Open Digital Repositories

The Movement of Open Access in Opposition to the Oligopoly of Scientific

Publishers

Ligia E. Setenareski¹, Walter Shima², Marcos Sfair Sunye³ and Letícia M. Peres³

System of Library, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil

Department of Economics, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil

Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil

Keywords: Information Technology, Marketplace Competitiveness, Market Structure, Open Digital Repositories.

Abstract: This paper shows how the market structure of scientific publications works and how the free-software

movement and the open source code have expanded and generated new developments in a period of

approximately twenty years, in opposition to an oligopolistic structure. The free-software movement did not

happen by chance, and neither did its subsequent developments. Researchers, tired of contributing towards

the production of scientific articles for private publishers, and also working as reviewers or taking part in

editorial boards, launched many alternatives within the editorial market in clear opposition to the publishing

industry, which has been making handsome profits on packaged periodicals sold to academic libraries.

Some of these alternatives are: the Copyleft and the Creative Commons in opposition to the Copyright; the

Open Access and the Open Digital Repositories of educational and research institutions, freely available on

the internet, opposing to the closed repositories of commercial publishers that offer their database at high

prices; and the creation of h-index, g-index, Google Scholar Citations (GSC) and other impact

measurements that come up against the impact factor controlled by private publishers. In the editorial

process, while educational and research institutions, through their researchers, provide all workforce

necessary for the production, arbitration and editorial board, publishers are in charge of organizing services,

providing reliable browsing on their closed database, and keeping high levels of impact for their

publications. Nowadays, search providers like Google also offer reliable search engines to browse open

digital repositories. Therefore, Google and the Open Digital Repositories, in a symbiotic relationship, can be

in charge of the whole process of scientific publication, as an alternative to oppose the oligopoly of

scientific publishers.

1 INTRODUCTION

The global market of scientific publishers is

characterized by an oligopolistic structure that

retains their collections of periodicals in closed

digital repositories. Readers normally have access to

content by means of academic libraries, which pay

monopoly prices for subscriptions, usually in

packages of titles of periodicals or through the

purchase of individual articles whose prices are also

too high. The main barrier to entry is the impact

factor, which is a global measure to evaluate

scientific production, of periodicals published by a

dominant group.

Generally, publishers control the entire process of

publication, distribution and the impact index of

their product in this oligopolistic market. Authors

participate in the editorial process for free and

transfer their copyright to publishers. On the

margins of this market there are small publishers

that, due to the size of the barriers, are specialized in

the publication of specific areas of knowledge

(niches). All the competitive dynamics of this

market occurs on the internet. The search for articles

in these repositories can be done through specific

search engines, owned by publishers. In addition,

open technological standards have been responsible

for positive network effects on the spill over.

On the other hand, in an extra-market dynamics,

which is open, public, and does not involve any

barriers to entry, there are open digital repositories,

built and maintained by educational and research

institutions throughout the world, as a tool to

publish, store and retrieve periodicals and articles

produced by academic communities. The emergence

of these repositories represent the development of

Setenareski, L., Shima, W., Sunye, M. and Peres, L.

Open Digital Repositories - The Movement of Open Access in Opposition to the Oligopoly of Scientiﬁc Publishers.

In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2016) - Volume 2, pages 583-593

ISBN: 978-989-758-187-8

583

the free-software movement, which was led by

scientists who were seeking alternatives against the

business model of publications imposed by the

oligopoly. Thus, in spite of not being guided by

market logic, repositories are an important

alternative to oppose major commercial publishers,

since they have been taking an increasing part of

their market. In other words, the repositories, which

have a purely scientific perspective, end up

competing directly with huge commercial publishers

as potential entrants that have increasingly become

real.

Therefore, research institutions and universities,

producers of scientific content, soon realized the

benefits of using the digital repositories freely in

order to get a global visibility of this content. This

has been fully supported by Google that is highly

interested in expanding its content to reach a greater

number of users. Thereby, a network of repositories

has been evolving, linked by protocols and with

benefits such as visibility as well as the share of

content available. This work aims to analyse the

free-software movement, which has created

alternatives for the publication of scientific content,

out of the oligopoly of big publishers. The

methodology adopted in this study, since the theme

has a worldwide scope, was to research the literature

available, considering specific and related topics of

analysis. The period of time delimited for the search

was between the second half of 1980 until mid-2013.

