Research & Scholarly Publications Team: Coventry ORSP Blog

Who do Coventry University authors publish with? An analysis of journal publications

Since rolling out the Pure system in the Spring of 2017, the amount of research output content has grown to over 30,000 unique records. Of these 30,000 records a little over half, 15,000+ records, relate to journal article publications. The journal article in many academic disciplines remains the dominant means for communicating scholarly research. 

The question of which publishers our academic authors are publishing with is of increasing interest to academic libraries. We are now in the era of ‘Transformative Agreements’, deals struck between publishers and academic library consortia which aim to cover both ‘read’ access costs and open access publishing costs. The goal of these ‘Transformative Agreements’ is that they will pave the way for publishers to eventually change their business models away from ‘subscription’ access publishing models to ‘open access’ models by the end of 2024. This is in keeping with one of the goals of Plan S, a major Open Access initiative which several major research funders, including UKRI which oversees the UK’s Research Councils, are signatories to.  

To assess the value for money of these deals it’s important for Universities to have an understanding of where their academics are publishing and what the publishing trends are. What follows is a summary of some of the findings from when we recently undertook some analysis using the data in our Pure system. 

Major Publishers

The top two journal publishers which Coventry University authors most commonly publish with will not be a great shock to many. Elsevier, with whom Coventry University authors between 2017-2020 published an average of 250 articles a year, is out in front as the biggest single publisher of Coventry University research. In second place sits Taylor & Francis, with whom Coventry University authors publish with half as frequently as they do in Elsevier journals, at an average of 125 articles a year. 

A 2015 article published in Plos One on the ‘Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era’ (Lariviere, 2015) identified that five publishers, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis amongst them, accounted for more than half of all academic papers published in 2013. A process of business consolidation and mergers has increasingly led to a few dominant academic publishers.  

The great majority of articles published with Elsevier and Taylor & Francis are subject to subscription access requirements, also commonly referred to as a ‘Paywall’. Whilst the number of articles published via a ‘Gold’ Open Access route, whereby the final published version is openly available, often under a Creative Commons re-use licence, is slowly increasing, the figures remain low. For example 15% of Elsevier articles acknowledging CU authorship were published via the ‘Gold Open Access’ route in 2020. In the case of Taylor & Francis the number of articles published ‘Gold Open Access’ increased from 5% of the total in 2019, to 12% of total publications in 2020.  

The majority of Elsevier and Taylor & Francis content is made available via the ‘Green Open Access route, where the accepted manuscript is archived on our institutional repository Pure, and made available either immediately or after an embargo period where required by the publisher. The University has had an Open Access policy in place since 2015 focused on authors making their work available via this route, which was supplemented by the policy introduced for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2016. 

In the case of Elsevier articles, 86% of those published between 2017-2020 have been made, or will shortly become, available Open Access through our Pure system. For Taylor & Francis, the equivalent figure is 81%.   

In an analysis of Elsevier and Taylor & Francis journal publications for the period 2019-2020, a little over 50% of the total number Coventry University authored articles featured a corresponding author from our University. 

Below Elsevier and Taylor & Francis, we have a number of other large publishers with whom Coventry University authors publish in the region of 50-70 articles a year. In this bracket are the likes of: Wiley, Springer, Sage and Emerald.  

Open Access Publishers

We then looked at those newer publishers who publish exclusively Open Access article content. Historically Coventry University’s open access policy has stressed the ‘green’ route to open access, which has promoted publishing in subscription access journals and archiving the accepted manuscript in Pure. Due to financial considerations, many researchers who aren’t in receipt of specific research funding will have found it challenging to publish in major open access journals operating under the model which requires an Article Processing Charge (APC) being paid to facilitate open access publication. 

Nonetheless, the data indicates that the level of publishing with journals operating on a ‘pay to publish’ open access business model has roughly trebled from 40 articles in 2017, to 120 articles in 2020. 

Of those Open Access publishers which we looked at, the Swiss based publisher MDPI clearly dominates, with an increase in publication numbers of over 400% between 2017 and 2020.  

This is partly a reflection of MDPI’s exponential growth in recent years, which merited a 2020 article on Scholarly Kitchen, but also of the fact that publishing in fully open access journals has become an increasingly popular way to publish, even with the financial challenges which it can place on authors. 

Launched in September 2021, for the first time our University has an institutional Open Access fund which can be used to support the costs of publishing ‘Gold’ Open Access in fully Open Access journals which charge an Article Processing Charge (APC). For eligibility criteria please see this tab on our LibGuide. 

What may change in the future?

The publishing landscape is presently in a state of flux. Publishers which largely operate a subscription access journal portfolio are now under pressure to shift toward an open access business model. In the UK, JISC are negotiating on behalf of the UK Universities sector to agree ‘Transformative Agreements’ with publishers which would see them bundle their ‘read’ and ‘publish’ costs into one consolidated package which Universities can sign up to. The goal of such deals is to make it simpler for academic authors to publish via the ‘Gold’ route to open access without needing to pay individual article processing charges. 

For a list of publishers which our University have agreements in place with please see this section of our LibGuide. 

It is possible that academic publishing behaviour may adapt to prioritise those publishers with whom their University has agreements in place with, due to the ease of being able to publish via the Gold Open Access route and hence to comply with a range of open access policy criteria. This has led to some alarm calls that major publishers with the scale to pivot to a business model will find their market share increased further, whilst independent society publishers and university presses may risk being irreparably damaged. Some of the challenges in this area are expressed in this piece in Research Information.  

A more radical vision of the future could see a greater role being played by ‘Diamond’ Open Access journals. ‘Diamond’ journals are those which don’t charge authors fees to publish, and which are also free to access. Analysis from 2015 highlights the fact the great majority of journals indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), some 73%, didn’t charge authors APCs to publish. However, that same analysis showed that Diamond journals tend to operate on a much smaller scale than their APC charging counterparts, with only a minority of overall research published in DOAJ indexed journals, 43%, attributable to Diamond journal publications.