Stop, Look, Listen — New Wilderness in Orderly Markets Academic Publishing in Times of APCs and Transformative Deals Column Editor: Dr. Sven Fund (Managing Director, Knowledge Unlatched GmbH, Maximiliankorso 66, 13465 Berlin, Germany) <sven@knowledgeunlatched.org>
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cademic publishing is an orderly market — the big players dominate the most profitable markets, while there is still enough room for medium-sized and small providers to make a living. Many publishers have survived the first two decades of digitization so well, although the need for investment has grown significantly, and the economic reserves have shrunk for many. The development of business models for the new digital reality, on the other hand, has remained manageable. In this situation, libraries and publishers are challenged to integrate Open Access (OA) into their work processes — an organizational challenge from various perspectives that is difficult to solve by just a few players.
central role in the more efficient organization of OA. Not just since the advent of Project DEAL in Germany and comparable deals around the globe, the players involved are striving to make deals that enable OA without requiring the same informedness from scientists as well as from librarians.
Library Acquisition Behavior: Addictive Models
The inherently understandable need for simplification puts the structures of scholarly publishing under a burning glass: it’s a game of big with big. A quick survey of transformative agreements by Dufour et al. demonstrates this (see https://halshs. archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-03203560). Scholarly institutions first sign agreements that show high publication and usage volumes. The often-vaunted library diversity largely falls by the wayside, even with the most recent publishing models. Large publishers with broad portfolios are better able to manage the change in business model. This is all the more surprising since universities under considerable cost pressure — such as in the wake of the COVID pandemic and uncertain student numbers in, for example, the United States or the United Kingdom — have begun to dismantle the Big Deal and prefer to subscribe to journals individually (with the help of solutions such as Unsub.org).
OA represents a significant shift in the economic decision-making process of academic institutions. This mainly affects libraries, which in the past were not able to make decisions autonomously from scientific committees but were exposed to their influences in an organized form with relatively low decision frequency. Plans for collection development were discussed and developed in detail and implemented over several years. The offer of big deals for journals and eBooks by publishers, especially larger ones, encouraged this acquisition behavior — in libraries, acquisition and cataloging departments could be significantly thinned out as a result. The result is a relatively high level of dependence on a very efficient business model, which customers usually do not appreciate. On the other hand, publishers are traditionally accustomed in their processes to organizing highly fragmented target groups and content qualities through peer review, which is supported by academics and handled with the help of relatively efficient systems. In this way, they can even cope with high rejection rates of submitted papers.
Scientists as New Decision-makers While publishers can handle and scale the high volume of individual customer relationships quite well, OA poses a new challenge for libraries: instead of being made at the level of a journal subscription, purchasing decisions are now often made at the level of articles. What’s more, this decision-making process is not carried out by professionals in information retrieval but in the majority by laypersons in this activity. Classics scholars, biologists, Germanists, and representatives of all other disciplines have to make decisions about economics and licensing conditions, usually without being adequately trained and informed to do so. The result: a massive need for information, which many libraries have met in recent years by setting up OA departments. However, Knowledge Unlatched’s cursory surveys reveal that numerous scientists are overwhelmed by the task of selecting the right form of publication for them, while they practically universally welcome OA as a concept and would like to implement it in their work.
Transformative Deals: The Solution to OA’s Structural Problems? It is hardly surprising that, despite all reservations, the experience of the Big Deal in acquiring content quickly played a
Against the Grain / September 2021
Structure and Competition It is foreseeable that the Big Deal problems will arise in the same way as with traditional media acquisition, especially as read-only access and the ability to publish OA are combined. The Big Deal is getting even bigger.
Lack of Intermediaries Digitization in scholarly publishing is primarily a story of disintermediation: journal agents and specialized booksellers have been systematically cut out of the content acquisition process of big houses over the last two decades. They have been left with complicated and small-scale tasks and negative economic consequences. The advantages for publishers with their own sales teams are obvious, resulting in increased profits and better customer contact. To avoid misunderstandings: Intermediaries are not uninvolved in this development; too often in the past, they had failed to show or develop their share of value creation and, where this was not present, to reduce their costs accordingly. The consequences for libraries and the market as a whole have been severe: little has remained of the political agenda of OA of the early years, according to which the oligopoly of the big players was to be broken in the interest of more reasonable prices and maximum openness of research content. While the Budapest Declaration of 2002 called for a significant reduction in costs, many of the current contract agreements give the lie to such a development: “(...) experiments show that the overall costs of providing open access to this literature are far lower than the costs of traditional forms of dissemination. With such an opportunity to save money and expand the scope of dissemination at the same time, there is today a strong incentive for professional associations, universities, li-
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