Behind a multi-billion dollar industry built on the pursuit of knowledge, the academic publishing giants are thriving as evidenced by a global market worth $26.5 billion and over half of all scholarly articles being controlled by just five major players.
Key Takeaways
- In 2022, the global scholarly publishing market was valued at approximately $26.5 billion USD, with a CAGR of 4.5% from 2017-2022
- RELX Group (Elsevier's parent) reported STM revenue of €2.599 billion in 2022, up 5% from 2021
- Springer Nature's total revenue reached €1.897 billion in 2022, with 45% from open access
- Elsevier's article output grew to 600,000 articles in 2022
- Globally, 3.3 million scholarly articles were published in 2022 across all disciplines
- Peer-reviewed journals number around 35,000 worldwide in 2023
- Open access share of publications rose from 12% in 2014 to 45% in 2022
- Diamond OA (no APC) accounts for 27% of OA articles in 2022
- Transformative agreements funded 1.2 million OA articles in 2022
- Average subscription price per journal increased 3.2% in 2023
- Big Deal bundles cost US libraries $1.2 billion annually
- APCs for top STM journals average $4,500 USD in 2023
- H-index average for top 10% journals: 150+
- Global citations grew 6% to 1.5 billion in Scopus 2022
- Altmetrics attention score average: 15 for articles
The academic publishing industry is a multibillion-dollar market dominated by a few major players.
Costs and Pricing
- Average subscription price per journal increased 3.2% in 2023
- Big Deal bundles cost US libraries $1.2 billion annually
- APCs for top STM journals average $4,500 USD in 2023
- US university library serials budget: $1.5 billion for journals in 2022
- Price per download (PPD) for journals averages $0.45 in 2023
- Inflation in journal prices: 4-5% annually over 10 years
- Transformative agreement costs rose to €500 million globally in 2022
- Average book processing charge (BPC) for OA books: €8,000-€12,000
- Library cancellations of journals: 10% reduction in subscriptions 2020-2023
- Profit margins for top publishers: 30-40% on journals
- Cost per use (CPU) metric shows STM journals at $15-20 average
- APC waivers granted to 25% of authors in low-income countries
- Journal bundle discounts: 20-30% off list prices
- UK NESLi2 agreements: £50 million annual spend
- APC inflation: 10% over 5 years
- Library e-journal market: $10 billion globally
- Cost per article subscription: $5,000-10,000 for top titles
- OA book market: growing 20% YoY
- Publisher profits: RELX 38% margin 2022
- COUNTER usage reports: 10 billion downloads 2022
- Negotiated price caps in TA deals: 2% growth limit
- Average BPC variance: €10,000 STM vs €5,000 HSS
- Serials price index US: +213% since 1986
- EBSCO survey: 92% libraries face budget pressures
- Springer APC range: €1,000-€11,000
- ARL members spend $60k avg per institution on journals
- Big Deal savings claimed: 50% vs individual
- Springer Nature TA spend: €100 million 2022
- Elsevier subscription revenue: €2.3 billion
- Usage-based pricing trials: 10% of deals
- HSS journal prices +2.1% vs STM +4%
Costs and Pricing Interpretation
In a truly remarkable display of economic alchemy, the academic publishing industry has managed to systematically price-gouge the very institutions that produce its content, trapping knowledge in a cycle of escalating costs and immense corporate profits while dressing it up as a public service.
Impact and Metrics
- H-index average for top 10% journals: 150+
- Global citations grew 6% to 1.5 billion in Scopus 2022
- Altmetrics attention score average: 15 for articles
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) global average: 1.00
- Top 1% cited papers: 0.1% of total, receive 20% of citations
- Journal Impact Factor median: 2.8 across disciplines 2022
- Download counts: top journals exceed 1 million/year
- Citation half-life average: 10 years for STM
- h5-index for Nature: 450+
- 70% of researchers value citations for career progression
- PlumX metrics track 100 million+ mentions yearly
- ORCID registrations: 15 million researchers by 2023
- Average citations per paper: 12 in Scopus 2022
- DORA signatories: 2,500+ organizations rejecting JIF
- CiteScore average: 3.5 across 27,000 journals
- Google Scholar metrics: h5-median 50 for top pubs
- Normalized citation impact: top countries US 1.6, NL 1.5
- APC-discounted citations: no penalty observed
- Article views: Nature papers average 100,000+
- SJR (Scimago Journal Rank) top quartile: 25% journals
- Mendeley readers average: 50 per article
- Patent citations to papers: 1 million/year
- Clinical trial citations: 80% of top guidelines cite journals
- JCR top 10% IF: 10+, median 14.5
- Citation concentration: top 10% papers 50% citations
- Dimensions.ai citations: 2 billion tracked
- Country citation leaders: US 25% global share
- OA citation boost HSS: 10%
- PLOS ONE citations avg: 4.5/paper
- Eigenfactor top: Physical Review journals
- Scopus SNIP average: 1.0
- Social media shares: 20% articles get 10+
- Policy mentions: 5% top papers
Impact and Metrics Interpretation
The academic publishing universe, while swelling with citations and attention, remains an elite country club where a handful of hyper-cited papers sip the champagne of impact while the vast majority politely hold their warm beer at the bar.
