Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Collaboration between research institutes and large and small publishers for publishing open access journals

  • Published:
Scientometrics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Research institutes frequently collaborate with for-profit publishers for the publication of open access journals. This study uses a structural break test to examine the effects of the collaboration between research institutes and large and small for-profit publishers for the publication of 15 gold open access journals on the journals’ internationality and academic influence. The results reveal an improvement in the internationality and academic influence for most of the journals following the collaboration. Additionally, the scale and persistence of the effects are not dependent on the size of the publisher. The findings indicate that large publishers do not have any advantage over small publishers in publishing journals for research institutes. This implies that small publishers can compete with large ones in publishing official journals on behalf of research institutes. However, as collaboration with research institutes strengthens the large publishers’ presence in the open access journal market, it is necessary to monitor their activities, including large publishers’ acquisitions of small ones.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Data Availability

The data used in this study are available from Scopus.

Notes

  1. This study investigates journals for academic societies, universities, government-affiliated research institutes, and non-profit organizations, and refers to these organizations collectively as research institutes.

  2. Web of Science yielded only 11 observations that meet these criteria.

  3. Although both BMC and Springer are part of Springer Nature, BMC and Springer journals are published separately on the BMC website and SpringerOpen, respectively.

  4. Termedia Publishing House also sells the two journals by subscription, although the articles are published on an open access basis. One reason for the low APCs may be that these journals have subscription revenues.

  5. The SJR in the 2011–2013 period for Earth, Planets and Space rose significantly owing to increased citations of articles from a special issue regarding the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, the greatest earthquake in the modern history of Japan.

References

  • Ainsworth, S., & Russell, J. M. (2018). Has hosting on science direct improved the visibility of Latin American scholarly journals? A preliminary analysis of data quality. Scientometrics, 115(3), 1463–1484.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Andrews, D. W. K. (1993). Tests for parameter instability and structural change with unknown change point. Econometrica, 61(4), 821–856.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Asai, S. (2020). The effect of collaboration with large publishers on the internationality and influence of open access journals for research institutions. Scientometrics, 124(1), 663–677.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ashman, P. (2009). What societies want from a publishing partner. Learned Publishing, 22(3), 209–219.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Björk, B. (2019). Open access journal publishing in the Nordic countries. Learned Publishing, 32(3), 227–236.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Björk, B., & Solomon, D. (2015). Article processing charges in OA journals: Relationship between price and quality. Scientometrics, 103(2), 373–385.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Buela-Casal, G., Perakakis, P., Taylor, M., & Checa, P. (2006). Measuring internationality: Reflections and perspectives on academic journals. Scientometrics, 67(1), 45–65.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chow, G. C. (1960). Tests of equality between sets of coefficients in two linear regressions. Econometrica, 28(3), 591–605.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Clarke, M. T. (2019). The journal publishing services agreement: A guide for societies. Learned Publishing, 33(1), 37–41.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cooney-McQuat, S., Busch, S., & Kahn, D. (2010). Open access publishing: A viable solution for society publishers. Learned Publishing, 23(2), 101–105.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crawford, W. (2020). Gold open access 2014–2019: Articles in journals (GOA5). Livermore, CA: Cites & Insights Books. https://waltcrawford.name/goa5.pdf. Accessed April 3, 2020.

