The development of Open Access (OA) publishing in the past three decades has profound implications on how academics produce, process and share an idea. Understanding of this phenomenon in turn requires an understanding of the OA publishing market, and, perhaps more importantly, the relevant regulations on the OA market. It is crucial to appreciate the structure of relevant markets, demand and supply, and (behind the market) the potential of price and quantity to drive behaviour. The topic of a writer's research, the dynamic of different disciplines and the size of target audiences can all have sizeable impacts on the structure of the market. A good understanding of the market provides the rationale of who, among the key individual players and institutions – authors, publishers, subscribers and readers – would benefit from the OA publishing and who would pay the cost. A further question is whether, given the market structure and its efficiency analysis, policy-makers ought to provide subsidies or levy taxation to accommodate the externalities and whether legislators ought to revise intellectual property laws, particularly copyright.
The Economics of Open Access contributes to debate of these questions by providing a detailed description and comparison of the traditional academic publishing market and the OA publishing market. Apart from the authors' comprehensive accounting exercise – linking quantity, subscription fees, impact index and various characteristics from different academic fields and countries – Eger and Scheufen also explore a unique data set on subjective scores collected from more than 10,000 questionnaires from 25 countries. This data provides an excellent opportunity to get a snapshot of the heterogeneity of the academic publishing market, objectively and subjectively. The authors’ empirical analysis provides evidence on the correlation between the usage of OA publishing and subjects. However, the results are limited by the sample size and representativeness of the responses. The authors discuss the policy implications and put forward some fundamental policy requirements to facilitate the transition from traditional publishing to OA publishing. These discussions, however, are less driven by the empirical results but more from their theoretical point of view.
Eger and Scheufen start the discussion by analysing commercial academic publishing. They highlight the unique feature of the academic publishing as the reward structure, whereby researchers are “predominately motivated by curiosity, priority and the expected gain in reputation, and much less so by any monetary rewards”. Hence, non-monetary rewards and punishments would have a long-run effect on researchers. Owing to the asymmetry of information in this two-sided market, the reputation of peer-review journals becomes a key signal. The direct result is that “the big five [commercial] publishers not only host almost half of all academic journals but two of them own a large share of important journals with above-average impact factors”. This concentration of journals with publishers enhances the bargaining power of the publisher against the libraries. It contributes to the high subscription prices and the “Serials Crisis”, in which libraries are “regularly forced to cancel serials subscriptions and to cut back on new monographs”. Inevitably, it affects different disciplines differently. Apart from the detailed data across disciplines and publishers, the authors also investigate (but find no evidence on) the correlation between the price per article and impact factor. Their dataset could be extended to explore the underlining determinants of the differences between disciplines and to consider the compositional differences among publishers.
In contrast to the commercial publishing model, the OA publishing model provides academic articles to all readers, free of charge. To better compare the OA and the traditional publishing markets, it is essential to define the two different types of OA publishing: the gold OA journals – listed in the Dictionary of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – and the green OA journals, which operate through self-archiving or repository platforms run by the authors. OA publishing has developed rapidly since 2010, and the development has varied geographically and across disciplines. As of April 2017, more than 85% of DOAJ listed articles were in English. The top three fields, Health Science, Social Science and Technology and Engineering, account for nearly half of all OA journals. The dramatic increase of the gold OA journals has attracted attention from the traditional commercial academic publishers, who have established hybrid journals. On the other hand, the green OA journals are restricted by the journal publishers as the copyright-holders. In the last part of their objective observations, Eger and Scheufen discuss policy development (including the support by national parliaments and governments) by research funds and by universities and research institutes. Interestingly, they also compare the impact factor of commercial journals and OA journals. They find a significant impact factor advantage for the commercial journal. However, this is an observation of correlation rather than causality. It might be affected by the different development stage of the journals since the transition process could be long, and reputation among authors and readers requires time to build up. It could place a limit on the number of readerships where the OA publishing could have more impact.