2 NETWORK EXTERNALITIES

The companies or institutions that adopt standards

and technologies may, consequently, have the

effects of network externalities. The network,

whether real or virtual, has a fundamental economic

characteristic, which is the dependent value of the

number of people who are already connected to

them. The proposition of a network value may be

named as follows: network effects, network

externalities or economies of scale on the demand

side. The externalities arise when a market

participant affects others without the payment of

compensation (Shapiro and Varian, 1999). The

network externalities are fundamentally based on

Metcalfe's Law, (a well-known law in the field of

Information Technology, created by Robert

Metcalfe, the co-inventor of Ethernet and the

founder of 3Com) “the value of the network is

proportional to the square of the number of users.”

Externalities have two poles: negative and positive.

The positive feedback strengthens the strong

competitor and weakens the weak one, leading to

extreme results such as market dominance by a

single company or technology. In other words,

success breeds success and failure breeds failure,

which is the essence of the positive feedback

(Shapiro and Varian, 1999). The positive feedback

and the network externalities have been considered

essential for the communications and transportation

sectors for a long time where companies need to

compete to expand their network, and a network can

dramatically increase the market value of these

companies by being interconnected to another

network. The opposite pole of the positive feedback

is the negative feedback. When a process of negative

feedback occurs, the strong competitor becomes

weak, and the weak competitor becomes strong;

both being pushed into a middle ground (Shapiro

and Varian, 1999).

3 THE MARKET STRUCTURE IN

AN OLIGOPOLY

An oligopolistic market is composed of few firms

that hold substantial portions of the market, which

only perpetuates through barriers to entry, such as:

patents, distribution channels, economies of scale

and capital, pricing levels, and product

differentiation. Although the barriers to entry have

been depicted in the literature for nearly 80 years

(Possas, 1999), the nature and extent of these

barriers only succeeded in terms of analysis after a

study carried out by (Bain, 1956). That study (Bain,

1956) resulted in valuable contributions, such as: the

introduction of a dynamic perspective regarding the

analysis of markets; the realisation that firms in

oligopoly take the external or potential competition

into account for their strategy; and a demand for a

redefinition of the conventional instruments of

analysis in order to suit them to a long-term

perspective. Furthermore, considering specifically

the price as a barrier to entry, suggests measuring

the level of this barrier through a markup, i.e., the

relation between the highest price that prevents the

entry, or the minimum price that allows the entry,

and the competitive price.

This measure can assess how established firms

can raise prices, above the competitive price,

without letting new firms enter the market. In turn,

(Possas, 1999) it is possible to establish a theoretical

relation between prices and barriers to entry, in a

generic way, since the desire to prevent the entry is a

pricing strategy of firms that are established in the

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market. This pricing strategy has two objectives: 1)

to fix prices and to establish the production volume

in order to prevent the competition with small and

medium-sized entrants, or at least to limit this kind

of competition, seeking to enhance distribution over

time; 2) to discourage the competition with big

entrants that intend to establish themselves more

efficiently in terms of scales, which would threaten

the oligopolistic equilibrium and, hence, generate a

price war among established firms. However, this

kind of discouragement may not be necessarily tied

to price set by the market.

3.1 The Market Structure of Scientific

Publications

Although the market of scientific publications,

especially the market of periodicals, is dominated by

few large global publishers that establish all kinds of

barriers to entry, there are on the sidelines of this

market over 2,000 small publishers specialize in

different areas of knowledge, and which meet a

specific and specialized audience (McGuigan and

Russell, 2008). In this global market, global

publishers, through their sales representatives, sell

their periodicals all around the world and, therefore,

control the distribution channels. The target market

of these globalized publishers is the libraries and the

researchers from academic communities, universities

and research institutions. Researchersplay an

important role in this partnership, since the

publication of scientific periodicals is only possible

with the participation of researchers as authors or

reviewers of other researchers’ papers, which is

called peer review or refereeing. Researchers can

also take part in the editorial board. This kind of

work is usually free of charge for publishers, who

later sell such periodicals to libraries.

