Highlights Elsevier is now the world’s largest OA publisher with 511 fully open access titles (De Gruyter second at 435, Hindawi third at 405). These figures are drawn from the publishers’ websites.
315 of the 511 journals (63%) have an APC of 0 and an indication of “fee not payable by author”. This is primarily due to substantial active society and institutional involvement and sponsorship of these journals. A large percentage of these societies are keeping their copyright. I argue that this is not a bad thing; the alternative may not be a purer OA but rather Elsevier copyright retention. There are marked differences between Elsevier’s fully OA journals and their 2,149 hybrid journals. The OA journals tend to be clustered near the low end of the $0 - $5,000 APC range while the hybrids are skewed toward the high end. Society and institutional involvement and copyright retention is far more evident in the open access journals. Using data from Elsevier’s website and 2015 annual report, I assess the potential for Elsevier to achieve a full flip to OA while retaining the current $3 billion USD in revenue and 37% profit rate. By my calculations, Elsevier would need to charge APCs averaging from $5,000 to $11,000 USD. This is not realistic. Libraries and those seeking to further transition to open access should (in my opinion) expect that Elsevier will continue to seek substantial subscriptions revenue for some time to come, even given substantial support for APCs. For more detail and a link to a draft article on the topic, see: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2016/05/13/elsevier-now-the-worlds-largest-open-access-publisher/ best, -- Dr. Heather Morrison Assistant Professor École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies University of Ottawa http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/ heather.morri...@uottawa.ca _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
