Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific ...

As of 1995, publishers started to adopt digital
delivery and provide online access to their
journals. New technologies and the internet
have dramatically improved the accessibility of
scientific publications for researchers, but
actual access to the literature still relies on
their library’s ability to pay the subscriptions.
Digital delivery brought significant changes in
the journal pricing policies (e.g. selling access
to bundles of journals in multi-year contracts)
and enabled the introduction of new business
models (e.g. provide free access to journals by
charging a publication fee). Libraries gathered
into consortia to share the benefits of access
and improve their bargaining positions in front
of publishers. Technologies also enabled the
development of alternative ways to disseminate
and exchange scientific information more
freely, such as open access e-print archives
(i.e. server collecting papers deposited by their
authors).
In view of the libraries’ ongoing budgetary
difficulties and of the opportunities provided
by information technologies, and acknowledging
the significant part of public funds involved in
the scientific publishing process, a movement
in favor of open access to scientific information
has gained scale in the research community
and research-related organizations. Declarations
in favor of open access, such as Budapest
Open Access Initiative and the Berlin Declaration
on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences
and Humanities, were signed by thousands of
individuals and by major research institutions
and research funding bodies around the world.
These concerns about access to research
results have been echoed by the civil society
(e.g. at the World Summit on the Information
Society) and by political bodies at national and
international levels (e.g. the OECD Declaration
on Access to Research Data from Public
Funding). In the UK, the House of Commons
(2004) recommended that public funding
agencies require open access to publicly-funded
research through deposit of the publications in
the authors’ institutional repositories.
Following these declarations and recommendations,
several important research funding
bodies have established policies urging their
funded researchers to publish in open access
journals, offering to pay the publication fees if
any, and/or to deposit their articles in an open
access repository (e.g. the US National
Institutes of Health, the UK Research Councils,
the Wellcome Trust, CERN…). These policies
have raised publishers and learned societies’
concerns about the potential threat on their
existence and activities: they fear that as articles
become freely available in open archives and
as search, access and retrieval facilities are
enhanced by search engines and interoperability,
journal subscriptions will be cancelled, thereby
undermining the viability of their journals.
Starting from this global economic and
research-policy context, this report provides an
independent analysis of the conditions regarding
access and dissemination of research results,
with a view to maximizing societal returns on
R&D investments.
RESULTS OF THE ANALYSIS
The report is subdivided in 8 sections,
numbered 2 to 9. We follow this numbering
here.
Section 2 starts by relying on the existing
literature to stress the broad facts about the
market for journal publications. It first discusses
the significant difference between this market
and the ‘ideal perfectly competitive market’.
Beyond the key role of public funding of
authors, referees and journal purchases, it is
worth stressing that this is an intermediated
market, where libraries are the key buyers,
which leads to lower reader price sensitivity.
Moreover, it is a market where the best authors
want to publish in highly-read journals and
readers want to read journals which publish
the best authors. This leads to ‘virtuous circles’
for journals, and to associated ‘natural barriers
to entry’.
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