3.2 Types of Barriers to Entry

In this market structure, the barriers to entry are

organized as follows: a) the authors transfer their

obliged to pay for the access of their published

content; b) the readers who are not members of any

academic community, which provides the access to a

library, cannot afford any content, given the prices

charged for single articles; c) potential entrants

cannot enter the market because the established

firms control the distribution channels, sell their

periodicals in packages to libraries, and control the

impact factor of publications. Not only does the

academic community read the content of these

periodicals but also cite them, ensuring an increasing

positive impact factor for these periodicals, which

hinders the entry of new periodicals from potential

publishers with low impact.

Figure 1: The structure of closed digital repositories in the

market of scientific publications.

A report of the European Commission empha-

sizes that the main barrier is still the ability of new

journals to attract a group of publishers, reviewers

and authors. Even when a new journal can attract a

selected group of distinguished scholars, it is going

to take time for it to be recognized since its

reputation has not been established yet. Secondly,

even if the entry of new periodicals is facilitated, the

access to the stock of knowledge is historically

controlled by publishers; partly because they own

the copyright of authors (European Commission,

2006). Figure 1 above illustrates the structure of

closed digital repositories in the market of scientific

publications, as described before.

3.3 The Market Structure of Scientific

Publishers

The market of scientific publications is divided into

non-profit and for-profit publishers. Some examples

of non-profit companies, associations and

universities are the Institute of Electrical and

Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for

Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Oxford

University Press. For-profit publishers dominate this

market. The journal business is characterized by a

relatively inelastic demand, with individual journals

that usually have strong support within their

particular niche. The market natural niche and the

rapid growth of budgets for academic libraries

Open Digital Repositories - The Movement of Open Access in Opposition to the Oligopoly of Scientiﬁc Publishers

585

resulted in the expansion of the market of scientific

publications, in such a way that no other market has

grown so fast in the media industry over the last

fifteen years (Morgan Stanley, 2002). North-

American university libraries represent about 60%

of the global market of an industry of $ 7 billion

dollars, in which Reed Elsevier (Elsevier Science) is

the market leader. Along with Elsevier, five other

publishers - Wolters Kluwer, Blackwell,

Bertelsmann, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis - account

for 37% of the best-rated periodicals and 44% of

published articles.

The academic publication depends on an unusual

economic model, in which the necessary input

(articles and editorial services) for the publishing

business is provided at no cost. The situation is even

more unusual since colleges and universities, which

purchase journals, partially subsidize the production

of journals by paying the salaries of teachers,

authors and publishers. Publishers have a

mediatingrole in the industry. They collect, pack and

disseminate articles produced by academic authors.

The main users of journals are the same group that

produced their content, i.e., the academic teaching

staff. Thus, the content is consumed by professors /

researchers, who produce more content, and the

cycle goes on. Academic libraries acquire and

provide access to journals. They work as agents for

Figure 2: The traditional process of publication, sale and

dissemination of scientific journals.

both the academic staff, who demand certain provide

access to journals. They work as agents for both the

academic staff, who demand certain journals, and

the university administrators, who provide the

budget for the purchase of volumes.

Thereby, considering that publishers act just as

intermediaries between the production process and

its dissemination, there has been an abusive charge

for published articles (McGuigan and Russell,

2008). While the access to newspapers, such as The

Times and The Sunday Times, is £ 1.00 for a period

of twenty-four hours, in which the user has the right

to read and download any articles, the cost to access

a publisher’s single scientific article is: Elsevier

($ 31.50), Springer (Euro 34.95) and Wiley-

Blackwell ($ 42.00). Moreover, publishers

perpetually retain the copyright of their publications

(Monbiot, 2011). Figure 2 below illustrates how a

traditional publication process of scientific journals

is.

