From: Colin Steele <[log in to unmask]> Date: Sun, Oct 14, 2018 at 7:41 PM This 213 page report, by Rob Johnson Research Consulting,Anthony WatkinsonCIBER Research and Michael Mabe The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publisher is available at https://www.stm-assoc.org/2018_10_04_STM_Report_2018.pdf Some selected bits below. Colin ---------------------------------------------------------------- The STM market 3. The annual revenues generated from English-language STM journal publishing are estimated at about $10 billion in 2017, within a broader STM information publishing market worth some $25.7 billion. About 41% of global STM revenues (including nonjournal STM products) come from the USA, 27% from Europe/Middle East, 26% from Asia/Pacific and 6% from the rest of the world (page 22). 4. The industry employs an estimated 110,000 people globally, of which about 40% are employed in the EU. In addition, an estimated 20–30,000 full time employees are indirectly supported by the STM industry globally in addition to employment in the production supply chain (page 46). 5. Although this report focuses primarily on journals, the STM book market (worth about $3.3 billion annually) is evolving rapidly in a transition to digital publishing. Ebooks made up about a third of the market in 2016, having grown much faster than the STM market as a whole in recent years (page 22). There are estimated to be of the order of 10,000 journal publishers globally, of which around 5,000 are included in the Scopus database. The main English-language trade and professional associations for journal publishers collectively include about 650 publishers producing around 11,550 journals, that is, about 50% of the total journal output by title. Of these, some 480 publishers (73%) and about 2,300 journals (20%) are not-for-profit (page 40). 7. There were about 33,100 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals in mid-2018 (plus a further 9,400 non-English-language journals), collectively publishing over 3 million articles a year. The number of articles published each year and the number of journals have both grown steadily for over two centuries, by about 3% and 3.5% per year respectively. However, growth has accelerated to 4% per year for articles and over 5% for journals in recent years. The reason is the continued realterms growth in research and development expenditure, and the rising number of researchers, which now stands at between 7 and 8 million, depending on definition, although only about 20% of these are repeat authors (page 25) Research behaviour and motivation 16. Despite a transformation in the way journals are published, researchers’ core motivations for publishing appear largely unchanged, focused on securing funding and furthering the author’s career (page 77). 17. The research community continues to see peer review as fundamental to scholarly communication and appears committed to it despite some perceived shortcomings. The typical reviewer spends 5 hours per review and reviews some 8 articles a year. Peer review is under some pressure, however, notably from the growth in research outputs, including the rapid growth from emerging economies. This has temporarily unbalanced the sources of articles and reviewers, with a third of all reviews but only a quarter of articles provided by researchers in the USA (page 47) Approximately one third of the scholarly literature was available from legal and sustainable open access sources in 2016. Recent estimates place the proportion of articles published in open access journals at 15-20% (while OA journals make up about 26-29% of all journals), with a further 10-15% available via delayed access on the publisher’s website or self-archived copies (page 134). 25. Gold open access is sometimes taken as synonymous with the article publication charge (APC) business model, but strictly speaking simply refers to journals offering immediate open access on publication. A substantial fraction of the Gold OA articles indexed by Scopus, however, do not involve APCs but use other models (e.g. institutional support or sponsorship). The APC model itself has become more complicated, with variable APCs (e.g. based on length), discounts, prepayments and institutional membership schemes, offsetting and bundling arrangements for hybrid publications, read-and-publish deals, and so on (page 97). 37. The growth in the development of Artificial Intelligence and its implementation across industry as a whole has impacted generally on the publishing industry, partly because it can enable cost efficiencies. AI has subsumed much of semantic technology as a guiding principle. Blockchain, although much talked about, has yet to prove its usefulness in practice. While publishers have always provided services such as peer review and copy-editing, increased competition for authors, globalisation of research, and new enabling technologies are driving an expansion of author services and greater focus on improving the author experience. Online Collaborative Writing remains a service which has yet to have its day, though a recent emphasis on Annotations is showing promise (page 163). 38. Perhaps the biggest change in scholarly infrastructure has been the development of preprint servers and the growing use of preprints in areas such as biology and chemistry where there had hitherto been little appetite for their take up. Primary journals in general have now accepted that a preprint is not prior publication. There is some concern that preprints (which can be brought up to date) may become a go-to place for the version of record, undermining publisher business models (page 179). "Average publishing costs per article vary substantially depending on a range of factors including rejection rate (which drives peer review costs), range and type of content, levels of editorial services, and others. The average 2010 cost of publishing an article in a subscription-based journal with print and electronic editions was estimated by CEPA to be around £3095 (c. $4,000), excluding non-cash peer review costs. An updated analysis by CEPA in 2018 shows that, in almost all cases, intangible costs such as editorial activities are much higher than tangible ones, such as production, sales and distribution, and are key drivers in per article costs (page 73). The potential for technology and open access to effect cost savings has been much discussed, with open access publishers such as Hindawi and PeerJ having claimed per article costs in the low hundreds of dollars. A recent rise in PLOS’s per article costs, to $1,500 (inferred from its financial statements), and costs of over £3,000 ($4,000) per article at the selective OA journal eLife call into question the scope for OA to deliver radical cost savings. Nevertheless, with article volumes rising at 4% per annum, and journal revenues at only 2%, further downward pressure on per article costs is inevitable (page 74).... It is unclear where the market will set OA publication charges: they are currently lower than the historical average cost of article publication; and charges for full open access articles remain lower than hybrid, though the gap is closing. Calls to redirect subscription expenditures to open access have increased, but the more research-intensive universities and countries remain concerned about the net impact on their budgets (page 101; 139). ... Recent developments indicate a growing willingness on the part of funders and policymakers to intervene in the STM marketplace, whether by establishing their own publication platforms, strengthening OA mandates or acting to change the incentive structures that drive authors’ publication choices (page 113). ... Concerns over the impact of Green OA and the role of repositories have receded somewhat, though not disappeared. The lack of its own independent sustainable business model means Green OA depends on its not undermining that of (subscription) journals. The evidence remains mixed, with indications that Green OA can increase downloads and citations being balanced against evidence of the long usage half-life of journal articles and its substantial variation between fields. In practice, however, attention in many quarters has shifted to the potentially damaging impact of Social Collaboration Networks (SCNs) and pirate websites on subscriptions (pages 114; 174). ..." --------------------------------------------- Colin Steele Emeritus Fellow ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences The Australian National University Room 3.31, Beryl Rawson Building #13 Acton, ACT, 2601 Australia P: + 61 2 6125 8983 E: [log in to unmask]