Science in the Open

Just to declare various conflicts of interest: I regard Gregg Gordon, CEO of SSRN as a friend and have always been impressed at what he has achieved at SSRN. From the perspective of what is best for the services SSRN can offer to researchers, selling to Elsevier was a smart opportunity and probably the best of the options available given the need for investment. My concerns are at the ecosystem level. What does this mean for the system as a whole? 

 

 

The first two paragraphs of this post have been edited following its initial posting. The original version can be found at the bottom of the post.

The response to the sale of SSRN to Elsevier is following a pattern that will be very familiar to those who watched the sale of Mendeley a few years back. As I noted in my UKSG talk we face real communications problems in scholarly communication because different groups are concerned about very different things, and largely fail to understand those differences. These plays out in commentary that argues that “the other side” has “failed to understand” the “real issues” at stake, and mostly missing the issues that are at the centre of concerns for that “other side”.

To be clear, obviously I’m doing exactly the same thing in this post, it’s just that I’m pointing the finger at everyone and at a slightly higher level of abstraction. What I hope to do in this post is use one particular strand of the arguments being raised to illustrate how different stakeholders focus on quite different issues when they ask the question “is this purchase good or bad”. The real questions to ask are “what is it we care about” and “what difference does the purchase make to those aspects”. What we can do is look at this particular strand of the conversation and what it tells us about the risks, both for SSRN as a trusted repository for a range of research communities, and for the ecosystem as a whole.

The strand I’m interested in both illustrates the gaping divide between the narrative on both sides and also because it shows how quickly we forget history. But its useful because it also points us to some criteria for judgement. That strand goes like this: “Elsevier did a great job of supporting and looking after Mendeley [ed. as someone noted I originally had Elsevier here, arguably a Freudian slip…], so you can expect SSRN to be the same”. That’s a paraphrase rather than a direct quote but it captures the essence of a narrative that focuses on the idea that all the fears that arose when Elsevier purchased Mendeley turned out to be unfounded.

Except of course it depends which fears you mean. And that’s where the narrative gets interesting.

What were the fears for Mendeley’s future?

First the credit side. Elsevier invested massively in Mendeley, including a desperately needed top to bottom re-engineering of the code base. It’s not widely known just how shakey the Mendeley infrastructure was at the point of purchase, and without a massive capital investment from somewhere its questionable whether it could have stayed afloat. Elsevier have also maintained Mendeley as a free service for users – many assumed that it would convert to a fully paid model. The free for users offering sits alongside an institutional business offering, but that was already the primary focus of the team before the purchase. Indeed, again for full disclosure I, amongst I am sure many others, strongly recommended that Mendeley should shift its business focus from individual memberships to institutions long before the purchase.

Yes, there was a fear that Elsevier would just crush Mendeley, that it would go the way of many previous purchases, but at the very least that would never have been the intention, and many of those fears seem to have been unfounded.

Except that they weren’t the fears that at least some of us had. It’s actually telling that the narrative has legs because it shows how much of recent history has been forgotten. What has been largely forgotten that Mendeley was once positioned as a major and very public force in driving wider access. The description of Mendeley on the Elsevier Connect blog post about the SSRN purchase illustrates this:

As a start-up, Mendeley was focused on building its reference manager workflow tool, gaining a loyal following of users thankful that it made their lives easier. Mendeley continues to evolve from offering purely software and content to being a sophisticated social, informational and analytical tool.

SSRN—the leading social science and humanities repository and online community—joins Elsevier – Gregg Gordon

It’s not that this isn’t true. But it excises from history one of the significant strands of Mendeley’s early development. Compare and contrast that with this from Ricardo Vidal on the official Mendeley blog in 2010 (emphasis added):

Keeping with the Open Access week spirit, we’re taking this opportunity to show you how to publicly share your own research on Mendeley. Making it openly available for others to easily access means they are more likely to cite you in their own publications, and also allows your colleagues to build upon your work faster.