4 THE OLIGOPOLY

OFSCIENTIFIC PUBLISHERS

REGARDING THE IMPACT

FACTOR

The market of publications of scientific journals is

also characterized by the Impact Factor (IF), which

is a measure that evaluates the quality of journals

(Pritchard, 1969). Also known as Impact Index or

Citation Index, the Impact Factor is published as a

periodical by dominating publishers in this

oligopolistic market. Only two major publishers,

providers of the Impact Factor, concentrate the

market of publications: Thomson ISI, which

publishes the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and

Elsevier, which publishes the SCImagoJournal

Ranking Indicator (SJR). Not only do these

companies publish the Impact Factor of other major

publishers, but also start to enter the market of open

access publications. It is a hybrid model, in which

dominant publishers accept open publications in

their closed repositories (database) and provide the

Impact Index of these publications. An example of

this model is the Web of Science (WOS) database of

Thomson Reuters that provides the Impact Factor

through the JCR, which currently contains 12,000

journals, including open access journals such as

PLoS One (Web of Science, 2013).

Another example of this model is the partnership

formed in 2012 between Thomson and the Scientific

Electronic Library Online (SciELO), which is the

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Figure 3: The Oligopolized Market of Impact Factors.

largest open digital repository in Brazil. Thomson

hosted SciELO database in its repository, the Web of

Knowledge. This partnership aimed to provide better

visibility and access to research in emerging

economies. Nowadays, SciELO publishes

approximately 40,000 new articles every year in

more than 900 open access journals in Argentina,

Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico,

Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and Venezuela. It

also provides 650 titles and more than 4 million

cited references at the database WOS, which

originated the SciELO Citation Index (Thomson

Reuters, 2013). With this partnership, SciELO

started using the Impact Factor from Thomson in its

repository, provided by JCR. Regarding the metric

used by Thomson, the Impact Factor can only be

established after two years of publication; hence, as

from 2014, SciELO begins to obtain conclusive

results relative to the number of citations in its

publications. Thus, the Brazilian Research Council

(CAPES - Coordination of the Qualification of

Higher Education Personnel), uses the metric of

Thomson to assess the scientific production.

Another relevant aspect of this competitive

dynamics, taking the Impact Factor into account,

refers to network effects that act as barriers to entry.

For instance: researchers from universities and

research institutions throughout the world need to

publish the outcome of their work, since it is

indicative of quality for future professional

assessments. The higher the Impact Factor of

journals is, the greater the likelihood of obtaining a

favourable assessment and posterior career

opportunities is. This kind of incentive does generate

positive network externalities, which favour

publications in journals by dominant publishers. In

addition, the publication of an article in a journal

with a high Impact Factor will certainly cause this

article to be read and cited more, which will

ultimately contribute towards the author’s Impact

Index as well. Figure 3 above illustrates the market

of Impact Factors, controlled by the major

publishers of closed repositories; the researchers

who need to publish the outcome of their research;

the metrics that are used for the analysis of citations;

and the search engines owned by major publishers,

responsible for seeking content.

4.1 The Dynamics of Prices for

Publications in an Oligopoly

The report by the European Commission shows that

the scientific publications have become a significant

global economic activity and the core of the editorial

market (science, technology and medicine) is

estimated between $ 7 and 11 billion. The price of

scientific journals, which has increased

considerably, has been a constant topic of discussion

over the past 30 years. In the period between 1975

and 1995, which is known as ‘the crisis of

periodicals’, journal prices have increased by 200%

to 300% above inflation. The price rise was followed

by a reduction in the number of subscriptions by

researchers and libraries. Journal prices far exceeded

the natural evolution of the library budgets and such

a pressure resulted in the decrease of journal

subscriptions. As of 1995, as a result of the

evolution of the Information and Communications

Technology (ICT), publishers started to adopt the

digital distribution and provide access to their

journals online through high performance research

platforms (European Commission, 2006).