The Economics of Open Access further introduces a unique dataset, measuring the subjective opinions from academics around the world. The three-year cross-country survey consisted of 10,469 completed questionnaires by scholars from all disciplines and from 25 countries. The survey also included individual characteristics, including age and professional status, and discipline-specific and country-specific characteristics, providing opportunities to study the underlying reasons behind the discipline effects. Eger and Scheufen summarise the key features of different disciplines and group them into the gold culture, the green culture and the grey culture, which includes disciplines with mediocre use of both gold and green OA publishing. They then run four different logit regression models (for dichotomous outcome variables, in this case, whether to publish or not) to explain the latent variables that might have an impact on the probability that a researcher chooses to publish on OA journals. The main differences across models are the selection of explanatory variables and the detail level of country and discipline controls. The regression results, as expected from the authors’ model, are not dramatically different. Aligned with the previous discussion using the objective data, “the likelihood of publishing articles in OA journals (the gold road) or uploading papers to OA repositories (the green road) largely depends on the discipline the scholar is affiliated with”.
Three points on the subjective dataset require further discussion. The first is about the dataset. Although they have a large and detailed dataset, the potential for selection bias puts an important caveat on any argument of correlation and causality when analysing the effects of the various characteristics used within countries (25 countries in total) and within disciplines (15 disciplines in total). As one can see from table 3.2 in the book, many country-discipline combinations have fewer than five observations, which could suggest that these replies might have a huge impact on the final results. It is less problematic when the models group the dummies into region and cultures. Besides, the key focus is on the probability of publishing in the OA journals, to explain how likely the OA publishing might be accepted by the academics. It could also be helpful to know the number of papers published in the OA journals, especially for disciplines with a relatively matured OA publishing culture. Furthermore, an interesting question here is what is the role of OA publishing: for example, the green OA may complement traditional publishing or may substitute for it. The results may be explained by effects of a fixed system of topics, research methods and rewards within a discipline. However, the results might instead be explained by the “over-time development stage effect”, whereby if all the disciplines developed to a certain stage, they would choose more or less the same publishing strategies. It would also be nice to know which effect is larger, if any. The most interesting questions are, unfortunately, absorbed by the dummy variables in the regression models.
Policy recommendations are the key of the discussion. Egar and Scheufen propose several alternative policy instruments, including: the DEAL project in Germany to improve the collective bargaining power of academic institutions; the administrative regulation of authors by their employer institutions to reduce publication in commercial journals; and the abolition of copyright protection for academic articles. They discuss the financial viability of a large-scale transition to gold OA, to reallocate the subscription fees to article processing charges. The discussion here is more accounting-based, using the current average cost of commercial publication and OA publication to calculate the cost and benefit. One issue that could be worth further discussion is the dynamic of cost and quantity, and the externality effect on the social cost. From the policy-makers’ view, one more benefit is that of researchers and the public who lack access to subscription journals. That benefit could potentially generate a positive externality to socioeconomic development. If that is the case, subsidising authors would be justifiable. On the other hand, if the reward system is the fundamental reason for academic publication, then the cost of publishing an article, which can then partially serve as a signal of the quality of the researcher, would be fully paid by the researcher who benefits from it in the long-run. Yet another consideration could be whether the quantity of submission will increase or decrease dramatically, given the subsidy to the author, which will have an impact on the tightness of the publication market, which might generate other indirect impacts on the publishing market. For example, more submissions will mean greater demand for referees and editors, thus raising the cost.
Egar and Scheufen also discuss the limits of OA publishing. They point out that many academic authors do not trust the quality of OA journals. Another issue they discuss is whether a transition from the subscription model to the OA model would create various types of discrimination. The last part of The Economics of Open Access proposes the fundamental requirements for an efficient transition to OA, including proper incentives for academic publishers, quality assurance, adequate assessment of scholars and guarantees of academic freedom. They argue that, “at the present, it seems advisable to proceed with both the green and the gold road to open access”. However, “the future of academic publishing will most likely be characterised by increasing importance of OA mega-journals with open post-publication reviews”. The discussion in the last part of the book is largely based on literature. Another potential resource would have been the survey results and the dataset in the previous chapters. If that information had been used, the policy recommendation would have been more empirically founded.
In sum, this book provides a detailed discussion of the structure of the academic publishing market and the development of OA publishing, with both subjective and objective datasets. Egar and Scheufen discuss the potential determinates and provide policy recommendations. Further work to decompose the underlining reasons for the differing popularity of OA publishing in different disciplines would enable policy recommendations that are capable of implementation to be identified. Also, it would have been nice, particularly for readers of this journal, to have more discussion of the implications of the study for intellectual property rights.