When you sign up for a Mendeley user account, a researcher profile is created for you. On this page, along with your name, academic status, and short bio, you will also see a section titled “Publications”. This section is where you can display work you’ve published or perhaps even work that’s not yet published.

Or this from William Gunn in 2012 (again emphasis added):

Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

We have a brief, critical window of opportunity to underscore our community’s strong commitment to expanding the NIH Public Access Policy across all U.S. Federal Science Agencies. The administration is currently considering which policy actions are priorities that will they will act on before the 2012 Presidential Election season swings into high gear later this summer. We need to ensure that Public Access is one of those priorities.

From 2008 when I met Victor Henning for the first time until 2013 Mendeley was a major, and very public, advocate for Public Access and Open Access. It was a big part of the sales pitch for the service and a big part of the drive to increase the user base, particularly amongst younger researchers. Mendeley provided a means for researchers to share their articles on a public profile and it did this in the context of a service that was useable and gaining traction. Alongside this it made a very public commitment to open data, being one of the first scholarly communications services to have a functional API providing data on bookmarks. It was the future of those activities that many of us feared in 2013 when the purchase went through. So how have they fared?

Has Mendeley thrived as an “open access” organisation?

Public sharing of articles is long gone. Long enough that many people have forgotten it ever existed. I can’t actually figure out exactly when this happened but it was around the time of the purchase. A chunk of a Scholarly Kitchen post on the sale is very sceptical of how this could be managed inside Elsevier. Now any public links on researcher profiles are to the publisher versions of the articles. Note that shift: an available version of a manuscript was removed from public view and replaced with a link to the publisher website (not augmented, not “offering the better version”, replaced). Certainly Mendeley does not provide any means of publicly sharing documents any more.

Has Mendeley retained an individual voice as an advocate of Public and Open Access? Well to be fair there is at least some evidence of independence. This from William Gunn on the STM/Elsevier policies on article sharing at least raises some things that Mendeley was not happy with. But more usual are posts that align with the overall Elsevier position. This on the UK Access to Research Program for instance is a straightforward articulation of the Publishers Association position (and completely at odds with those earlier positions above). A search for “open access” gives this post on “Myths of Open Access“, a rather muted re-hash of a much older BioMedCentral post. The next several hits are posts from before the purchase, followed by the Access to Research post. There is nothing wrong with this, priorities change, but Mendeley is no longer the place to go for full throated Open Access advocacy.

What about the API? As was noted of both the Mendeley and SSRN purchases it’s the data that really matters. The real diagnostic of whether Elsevier was committed to the same vision as the founders would have been strong support for the API and Open Data. Now, the API never went away, but nor was it exactly the priority for development resources. For those who used that data the reliability went steadily downhill from around 2013 onwards. What had once been the jewell in the crown of open usage data in scholarly communications was for periods basically un-usable. The priority was working with internal Elsevier data, building the vertical integration from Scopus through to Mendeley to support future products. Outside users (and therefore competitors) were a distant second. Things have improved significantly recently, a sign perhaps of investment priorities changing, but it is also coupled with some other troubling developments that indicate a desire to maintain control over information.

Within the STM/Elsevier Article Sharing Policy is an implication of a requirement for information tracking: “Publishers and libraries should be able to measure the amount and type of sharing, using standards such as COUNTER, to better understand the habits of their readers and quantify the value of the services they provide”. Read that next to this post on the LibLicense List on growing restrictions on the re-use of COUNTER data imposed by publishers. Then ask why there is a need for a private mechanism for pushing usage data, one that is intended to support the transport of “personally identifiable data about usage”? Business models where “you are the product” benefit from scale and enclosed data. Innovative and small scale market entrants benefit from an ecosystem of open data – closed data benefits large scale and vertically integrated companies, of which there is really only one example in the Scholarly Communications space (for the future watch SpringerNature and the inevitable re-integration of DigitalScience after the IPO but they’re not there yet).