Consequently, new technologies and the Internet

have enhanced the accessibility of scientific

publications by, but the actual access to literature

still depends on the capacity of the libraries to

afford subscriptions. Journal prices have risen faster

than inflation, but at a slower pace in comparison to

the previous 20 years. The digital distribution has

allowed the introduction of new business models,

which resulted in significant changes in pricing

policies on periodicals. Individual prices and the

sales of journals were transformed into "Big Deals",

i.e., the sales of packages of journals, whose prices

vary from place to place, can also range from

annual subscriptions to licenses that last for several

years. Then, the libraries started to join together as a

group in order to form a consortium so they could

share the benefits of access and improve their

bargaining positions against publishers. In general,

Open Digital Repositories - The Movement of Open Access in Opposition to the Oligopoly of Scientiﬁc Publishers

587

packaging has two effects: a) it can narrow or

broaden the consumers’ choice in the short term,

and b) it can restrict entry in the long term

(European Commission, 2006). In his blog

(Gowers’s Weblog, 2012), William Timothy

Gowers, a British mathematician and Professor at

Cambridge University, the winner of the Medal

‘Fields’ of the American Mathematical Society,

criticized the commercial practices of Elsevier. He

firmly states that he will no longer take part in

publications and condemns the business practices of

Elsevier: a) prices are too high, far above average;

b) There are tying sales (a practice condemned by

the antitrust law), which force libraries to purchase

a package without being given the choice to choose

the journals they want to subscribe. The libraries,

which survive on a tight budget and, therefore,

cannot afford a reasonable number of subscriptions,

are not the only sufferers in this market. Other

publishers have also suffered its effects, which is, of

course, part of the motivation for the scheme c) if

libraries try to negotiate better deals, Elsevier

remains implacable in its opposition, threatening to

cut the access to all its periodicals; and d) Elsevier

supports measures such as: the Research Works

Act, an American bill that tries to stop the Open

Access movement for researches financially

supported by the federal government. Furthermore,

Elsevier supports the Stop Online Piracy Act

(SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), having

exerted pressure on their existence.

Gowers's boycott against Elsevier began to spread

in the academia and on February 4, 2012, The

Economist called this movement Academic Spring

(The Economist, 2012).The Cost of Knowledge is a

site where researchers can enter to boycott Elsevier

by checking the services they intend not to provide.

These services are: Publication, arbitration or

editorial work. Nowadays, 13,832 researchers from

all areas of knowledge and from several parts of the

world have already signed the boycott (The Cost of

Knowledge, 2013).

4.2 The Open Access Movement for the

Publication of Scientific Content in

Opposition to Traditional

Publication

A new initiative to share open academic journals for

free through repositories emerged from the free-

software movement, the creation and subsequent

availability of technological standards, and the

creation of software for interoperable open

repositories. This initiative started from the late 90s

as a worldwide movement, in which several

countries, academic and research institutions, and

funding agencies took part. This movement was

named Open Access - OA and its main requirement

was the right to have free access to scientific content

from open repositories. This access was also thought

to be free in relation to the restrictions imposed by

the copyright. The issue of open access to scientific

information has led some countries to discuss the

regulation for the implementation of institutional

repositories. In addition, researchers from all fields

of knowledge will probably face a change of

paradigm while major publishers will have to take

into account unavoidable changes in their policies

(Carvalho, 2009).

In the OA model, the process of scientific

publication, especially periodicals, occurs as

follows: a) the institutions take charge of the

necessary conditions for their researchers by paying

their salaries and keeping adequate physical

facilities such as furniture and equipment as well as

laboratories and digital repository; b) the

researchers/authors are responsible for activities

related to articles, peer review and the editorial

process for the publication in the open repository; c)

libraries deal with the maintenance and recovery of

content kept in a repository, which provides support

to researchers in relation to the dissemination of

content, and also provides a better use of this

informational resource available. Thereby,

researchers, who are also the main readers, will read,

cite and produce new texts, continuing the process.

In this model, all articles are available in creative

commons or copyleft licenses instead of copyright,

which will give the authors the right to retain their

institutions along with their libraries and the

academic community will be in charge of the whole

process, without the involvement of oligopolized

publishers as intermediaries in the organization of

editorial activities and dissemination of content, as

illustrated in Figure 4.