  • Evrim-Mandaci, P., Kahyaoglu, H., & Cagli, E. C. (2011). Stock and bond market interactions with two regime shifts: Evidence from Turkey. Applied Financial Economics, 21(18), 1355–1368.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Franceschini, F., Maisano, D., & Mastrogiacomo, L. (2016). Empirical analysis and classification of database errors in scopus and web of science. Journal of Informetrics, 10(4), 933–953.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • González-Pereira, B., Guerrero-Bote, V. P., & Moya-Anegón, F. (2010). A new approach to the metric of journals’ scientific prestige: The SJR indicator. Journal of Informetrics, 4(3), 379–391.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harzing, A., & Alakangas, S. (2017a). Microsoft academic: Is the phoenix getting wings? Scientometrics, 110(1), 371–383.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harzing, A., & Alakangas, S. (2017b). Microsoft academic is one year old: The Phoenix is ready to leave the nest. Scientometrics, 112(3), 1887–1894.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • He, T. (2003). Difficulties and challenges of Chinese scientific journals: Statistical analysis of Chinese literatures using Chinese science bulletin as example. Scientometrics, 57(1), 127–139.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • He, T., & Liu, W. (2009). The internationalization of Chinese scientific journals: A quantitative comparison of three chemical journals from China. England and Japan. Scientometrics, 80(3), 583–593.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hirschman, A. O. (1964). The paternity of an index. American Economic Review, 54(5), 761–762.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, R., & Fosci, M. (2015). On shifting sands: Assessing the financial sustainability of UK learned societies. Learned Publishing, 28(4), 274–282.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kenney, M., & Zysman, J. (2020). The platform economy: Restructuring the space of capitalist accumulation. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 13(1), 55–76.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kim, S.-J., & Park, K. S. (2020). Market share of the largest publishers in journal citation reports based on journal price and article processing charge. Science Editing, 7(2), 149–155.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). The oligopoly of academic publishers in the digital era. PLoS ONE, 10(6), e0127502.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McIntyre, D. P., & Srinivasan, A. (2017). Networks, platforms, and strategy: Emerging views and next steps. Strategic Management Journal, 38(1), 141–160.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moed, H. F. (2010). Measuring contextual citation impact of scientific journals. Journal of Informetrics, 4(3), 265–277.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moed, H. F., de Moya-Anegon, F., Guerrero-Bote, V., & Lopez-Illescas, C. (2020). Are nationally oriented journals indexed in Scopus becoming more international? The effect of publication language and access modality. Journal of Informetrics, 14(2), 101011.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morrison, H. (2018). Global OA APCs (APC) 2010–2017: Major trends. https://doi.org/10.4000/Proceedings.elpub.2018.16f. Accessed April 3 2020.

  • Plavčan, P., & Funta, R. (2020). Some economic characteristics of internet platforms. Danube: Law, economics and social issues review, 11 (2). https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/danb/11/2/article-p156.xml?language=en. Accessed October 14, 2020.

  • Ponte, D., Mierzejewska, B. I., & Klein, S. (2017). The transformation of the academic publishing market: Multiple perspectives on innovation. Electron Markets, 27(2), 97–100.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Universities UK (2017). Monitoring the transition to open access. Report. Universities UK. https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Pages/monitoring-transition-open-access-2017.aspx. Accessed February 26, 2020.

  • Wajda-Lichy, M., & Kawa, P. (2018). Trade-finance nexus: Was it distorted in the aftermath of the global financial crisis? Entrepreneurial Business and Economics Review, 6(3), 11–27.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang, S., Wang, H., & Weldon, P. R. (2007). Bibliometric analysis of English-language academic journals of China and their internationalization. Scientometrics, 73(3), 331–343.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ware, M. (2008). Choosing a publishing partner: Advice for societies and associations. Learned Publishing, 21(1), 22–28.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wise, A., & Estelle, L. (2020). How society publishers can accelerate their transition to open access and align with Plan S. Learned Publishing, 33(1), 14–27.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhu, J., & Liu, W. (2020). A tale of two databases: The use of web of science and scopus in academic papers. Scientometrics, 123(1), 321–335.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The author appreciates the valuable comments from a reviewer for improvement to the article. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant number 20K01663.

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan society for the promotion of science (JSPS) KAKENHI (Grant number 20K01663).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Political Science and Economics, Meiji University, 1-1, Kanda-Surugadai Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 101-8301, Japan

    Sumiko Asai

Authors
  1. Sumiko Asai
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sumiko Asai.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The author has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Asai, S. Collaboration between research institutes and large and small publishers for publishing open access journals. Scientometrics 126, 5245–5262 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03949-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03949-4

Keywords

JEL Classification

Search

Navigation