If the argument for SSRN continuing successfully within Elsevier depends on the argument as to whether Mendeley has succeeded within Elsevier, then that argument depends entirely on what you mean by “succeeded”. Mendeley has changed: opinion will divide rather sharply between those who think that change is overwhelmingly good and those that think that change is overwhelmingly bad. About now, one group of readers (if they made it this far) will be exasperated with the “wooly” and “political” nature of the comments above. They will point to Mendeley “growing up” and “becoming serious”, properly integrated into a real business. Another group will be exasperated by the failure to criticise any and all commercial involvement, and the lack of commitment to the purity of the cause. If you fall into one of those camps then it tells me more about you, than it does about either Mendeley or SSRN. Far more interesting is the question of whether each element of that change is good, or bad, and for who, and at what level? Either way, the argument that “Mendeley thrived within Elsevier, therefore SSRN will” is certainly not a slam dunk.

What does this tell us about SSRN?

So what of the canaries? What does this tell us about what we should be watching for at SSRN? Certainly the purchase makes sense in the context of establishing stronger and broader data flows that can be converted to product for Elsevier. But what would be a sign that the service is drifting away from its original purpose? It’s those same three things. The elements that I have argued were lost after Mendeley was purchased.

1. Advocacy: SSRN always occupied a quite different space in its disciplinary fields to that of Mendeley, and has never had a strong policy/advocacy stance. Nonetheless look for shifts in policy or narrative that align with the STM Article Sharing Policy or other policy initiatives driven from within Elsevier. Particularly in the light of recent developments with the Cancer Moonshot in the US look for efforts to use SSRN to show that “these disciplines are different to science/medicine”.
2. Data: SSRN doesn’t have an API and access to data on usage is moderately restrictive already. One way for SSRN and Elsevier to prove me wrong is to make a covenant on releasing data or even better for them to build a truly open API. In the meantime watch for changes in terms of use on the pages that provides the rankings. When it is updated with the major site refresh that is almost certainly coming check for the tell tale signs of obfuscation to make it hard to scrape. These would be the signs of a gradual effort to lock down the data.
3. Redirection: This is the big one. SSRN is a working paper repository. That is its central function. In that way it is different to Mendeley where you could always argue that the public access element was a secondary function. Watch very closely for when (not if) links to publisher versions of articles appear. Watch how those are presented and whether there is a move towards removing versions that might (perhaps) relate closely to a publisher version. Ask the question: is the fundamental purpose of this repository changing based on the way it directs the attention of users seeking content?

SSRN is a good service, and the Elsevier investment will improve it substantially. Whether the existing community of users will continue to trust and use it is an open question. I’ve heard more disquiet from real researchers beyond the twitter echo chamber than I would have expected but any reading of history suggests that it will lose some users but retain a substantial number. Service improvements offer the opportunity for future growth, although SSRN already has substantial market penetration, something that wasn’t true of Mendeley and its subsequent growth. It’s not clear to me that integration with the wider Elsevier ecosystem is something that user base wants, but improved interfaces and information flow to other systems certainly are. The real question is the extent to which Elsevier exerts control over information and user flows, and whether it uses that to foster competition or to control it.

Note on changes made post-publication: I have modified the initial paragraph because it was pointed out that it could be read as me being dismissive of the quality of arguments being made in other posts on the SSRN sale. That wasn’t my intent. What I had intended to say was that the different sides of those arguments build on quite separate narratives and world-views and that I had seen little evidence of real understanding of what the issues are across the stakeholder and cultural divides.  The original first paragraph is below.

The response to the sale of SSRN to Elsevier is pretty much entirely predictable. As I noted in my UKSG talk different groups are simply talking past each other, completely failing to understand what matters to the others, and for the most part failing to see the damage that some of that communication is doing. But that’s not what I want to cover here. What I’m interested is a particular strand of the conversation and what it tells us about the risks, both for SSRN as a trusted repository for a range of research communities, and for the ecosystem as a whole.