The adoption of open standards and the OA

movement were instrumental in the development of

software for digital repositories that emerged after

the arXiv, the first open repository (Luce RE, 2001)

that represents a philosophy of publication within

the free-software movement. By allowing service

providers and search providers scan their database,

the open repositories have fostered the emergence of

tools that allow measuring the impact of publications

within these repositories, out of the oligopoly of

traditional publications. Nowadays, the system of

electronic journal management and the system of

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588

Figure 4: The process of publication and dissemination of

scientific journals in open access.

digital libraries more used are, respectively: OJS

(www.pkp.org) and DSpace (www.dspace.org).

They adopt open standards that facilitate the

implementation of impact measurement

4.3 H Index, G Index and Other

Impact Factors out of the Oligopoly

of Publishers

The term Impact Factor (IF) was created by Eugene

Garfield in 1955 (Garfield, 2006).Over the years, it

has been used generically as an impact index of

citations, referring to an author’s impact factor, for

example, or any bibliographic material. The Citation

Impact is the measurement of the number of

citations in an article. The average citation impact by

article can also be used for collections, authors,

periodicals, institutions, etc. Until the early 2000s,

there were only impact indexes controlled by closed

commercial publishers in the market, but as of 2000,

several other tools were created and made available

in the market, as an alternative for researchers,

publishers and institutions that need to assess the

quality of publications.

Other databases that index quotes have emerged

and are vying for the ISI space (Institute for

Scientific Information/Thomson Reuters) in the

business of information generation to measure the

impact of scientific publications (Mugnaini and

Strehl, 2008). Among these tools to measure impact,

there are the Citebase, 2001 (Brody, 2003); the h

index, 2005 (Hirsch, 2005), the G-Index, 2006

(Google Scholar, 2013), the GSC, and the GSM

(Google Scholar, 2013). The software Publish or

Perish was also developed and made available in the

market. Besides being free of charge this software

tracks and measures impact by using all the tools

mentioned above (Publish or Perish, 2013).

The arXiv, as well as other open digital

repositories that have emerged after it, represent

alternative tools that are used for the publication of

scientific production in universities and research

institutions around the world. Due to these tools,

thousands of researchers around the world were able

to show the outcome of their work openly and free

of charge. Similarly, the dissemination of content

from repositories was made by service and search

providers. The increase in the visibility has led some

researchers to develop tools to measure the impact

of content in the academia. All these impact metrics

show the concern and the efforts of many scientists

at creating new alternatives as well as making them

available in the market for free, opposing to

traditional measurements of impact controlled by

scientific publishers. Thus, open repositories along

with free search engines and impact indexes free of

charge have spread globally.

Figure 5 illustrates the open market of impact

indexes, created as an alternative to the impact factor

controlled by the oligopoly; the relationship between

this market and the researchers, who need to publish

the outcome of their work; the relationship between

this market and the repositories, where these metrics

are used for the analysis of citations; and also the

Figure 5: The open market of impact index.

Open Digital Repositories - The Movement of Open Access in Opposition to the Oligopoly of Scientiﬁc Publishers

589

relationship with Google, responsible for searching

the content to be analysed.

4.4 The Impact Index of Private

Publications versus Public

Publications

The outcome of the comparisons between the impact

of open and closed publications, including the

metrics used for these comparisons, is still very

incipient. The studies that will be discussed below

refer to specific analyses such as: the comparison of

the impact of publications, both in the repository of

Thomson and ArXiv; the boycott in which

researchers take part against the impact factor of

Thomson; and the ranking of open publications

measured by Google.

The Internet, as an open database, is allowing

users to generate statistics of citation of researches

published free of charge (Butler, 2008). The Open

access is cooperating with giants like Elsevier,

inserting data from its publications on Scopus base,

a database of abstracts created by Elsevier in 2004.

