"The United States-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute and UK-based Wellcome Trust—both non-profit organisations—are offering up to £200,000 ($261,000) over up to three years for each of their Learned Society Curation Awards."

cOAlition S welcomes transparency framework and report, launches pilot – January 14, 2020

"Today an independent report is published by Information Power and is the output of a project funded by Wellcome and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) on behalf of cOAlition S to inform the development of Plan S. Funders, libraries, publishers, and universities have worked together to inform the development of a framework intended to provide information about OA services and prices in a transparent, practical, and insightful way."

Eight publishers to volunteer pricing info in pilot study – January 13, 2020

"To help transition toward transparent open access (OA), eight journal publishers, including SpringerNature, PLOS, and Annual Reviews, will share anonymized pricing information with a limited group. This is part of a test of a transparency template proposed today in a report commissioned by cOAlition S."

Taylor & Francis buys F1000 Research – January 10, 2020

"Taylor & Francis has acquired open research publisher F1000 Research from its founder Vitek Tracz. The acquisition sum was not disclosed. Tracz will remain owner of F1000Prime and F1000Workspace, which are not included in the sale."

MDPI releases general information on their Article Processing Charges (APCs) – January 9, 2020

"A breakdown of how MDPI's APCs are used. In calculating these values, we have followed recommendations from the Fair Open Access Alliance, an organization that promotes sustainable and transparent scholarly open access publishing. This also makes MDPI fully compliant with the requirements of Plan S."

Springer Nature and Germany's Projekt DEAL Finalise World's Largest Transformative Open Access Agreement – January 9, 2020

"Springer Nature and MPDL Services GmbH on behalf of Projekt DEAL today announce that the formal contract for the world’s largest transformative Open Access (OA) agreement to date has been signed. Dated 1 January 2020, the agreement provides OA publishing services and full reading access to Springer Nature journals to scholars and students from across the German research landscape."

OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

January 21, 2020

Viticulture Data Journal: Non-conventional papers foster Open Science & sustainability

"Non-conventional, yet pivotal research results: data, models, methods, software, data analytics pipelines and visualisation methods, related to the field of viticulture, find a place in a newly launched, open-access and peer-reviewedViticulture Data Journal (VDJ)."

January 16, 2020

American Chemical Society announces the launch of JACS Au, a new fully open access journal

"The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) announces the launch of its newest open access journal, JACS Au. The journal (pronounced “JACS Gold”) represents a bold new step toward open science for the global chemistry community. The fully open access journal will allow for the rapid dissemination of cutting-edge, high-impact research across the breadth of chemistry and all related areas intersecting with chemistry."

January 13, 2020

Karger Publishers Continues to Work Successfully Towards Open Access by Flipping Five Journals to OA

"Karger Publishers continues to work actively toward a transition to Open Access (OA), including plans to “flip”, or convert, more journals from the subscription model to OA. By January 2020, five Karger journals have already become OA: Lifestyle Genomics, Gastrointestinal Tumors, Liver Cancer, Inflammatory Intestinal Diseases, and Kidney Diseases, increasing the number of Karger Publisher’s OA publications to 30 out of more than 100 journals."

January 6, 2020

National Science Reviewmoves to fully Open Access

"Oxford University Press and China Science Press are delighted to announce National Science Review (NSR) now publishes as a fully Open Access journal. Launched in 2014, NSR is a scientific journal published in English under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and aimed at reporting cutting-edge developments across science and technology in China and around the world."

Delta Think

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Charleston Conference 2024 Reflections

Charleston Conference 2024 Reflections

News & Views Webinar: Market Sizing Update 2024

News & Views: Market Sizing Update 2024: Has OA Hit A Peak?

Headline findings

A note about our method

Trends

Conclusion

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OA JOURNAL LAUNCHES

October 17, 2024

October 7, 2024

October 3, 2024

September 24, 2024

September 17, 2024

Content Licensing Do’s and Don’ts in the Age of AI

News & Views: Register now for Delta Think’s 2024 Market Sizing Update Webinar

Exploring AI

AI Policy

AI to Support Revenue Generation

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