 

This is necessarily speculative and I can’t claim to have bottomed out all the potential issues with this framing. It therefore stands as one of the “thinking in progress” posts I promised earlier in the year. Nonetheless it does seem like an interesting framing to pursue an understanding of scholarly communications through.

The idea of “the market” in scholarly communications has rubbed me up the wrong way for a long time. Both the moral and political superiority claimed by private and commercial players for the presumption that markets should be unregulated and protected from “public interference” and the simplistic notion (acknowledging I’ve been guilty of doing this myself) of pointing to the market as “broken”.

A market, whether meant in the sense of a system of exchange that optimising complex pricing for a (set of) good(s) or in the political sense of a protected space for free private exchange, requires the ability for free exchange across that “market”. In it’s political sense it should also be somehow “organic” – that is it develops free from direct subsidy or indirect government control. None of these are true of the scholarly communications system: there is neither free exchange amongst providers, nor purchasers, there is as we shall see effectively compulsion on purchasers and providers, and the whole system only exists because of government subsidy.

Pointing to market failure isn’t helpful if there isn’t really a market. Nor is claiming that markets support better innovation and customer service. It’s poor politics but its also poor system analysis. If we want to make things better, we need a better framing that actually explains, and ideally predicts how changes might play out. After a conversation this morning I’m wondering whether general taxation is a better framing of the scholarly communications system.

Mancur Olson, in The Logic of Collective Action lays out the problem of how large groups can provision what he calls a “collective good”, today we would use the term “public good”. While he focusses on other examples he keeps the case of general taxation in the background. His conclusion is that large groups, which he describes as “latent”, need some form of compulsion to provide public goods. Buchannan, Ostrom and others would later work on the way in which smaller groups can successfully manage public-like goods that have some (differing) elements of private good-like natures. Buchannan focussed on “local public goods”, what we now call “toll goods” or “club goods“, which are non-rivalrous but excludable, Ostrom on “common pool resources” (CPRs) which are non-excludable but rivalrous. In both cases they diagnose limits on the scale of groups that can successfully manage these resources. Neither Ostrom nor Buchannan looked in great detail about the gradation from their ideal types (pure CPRs and club goods) as good become more public-like. We therefore need an economics of “public-making”.

The scholarly community (at least as currently configured) is far too large to provide public goods without compulsion or to manage CPRs or club goods. Yet research is about the generation of public goods (or at least public-like club goods). We therefore have a provisioning problem, and according to Olson one that requires compulsion to resource. We need tax.

That publishers provide a public-like good is easy to demonstrate for subscription articles. Once a PDF is created it is an almost pure public good in the wild. It can be distributed infinitely (non-rivalrous) and is almost impossible to stop (non-excludable). Equally the provision of metadata that is freely available for re-use is also a public good provision. The benefits of the review process are available to all who can access the article so that is also a public good. But herein lies a paradox. If these are public goods then classical economics tells us they won’t be provided by private enterprise. So what is going on?

One of Olson’s key insights is to separate the issue of public vs private (which is a vexed division in scholarly communications anyway) from systems that can impose the compulsion that provide public or collective goods. He notes for instance that in the early to mid-20th century workers in many US firms voted overwhelmingly in secret ballots to impose union membership on themselves and to create closed shops. Although we don’t get a vote on it, the world of academic publishing is not so different from the closed industrial shops of 50s America. If you don’t publish in the right places, you’re not part of the club. So there is a “tax” on the supply side, although the dues are paid in the effort of authorship (and refereeing) rather than as union membership fees. That compulsion is how knowledge as a club good is made more public-like.