Elsevier also owns the database The SCImago

Journal & Country Rank that makes the analysis of

data stored in the Scopus, concerning the data

mining from the universities of Granada,

Extremadura, Carlos III and Alcalá de Henares, all

in Spain. This database classifies periodicals and

countries that use citation metrics such as H Index,

and also includes a new metric: the SCImago

Journal Rank (SJR). It is difficult to compare the

results of the analyses of SJR with other impact

factors because their database is different.

And, on the other hand, Google Scholar has

already indexed much more from the literature than

the Web of Knowledge or Scopus (Butler D, 2011).

Thomson holds a monopoly on the number of

citations per year and its subscription products

include the Web of Science, the Journal Citation

Report, and the Essential Science Indicators.

However, researchers are negotiating with Thomson,

requesting greater transparency on how the citation

metrics are calculated and on its datasets as well

(Butler D, 2008). In an editorial published in the

Journal of Cell Biology, the head of Rockefeller

University Press and colleagues said that their

analysis of database provided by Thomson showed

different values for the metrics in comparison to

those published by this company (Rossner M, Van

Epps H, Hill E, 2007). And Thomson opened a web

forum to formally respond to this editorial (Thomson

Reuters, 2014).

In 2004, James Pringle, vice president for

development, academic markets, and government of

Thomson ISI, USA, conducted a study on the impact

factor of the entire content of Web of Science,

concerning closed and open access. At that time, the

base had 8,509 closed access journals and 191 open

access journals (Harnad and Brody, 2004). A

rigorous selection was made in this study and only

the journals that were directly accessible on the

Internet, without any cost, fitted the concept of open

access. Among them there were different types of

journals, such as: the BMJ, with a long history and

prestige that migrated to this new model of open

publication; and the Brazilian Journal of

Microbiology, an important regional journal that

uses open access as a way to expand global

awareness. There are several ways to make the

access open and the objectives of each publisher can

be different (Pringle, 2004). The outcome of this

study points out that the open access does neither

result in more nor fewer citations in these journals,

since the increase in the number of readers of

journals does not change the relevance of a

researcher’s article and its fundamental value in a

journal. Moreover, it does not seem that the increase

in the number of potential readers will necessarily

change a journal impact.

However,two researchers disagree with Pringle

when he says that open access journals and non-

open access journals have the same impact.

According to these authors, the comparison was

made between only 2% of OA journals indexed by

the ISI (191), against 98% of non-OA journals

(8,509)(Harnad S, Brody T,2004). New study was

made using the citation database ISI, on a CD-

ROM, with references of 7,000 journals from 1991

to 2001 and the content of arXiv.org. The CD-ROM

ISI had the metadata and references of 14 million

articles, and the arXiv.org base, in January 2004,

had 260,000 complete texts of e-prints. From this

amount, 95,012 articles were found both in the ISI

and arXiv database. The comparison between Open

Access and Non-Open Access articles, in all

Physics fields, from 1992 to 2001, showed that the

superiority of Open Access Citation Impact Ratios,

increases from 253% in 1992, to 557% in

2001(Brody et al., 2004). The access is not a

sufficient condition for citation, but it is necessary.

The OA dramatically increases the number of

potential users by just allowing them to access a

particular article, which otherwise would not be

possible due to its high cost. Thereby, the OA

increases both the use and the impact (Harnad and

Brody, 2004).

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On December 16, 2012, during the annual

meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology

(ASCB), the San Francisco Declaration on Research

Assessment, (known as DORA), was presented and

signed by more than 150 researchers and 75

academic institutions such as the American

Association for the Advancement of Science. This

declaration was a response to the urgent need to

improve the ways in which the production of

scientific research is assessed by development

agencies, academic institutions and other parties. As

a general recommendation, the metrics based on

journals, such as Journal Impact Factors (Thomson

Reuters), should neither be used as a measure of

quality of individual research articles, nor in

decisions related to hiring, promotion and funding

(DORA, 2012).

