Breaking The Corporate Journal Publishing Cycle.pdf

The rise of corporate journals and its impacts is striking, with corporate publishers accounting for more than 50% of all published articles as of 2013, a dramatic increase from 1973 when they accounted for ~20% of all articles. This situation arose due to nonprofit scholarly societies and university presses publishing the majority of academic journals through the 1960s, but changing in the 1970s when many societies started partnering with corporate publishers, giving away the rights to publish society journals in exchange for a portion of sales revenue. The rise of the internet accelerated instances of societies outsourcing journal production because they lacked the resources to effectively digitize their content. Corporate publishers have been raising bundle prices by 5-7% a year, outpacing library budgets, and the cost of subscriptions to key titles continues to soar. Today, educational institutions are running out of funding to pay for journal subscriptions and are desperate to coerce publishers to lower their prices, but the deck is stacked in favor of corporate publishers. Corporate publishers have large concentrations of titles with high journal impact factors, which researchers prefer to publish in due to perceived prestige, and can keep making libraries pay more with the threat of losing access to research only available in their journals. The OA movement has grown substantially in the last 20+ years, with “the proportion of articles published in open access journals at about 12% (while OA journals make up about 26-29% of all journals)” (Ware and Mabe 10). This growth has been spurred in part by government and funder OA mandates such as Open Access 2020 and the 2017 Gates Foundation OA policy. However, while the growing OA movement addresses the issue of scholars retaining access to research, it does not directly solve the problem of high journal production costs and the power imbalance between academic institutions and corporate publishers.