But what about the demand side? What about the real money? Publishers are also providing a public good for institutions. It’s the system that matters from an institutional perspective, the exposure that their researchers get, the credit for publication and therefore “membership”. One journal more or less doesn’t really matter. Again the classical economics says there should be a substantial free rider problem with each library gradually cutting back on subscriptions to bring down expenditure (this argument has nothing to do with the serials crisis, it would still follow with a flat, or even dropping over all expenditure). In practice libraries don’t really have a choice about dealing with the Big 4 publishers and not that much choice about what they pay. Fees are configured so that there are only marginal savings in cutting the big deal and going a la carte. Indeed fees are based on a bizarre set of historical factors that have no real basis in reality. Effectively there is compulsion. It is more like tax than a market.

If the Big 4 are a bit like Federal income tax in the US system (yes, the analogy breaks down a bit there but there are multiple strands of national tax in some countries, such as “National Insurance” here in the UK) then the smaller publishers are a bit similar to US state income taxes. If you want you can move to a state with low or no tax, and you can equally have an institution that does no humanities, or no chemistry and avoid paying out to SAGE or the ACS, but those are not the regular choices, and they limit your opportunities to operate. Article Processing Charges are equivalent to a sales or consumption tax. The analogy works right down to the political argument about how consumption taxes can in principle reduce income tax evasion (or redistribute the burden of the scholcomms system back towards the biggest players) because even those who can afford good accountants (or in our case subscription negotiators) still consume goods (or publish articles), but often in practice also raise access barriers for the poor, particularly those seeking to raise their income above the local tax-free threshold.

The serials crisis is then the unconstrained rise in collective provisioning. Far from being a market response to demand, it is a self-reinforcing increase in provision that can’t possibly be subject to proper market discipline, because a market can never truly operate. I don’t need to spell out the political consequences of this argument, but I find it fascinating that we can frame the system as a European general taxation system run by organisations that espouse American fiscal politics. It certainly creates a moral equivalence between “private” provision of these public goods and collective provisioning, such as through repository systems. There really isn’t a difference. It’s simply a question of which form of provision is better suited and better value.

The economic consequences are that we cannot constrain costs through market oriented actions. The only way to constrain run away collective provisioning is through collective action. But collective action is hard because we operate in an existing collective system, with its existing mechanisms of compulsion. The evolution of systems that provide public goods is slow, compared to that of private goods (I am minded to compare manuscript submission systems with government websites as an example). Change will come locally, with local changes of rules. The local governments in the system, the scholarly societies, perhaps some institutions and University Presses, are where change can start, where there are small groups, those that Buchannan and Ostrom as well as Olson identify as able to act.

Ostrom in particular notes that very large scale management of common pool resources is possible within communities (and that privatisation and nationalisation both tend to fail) as long as institutions are built that can coordinate groups of groups. Federations of societies and groups of institutions alongside collective mechanisms like Open Library of Humanities and Knowledge Unlatched offer some possible directions, as does an interesting increase in the number of endowed journals being launched. Ostrom’s prescription is to build institutions that support communities working together effectively, so they can build these large collectives.

And the big governments? Well they can be changed or their orientation shifted from “big” to “small”. And if I recall correctly issues with taxation are often at the root of that change.

I think I committed to one of these every two weeks didn’t I? So already behind? Some of what I intended in this section already got covered in What are the assets of a journal? and the other piece Critiquing the Standard Analytics Paper so this is headed in a slightly different direction from originally planned.

There are two things you frequently hear in criticism of scholarly publishers. One is “why can’t they do X? It’s trivial. Service Y does this for free and much better!”. I covered some of the reasons that this is less true than you might think in What’s the technical problem with reforming scholarly publishing? In particular I argued that it is often the scale of systems and the complexities of their interconnection that mean that things that appear simple (and often are for a one off case) are much more complex in context.

