From: Richard Feinman <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2015 07:36:50 -0400

Is up to the scientists. If we formed some union to stop the absurdity
of giving away services and products and forcing libraries to pay
money for these services and products, we could target individual
journals or publishers and stop the problem. Most of us have a lot of
other grief but maybe the librarians can help us organize.

RDF
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Richard David Feinman
Professor of Cell Biology
SUNY Downstate Medical Center
blog: http://rdfeinman.wordpress.com

NOTE: This mailer sometimes creates .DTF files. Please ignore.
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-----LibLicense-L Discussion Forum <[log in to unmask]> wrote: -----
From: Ann Shumelda Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2015 09:57:39 -0400

From Gary Price, via INFOdocket, of possible interest.
_______

The following article by researchers at the University of Montreal was
published  yesterday on the PLOS One web site.

Title

The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era
10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

Authors

Vincent Larivière
Stefanie Haustein
Philippe Mongeon

Abstract

The consolidation of the scientific publishing industry has been the
topic of much debate within and outside the scientific community,
especially in relation to major publishers’ high profit margins.
However, the share of scientific output published in the journals of
these major publishers, as well as its evolution over time and across
various disciplines, has not yet been analyzed. This paper provides
such analysis, based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of
Science over the period 1973-2013. It shows that in both natural and
medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH),
Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis
increased their share of the published output, especially since the
advent of the digital era (mid-1990s). Combined, the top five most
prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published
in 2013. Disciplines of the social sciences have the highest level of
concentration (70% of papers from the top five publishers), while the
humanities have remained relatively independent (20% from top five
publishers). NMS disciplines are in between, mainly because of the
strength of their scientific societies, such as the ACS in chemistry
or APS in physics. The paper also examines the migration of journals
between small and big publishing houses and explores the effect of
publisher change on citation impact. It concludes with a discussion on
the economics of scholarly publishing.

DIRECT to Full Text Article

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502