Another source of tension between publishers and

researchers is the lack of access to database of

journals, even for those who have paid for it. On 22

May 2013, researchers and librarians withdrew from

the European Commission's negotiations on this

subject because the publishers, supported by the

database. While researchers and librarians long to

see thousands of articles and research content online

through closed or open access, perform data

extraction, build a single research database, and

establish association standards, e.g., between genes

and diseases, the publishers, in turn, fear that their

content may be redistributed for free, which makes

them block search programs, even for institutions

that have paid for the access to their database (Van

Noorden, 2013). For these reasons, publishers begin

to realize that the market is changing and that the

alternative of open access is breaking the barriers to

entry, regarding the publication, the distribution, the

dissemination, and the access of scientific journals

by readers, as well as the impact factor of these

journals.

5 CONCLUSIONS

This paper analyses how the market structure of

scientific publications work and how open digital

repositories have become a viable alternative to

rebalance this market. In fact, the symbiosis between

the services provided by major search engines and

the ideals espoused by the open access and free-

software movements have created an environment

that is so favourable that the scientific market

behaviour has completely changed in less than 15

years. These movements have emerged from the

establishment of major search engines as a

centralizing element to recover scientific papers,

ensuring the recovery of relevant information

through an exhaustive scan of the Web. At the same

time, open access movements, originated by free-

software movements, have provided the scientific

community with high quality software for content

file. Academic institutions promptly began to create

large repositories of high quality scientific content.

Subsequently, the open file software has

established interoperability standards of scientific

files that were quickly assimilated by major search

engines. Through these new standards, major search

engines not only add visibility to open scientific

content, but also decode and highlight this content,

through open standards of large repositories, which

are managed by the academic community. The third

and last movement sets new impact indexes that are

measured through all scientific data available on the

Internet opposing to the traditional impact indexes

controlled by the oligopoly of major publishers. The

process of generation, retrieval and classification of

scientific information, which was a privilege of

publishers for more than a century, began to be

carried out on the open internet. Such a system deals

with a vast amount of scientific information

provided free of charge by major academic

institutions.

On the other hand, the oligopoly of publishers

still has the full power over the market of scientific

publication as follows: a) publishers own the

authors’ copyright - regarding the oligopoly of

periodicals, the copyright is transferred from authors

to the publishers when an article is accepted for

publication, though there are some differences in

concept, legislation and treatment from one country

to another; b) publishers control the distribution

channels - sales representatives throughout the world

sell their packages of periodicals to their most

important customers, the academic libraries; c) the

libraries provide these periodicals to researchers,

promoting their use; d) researchers read the content

of periodicals and cite them; e) publishers obtain a

high rate of citations for their periodicals.

Thus, the control cycle is closed in regard to the

publication of journals and the citation impact. In the

future, the repositories will probably change this

traditional model in which publishers fulfil both

functions of certification and dissemination. The

certification of periodicals is currently done through

editorial work and peer review while their

dissemination is achieved through search providers

like Google.

It is fundamental, however, the analysis of new

Open Digital Repositories - The Movement of Open Access in Opposition to the Oligopoly of Scientiﬁc Publishers

591

studies on open digital repositories in order to

contribute towards this paper, such as: a) a study on

an eventual lock -in of technologies linked to open

digital repositories, due to technical, economic and

institutional aspects. This could adversely affect the

storage and availability of digital content; b)

Analyses of public policies on storage and access to

digital scientific content stored on open digital

repositories, with a focus on technical, political and

economic interests. These interests involve

technological standards, trajectories of storage, and

distribution technologies of digital content; c) An

evaluation of the social impact on open digital

repositories regarding research development and the

number of published papers by researchers from

underdeveloped or developing countries; d) a survey

on incentive measures for innovation that are

promoted by the free access to scientific literature of

open digital repositories, and posterior assessment of

these measures. This study shows that the visibility

of open repositories and their growing impact index

have demanded an efficient and neutral search

engine to provide the necessary information. Any

change in this current business model of search

engines, or in the concept of Net Neutrality will

influence the OA community. The analysis of this

study is vital and so is the establishment of new

paths for the development of open repositories, if the

concept of net neutrality is reassessed.

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