In turn this argument, that big systems become more rigid and require greater investment in management and maintenance, raises the other oft-heard comment, that the industry is “ripe for disruption” by new nimble players. There is growing criticism that Christenson’s narrative of industrial disruption isn’t very general (see for e.g. articles in New Yorker, Sloan Business Review[paywall]), but for the purposes of this piece lets assume that it is a good model; that large industrial players tend towards a state of maintenance and incremental improvement where they are vulnerable to smaller, more innovative players who have less to lose, less investment in existing systems, and customers, and can therefore implement the radical change. This kind of narrative is definitely appealing, even empowering, to those agitating for change. It is also picked up and applied by analysts who take a more traditional approach.

So why hasn’t it happened?

The news pieces heralding the imminent demise of Elsevier started in the mid-90s. And people in the know will admit that internally there was a real fear that the business would be in big trouble. But despite this the big players remain remarkably stable. Indeed consolidation in the industry has increased that stability with a rapidly decreasing number of independent companies publishing a substantial proportion of the world’s research literature. The merger of Springer and Nature is just the latest in a long run of mergers and purchases.

A conventional market watcher will say that such mergers indicate that there are economies of scale that can be harnessed to deliver better returns. Cynics often point out that what is really happening is a recapitalisation that benefits a small number of people but doesn’t generate overall returns. Certainly in scholarly publishing there are serious questions about combining very different cultures creates benefits. It is not an accident that mergers and purchases are often followed by a mass exodus of staff. In the case of the Springer-Nature merger the departure of many senior ex-Nature staff is a clear indication of which of the two cultures is dominating the transition.

If we take Christenson seriously then a lack of disruption, and simultaneous consolidation implies that there are real economies of scale to be achieved. What are they? And are they enough to continue providing a sufficient barrier to entry that disruption won’t happen in the future?

Capital

Possibly the biggest economy of scale is the most obvious. Simply having access to resources. Elsevier’s public reports show that it has access to substantial amounts of cash (albeit as a credit facility). The 2015 RELX Annual Report [pdf] (p57) notes that “Development costs of £242m (2014: £203m) were capitalised within internally developed intangible assets, most notably investment in new products and related infrastructure in the Legal and Scientific, Technical & Medical businesses” giving a sense of the scale of investment. It is these resources that allow large corporations invest large amounts of money in various internal projects and also to buy up external developments, whether to add to the technology stack, bring in new expertise or to remove potential competitors for the market. Sufficient cash provides a lot of flexibility and opportunity for experimentation.

It’s not just the big players. PLOS is probably best characterised as a “medium sized” publisher but benefits from having access to capital built up during the period 2010-13 where it had significant surpluses. In the 2015 Annual Update PLOS reported $3.7M (8% of $46.5M total expenses) on R&D in FY 2014 and with a new platform launching imminently this probably saw a large uptick in FY 2015. eLife has not reported 2015 figures but again substantial development has gone into a recently launched platform, supported by access to capital. Smaller publishers, and particularly new market entrants don’t generally have access to the kind of capital that enables this scale of technology development. Community development is starting to make inroads into this and Open Source community projects are the most likely to challenge existing capital concentration but it is slow progress.

Broad Business Intelligence Base

Scholarly publishing is both slow and tribal. Publishers with a broad based set of journals have a substantial business intelligence advantage in understanding how publication behaviour and markets are changing. They also have privileged access to large numbers of authors, editors, and readers. They don’t always use this information well – the number of poorly constructed and misinterpreted surveys is appalling – and indeed sometimes still get tunnel vision based on the information they have, but nonetheless this is an incredible asset.

At best a disruptive market entrant will have deep insight into a specific community, and may be well placed to better serve that specific niche. The tradeoff is that they frequently struggle to scale beyond that base. This is in fact generally true of technology interventions in scholarly communications. What developers think is general often does not work outside of the proof of concept community. A variant of this is showing that something works, using the literature in Pubmed Central or Europe Pubmed Central as a demonstrator and failing to understand how the lack of infrastructure outside that narrow disciplinary space makes generalisation incredibly difficult.

Seeing a broad landscape and being able to see future trends developing is a powerful advantage of the big players. Used well it can drive the big strategic shifts (Springer’s big bet on APC funded Open Access, Elsevier’s massive shift in investment away from content and publishing into integrating Scopus/SciVal and Mendeley for information management). Used less effectively it can lead to stasis and confusion. But this information is an enormous strategic asset and one that smaller players struggle to compete with. Disruption in this context has to wait for the unforced error.

Diversified financial risks

Having the scale to develop a range of revenue sources is a huge benefit. Springer have a strong books business, Elsevier a significant revenue source in information. They are also diversified across disciplinary areas, some growing, some shrinking, and at generally have more coverage of varied geographies. New players like PeerJ, eLife, or Open Library of Humanities tend to have at best a few revenue sources, and often a restricted disciplinary focus. A lack of revenue diversity is certainly a risk factor for any growing business. On the other side most advice to start-ups to focus on developing one single revenue source, the transition from that start-up mode to diversification is often the challenge.

The other form of scale comes from having a sufficiently diverse and large journal portfolio to make up a big deal. It can be difficult for a small publisher to even get libraries to give them time when the amounts of money are relatively small. Effort is concentrated on the big negotiations. Having a stable of journals that includes “must-have” subscription titles along side volume (whether in mast heads or article numbers) that can be used to justify the annual price increases has been a solid strategy. The arguments for market failure for subscriptions are well rehearsed.

Ironically the serials crisis is leading to a new market emerging, a market in big deals themselves. With libraries increasingly asking the question of “which big deal do we cancel” the question of which of the big four is offering the worst deal becomes important. The deals being sought also differ. In North America it is usually Wiley or Springer deals being cancelled. The Elsevier big deal for subscription content generally appears to be better value for money in that context. In Europe, where the deal being sought includes provision of large scale Open Access publishing in some form it is the Elsevier big deal that more frequently looks at risk of being dropped. This kind of competition over big deals isn’t yet happening at a large scale but it does pose some risk of the economies of scale gained by a diverse journal list becoming a liability if large sets of (low volume and low prestige) titles become less attractive.

Successful Challengers

If we look at new and emerging entrants to the market that have succeeded we can see that in many cases their success lies in having a way around some of these economies of scale. Capital injection, directly through grants (PLOS, eLife, OLH) or from investors (Ubiquity, PeerJ) is common. Building on existing Open Source technology stacks (Ubiquity, Co-Action) and or applying deep technical knowledge to reduce start-up costs (PeerJ, Pensoft) is a strategy for avoiding this.

Successful startups have often created a new market in some form (PLOS ONE being the classic example) or build on deep experience of a specific segment (PeerJ, CoAction) or a new insight into how finances could work (Ubiquity, OLH). Many big players are poor at fully exploiting the business intelligence they have at their disposal. For whatever reason scholarly publishing is not a strongly data-led business in the way that term is usually used in the technology industry. Missed opportunities remains one of routes to success for the new smaller players.

Looking across the crop of existing and emerging new players revenue diversifications remains a serious weakness. And this limits the scale of any disruption they might lead. In this sense it could be argued that there are not yet any mature businesses amongst them. Ubiquity Press is probably the best example of a new publisher developing diversified revenue streams. Ubiquity’s offerings include an in-house OA publishing business with a a low enough cost-base to provide a range of funding models including APCs, endowments and community supported arrangements. It also provides services to a growing number of University Presses as well as underpinning the operations of OLH.

Real disruption of the big players will need a combination of financial stability, very low cost base, and technical systems that can truly scale. All of these need to come together at the same time as an ability to either co-opt or appropriate the existing markers of prestige. Christenson’s disruption narrative presumes that there is a parallel space or new market that can be created that is separate from existing assumptions about “quality” in the disrupted market. But when “quality” is really “prestige”, that is in a luxury goods market, this is much harder to achieve. The financial and business capacity to disrupt is not enough when quality, prestige and price are all coupled together in ways that don’t necessarily make any rational economic or business sense. That’s the piece I’ll move onto tackling next.