↓ Skip to main content

The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era

Overview of attention for article published in PLoS ONE, June 2015
Altmetric Badge

About this Attention Score

  • In the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • Among the highest-scoring outputs from this source (#15 of 111,435)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (99th percentile)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (99th percentile)

Mentioned by

news
21 news outlets
blogs
32 blogs
policy
1 policy source
twitter
1499 tweeters
facebook
94 Facebook pages
wikipedia
2 Wikipedia pages
googleplus
31 Google+ users
reddit
3 Redditors

Readers on

mendeley
325 Mendeley
citeulike
6 CiteULike
Title
The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era
Published in
PLoS ONE, June 2015
DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0127502
Pubmed ID
Authors

Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, Philippe Mongeon, Larivière, Vincent, Haustein, Stefanie, Mongeon, Philippe

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.

Twitter Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 1,499 tweeters who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 325 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
United States 11 3%
Spain 10 3%
United Kingdom 8 2%
Canada 7 2%
Brazil 7 2%
Portugal 7 2%
Germany 6 2%
Finland 3 <1%
Austria 3 <1%
Other 26 8%
Unknown 237 73%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Librarian 81 25%
Student > Ph. D. Student 47 14%
Student > Master 42 13%
Researcher 38 12%
Student > Doctoral Student 25 8%
Other 92 28%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Social Sciences 92 28%
Computer Science 53 16%
Agricultural and Biological Sciences 35 11%
Arts and Humanities 30 9%
Business, Management and Accounting 18 6%
Other 97 30%

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1563. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 21 June 2017.
All research outputs
#539
of 7,932,087 outputs
Outputs from PLoS ONE
#15
of 111,435 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#16
of 225,534 outputs
Outputs of similar age from PLoS ONE
#1
of 6,475 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 7,932,087 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 111,435 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 10.3. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 225,534 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 6,475 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its contemporaries.
https://www.altmetric.com/details/4270064
www.altmetric.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-26
30069
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:SUTJIGZ22W6EUYTS3K26NTRKYDECT7EY
<urn:uuid:9e2e1f11-d32d-42d1-8b28-d77ad8005aaa>
2017-06-23T04:57:45Z
151.101.34.2
text/html
sha1:IJ3DVSK2OTHUN6JWUUJHIGGXUTTCENL4
<urn:uuid:e47c7b33-6289-4715-9f30-79ada44d51ce>
https://www.altmetric.com/details/4270064
length
response
<urn:uuid:0b76cfb5-b9c1-4014-bb79-96d84b1ff4ea>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-185-81-55.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf