Universities South Africa (USAf) originally brought to the NRF’s attention the issue of article processing charges (APCs) imposed by the publishing giant Reed-Elsevier (called Elsevier henceforth) as well as the firm’s recent acquisition of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). This acquisition in principle makes Elsevier the world’s largest open access publisher as of May 2016; unfortunately, the adoption of an extraordinarily predatory marketing approach, namely the packaging of a majority of constituent journals as ‘hybrids’ containing both articles paid for by APC charges to authors and articles not thus paid for but covered by journal subscriptions, amounting to substantial double payments by licence purchasers (since the small discounts offered are not commensurate with the prepayments done through APCs).
The acquisition of the SSRN by Elsevier came as a surprise and shock to researchers and librarians supporting open access – SSRN is a worldwide collaborative network through which over 240 000 authors disseminate social sciences research to more than 1.7 million users. SSRN reaches over 400 000 people in about 140 countries and is the foremost open access repository in the world. Academics may submit a paper at no cost and content is similarly freely downloadable.
Elsevier has a major, virtually monopolistic hold over a large domain of scholarly publishing and the issues around them are highly complex and impactful. In a recent study, it was estimated that Elsevier specifically accounted for 16.4% of all social science and humanities (SSH) papers in 2013 (a 4.4 fold increase since 1990) and 24.1% of all natural and medical sciences (NMS) papers in the same year (a 1.5 fold increase since 1990) (Larivière V, et al, 2015)). The profit margins for Elsevier increased from 30.6% to 38.9% between 2006 and 2013 (Larivière V, et al, 2015) , reported as almost four times the average profit margin of groups in the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 (Cookson, 2015). It was also reported that Elsevier generates more revenue from both subscriptions and APCs than any other publisher (Shamash, 2016). SSRN is the second open access platform obtained by Elsevier, after the academic referencing site Mendeley2, acquisition of which also sparked wide criticism from the scholarly community (Shaw, 2013).
While retaining a substantial presence in commercial subscription journals (this sector still makes up the vast majority of its overall profits), as already mentioned Elsevier has added the commercial version of the open access Gold Route through APCs in both hybrid (subscription and APCs) and ‘open access only’
titles. The United Kingdom (UK) body JISC has reported that “Elsevier makes up nearly a quarter of total current APC expenditure, and captures 1.4 times more revenue from APCs than its nearest rival, Wiley” (Shamash, 2016). Other reports have indicated that Elsevier is concentrating on the doubly profitable hybrid open access model (Chumbe et al, 2014). The publisher has been criticised for overly aggressive copyright enforcement, which is often targeted at Elsevier-published authors who post their papers on institutional or personal websites (Pike, 2016).
The major funder, the Wellcome Trust, has reported poor compliance with funder requirements, stating that: “Elsevier and Wiley have been singled out as regularly failing to put papers in the right open access repository and properly attributing them with a Creative Commons licence; Elsevier lacked compliance in 57% of its funded article publications.3 (Matthews, 2016)
In April 2015, Elsevier announced a more restrictive ‘sharing and hosting’ (open access) policy in support of embargo periods of up to 48 months; this was criticised by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) as creating
“unnecessary barriers for Elsevier-published authors in complying with funders’
open access policies” (COAR, 2015). This decision sparked outrage in SA, with at least one library director reporting a 25% reduction in open access materials on its institutional repository (Mail & Guardian, 26 June 2015).
2 Mendeley is a researcher workflow tool that helps researchers organise, discover and share their research.
Mendeley is also becoming a collaborative environment for sharing early results of research but is more focused in science, technology and medical fields. Its technology platform, enhanced by Elsevier’s investment, uses metadata from articles and usage on its site to develop a suite of analytic tools that directs researchers towards the best people to collaborate with and what to read. Press release. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/ssrn- the-leading-social-science-and-humanities-repository-and-online-community-joins-elsevier
3 For Elsevier the non-compliance figure was 31 per cent for hybrid journals and 26 per cent for full open access.
Matthews, David. 2016. Wellcome criticises publishers over open access, Times Higher Education, 24 March 2016. Online available: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/wellcome-criticises-publishers-over-open- access
Elsevier is not the only monopolistic scholarly publisher and service provider. The report on The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era shows that
“combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013.4 These publishers are (with their 2013 market share) (Cookson, 2015): Elsevier (16% market share, and 42% market share of the top ten academic publishers), Wiley-Blackwell (6% market share), Springer Nature (12%
market share), Taylor & Francis (4% market share) and Sage Publications (unknown market share) (Larivière V, et al, 2015)5. The subscription charges paid by universities and research councils in SA to just these publishers represent approximately 57% of their total subscription costs.
Publishers have thus responded to the open access movement by using APCs as a second stream of income in addition to retaining their traditional, quasi- monopolistic subscription fees, and as a future fall-back system of the same general nature, in order to maintain high profitability; the response is not primarily a means to embrace open access, but to remain highly profitable even in the face of the strong trend of funders requiring open access publication of all funded research. The Wellcome Trust has found in its analysis of grantee compliance “that APCs were 51 per cent more expensive in hybrid than in full open access journals”
(Matthews, 2016); libraries and national access models (See below) therefore need to look at both APCs and subscriptions together, as both are part of the landscape of publication costs” (Shamash, 2016).
With new legislation on the payment of Value Added Tax (VAT) on international electronic resources, combined with the recent increase in the VAT rate from 14 to 15%, libraries in the HE sector have lost close to 40% of their buying power over the last few years. A further problem seems to be the unequal access to core databases by HEIs in SA.
APC expenditure is well-documented and quantified internationally by organisations such as JISC (UK), USA and Australia. In SA, APC payments are not reported to institutional management, nor to national or consortial bodies, largely due to the lack of the South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC)
4 “[I]n 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,” quoted from (9) Larivière V, et al. (2015).
5 “In terms of numbers of papers published, the five major publishers in NMS, accounted, in 1973, for little more than 20% of all papers published. This share increased to 30% in 1996, and to 50% in 2006, the level at which it remained until 2013 when it increased again to 53%. In this domain, three publishers account for more than 47% of all papers in 2013: Reed-Elsevier (24.1%; 1.5 fold increase since 1990), Springer (11.9%; 2.9 fold increase), and Wiley-Blackwell (11.3%; 2.2 fold increase). The American Chemical Society (3.4%; 5% decrease) and Taylor
& Francis (2.9%; 4.9 fold increase) only account for a small proportion of papers. In the SSH, the concentration increased even more dramatically. Between 1973 and 1990, the five most prolific publishers combined accounted for less than 10% of the published output of the domain, with their share slightly increasing over the period. By the mid-1990s, their share grew to collectively account for 15% of papers. However, since then, this share has increased to more than 51%, meaning that, in 2013, the majority of SSH papers are published by journals that belong to five commercial publishers. Specifically, in 2013, Elsevier accounts for 16.4% of all SSH papers (4.4 fold increase since 1990), Taylor & Francis for 12.4% (16 fold increase), Wiley-Blackwell for 12.1% (3.8 fold increase), Springer for 7.1% (21.3 fold increase), and Sage Publications for 6.4% (4-fold increase),” quoted from (9) Larivière V, et al. (2015)
participation in open access and support for national APC negotiations as part of its responsibilities. This brings about a lack of knowledge within the research system regarding how much expenditure is incurred on APC payments, and to whom – nationally and internationally, they are made nor can the implications of this in terms of total library expenditures be assessed.
During 2016, a preliminary study was conducted at one of the leading research universities in SA covering the period 2012 – 2016. This indicated low levels of APCs to international publishers for both hybrid and Gold Route open access journals (less than R2 m in a 3.5-year period), but high payments to one South African commercial open access publisher (more than R6 m in the same period). The average APC paid to an international publisher was R15 511.83, with the lowest average payments to IEEE and Oxford University Press (lower than R10 000) and the highest average payment to BMC (over R25 000).6 This South African spending pattern for APCs is quite different from that found internationally from the available data.
The subscription costs to academic journals and commercial databases consume a large proportion of local library budgets; South African HEIs spent a total of approximately R460 m in 2014 and R507 m in 2015.7 The accompanying crisis was the culmination of a more than 300% rise in library subscription fees over the last two decades, which publishers have sought to justify in terms of their role in
“maintaining and improving digital infrastructure which has revolutionised scientific communication” (Monbiot, 2011). Through this bundled e-journal re-licensing model, libraries do not own any of the back materials that they have already paid for, and are required to renew their subscriptions annually, thus paying for new material and (again) for access to the older issues.
Elsevier makes up a large percentage of the total amount that South African institutions pay (e.g. Science Direct costs for 2014 paid by South African institutions came to R 109 853 066 of a total subscription expenditure of R 507 531 488.52 (25%).8 Internationally, there has been a rising degree of direct action in various quarters to the quasi-monopolistic multi-national commercial publishers such as Elsevier.
The NRF has already released a Statement on Open Access to Research Publications from the National Research Foundation (NRF)-Funded Research (2015) limiting publishers’ embargo periods on research produced with NRF funding (much in line with international funding bodies, such as the Wellcome Trust, Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation) and requiring all data collected, produced and used as part of NRF-funded research projects to be made available through institutional data repositories as open data.
6 Preliminary report conducted by the Open Scholarship Office, University of Pretoria.
7 Not included in these subscriptions are any form of APC payment; fees for administering of the Big Deal negotiations with SANLiC; copyright fees (and the administration fees) paid to publishers through the collecting society DALRO for the use of content for educational; nor does this include expenses paid for administering Inter- Library Loans (ILL).
8 ASSAf. Improved access to commercial electronic knowledge resources for researchers in South Africa. Interim draft report (Not for publication).