Market Size and Financials
- In 2022, the global scholarly publishing market was valued at approximately $26.5 billion USD, with a CAGR of 4.5% from 2017-2022
- RELX Group (Elsevier's parent) reported STM revenue of €2.599 billion in 2022, up 5% from 2021
- Springer Nature's total revenue reached €1.897 billion in 2022, with 45% from open access
- Wiley's Research Publishing & Platforms segment generated $1.36 billion in FY2023
- Taylor & Francis (Informa) had £641 million in academic journals revenue in 2022
- The STM publishing market share held by the top 5 publishers is over 50% of articles
- Global R&D spending reached $2.5 trillion in 2022, driving publishing demand
- Digital journal revenue accounts for 82% of total STM revenue in 2022
- Book revenue in scholarly publishing was $5.2 billion in 2022, growing at 2.1% CAGR
- Services revenue (abstracting/indexing) hit $1.6 billion in 2022
- Market projected to reach $30 billion by 2027, CAGR 3.8%
- Informa PLC revenue from STM: £1.4 billion in 2022
- Frontiers revenue: $165 million in 2022, 100% OA
- Global database revenue: $2.1 billion in 2022
- US market share: 40% of global STM revenue
- Europe: 35% market share, Asia-Pacific growing at 6% CAGR
- Market revenue from China: doubled since 2017 to 10% global
- Wiley total revenue FY2023: $2.1 billion, 65% recurring
- STM books market: $4.8 billion 2022
- Top 5 publishers output 50%+ articles, revenue 70%
- Global R&D pharma spend: $200 billion driving pubs
- E-book scholarly sales: 15% of book revenue
Market Size and Financials Interpretation
Despite a noble global mission of sharing knowledge, the academic publishing industry has perfected a lucrative alchemy, transforming over $2.5 trillion in public and private R&D into a tightly held $26.5 billion oligopoly where, ironically, the authors, reviewers, and funders do most of the work for free while a handful of corporations profit from the resulting articles.
Open Access
- Open access share of publications rose from 12% in 2014 to 45% in 2022
- Diamond OA (no APC) accounts for 27% of OA articles in 2022
- Transformative agreements funded 1.2 million OA articles in 2022
- Plan S compliant OA reached 50% coverage in Europe by 2023
- Gold OA APC average is $2,500 globally, $3,500 in US
- 80% of OA megajournals charge APCs averaging €2,000-€4,000
- Wellcome Trust funded 50%+ OA compliance in grants since 2021
- cOAlition S members published 85% OA in 2022
- Scoap3 initiative covers 100% OA for 5,000+ journals in high-energy physics
- Readership of OA articles is 1.8x higher than subscription
- 73% of researchers prefer OA for reading, 2022 survey
- Hybrid journals converted to full OA: 1,000+ since 2020
- National mandates (e.g., UK) achieve 60% OA compliance
- OA megajournals: 50+, publishing 150,000 articles/year
- Subscribe-to-OA flip programs: Project DEAL covers 2,000 journals
- APC revenue: $1.5 billion globally in 2022
- No-APC OA journals: 60% in DOAJ
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: 100% OA mandate compliance
- Usage of OA: 47% of downloads are OA
- Citation advantage of OA: 18% higher
- Readership disparity: Gold OA 47% more reads
- Institutional OA repositories: 5,000+
- Green OA self-archiving rate: 15% of total
- Bronze OA share: 20% but declining
- TA agreements: 100+ worldwide covering 11,000 journals
- Average hybrid APC: $3,200
- Publisher OA waivers: Research4Life 10,000/year
- NIH public access: 95% compliance
- OA downloads: 2x subscription in first year
- Twitter mentions OA advantage: 1.5x
- Europe PMC OA full-text: 8 million
- Self-archiving policies: 90% journals allow
Open Access Interpretation
Once largely locked away for profit, the doors of academia are creaking open—thanks to mandates, deals, and shifting preferences—yet the gold-plated tollbooths on the road to free access reveal we’re still far from a truly open scholarly utopia.
Publication Output
- Elsevier's article output grew to 600,000 articles in 2022
- Globally, 3.3 million scholarly articles were published in 2022 across all disciplines
- Peer-reviewed journals number around 35,000 worldwide in 2023
- Annual growth in new peer-reviewed articles is 3-4% per year since 2018
- China published 744,000 research papers in 2021, surpassing the US's 624,000
- Scopus indexed 90 million records by 2023, with 8 million added yearly
- Web of Science Core Collection covers 21,000 journals
- Crossref registered 3.5 million new DOIs for scholarly content in 2022
- Open access articles reached 1.5 million in 2022, 45% of total output
- Humanities and social sciences saw 2% annual publication growth 2018-2022
- STM journals publish 2.8 million articles annually as of 2022
- Average time from submission to publication is 147 days in 2022
- Number of retracted papers increased to 10,000+ in 2022
- Preprints totalled 4 million on arXiv, bioRxiv etc. by 2023
- Multidisciplinary journals like PLOS ONE published 20,000+ articles in 2022
- 58% of journals are hybrid (subscription + OA option) in 2023
- Total peer-reviewed papers: 8.5 million added to Scopus 2013-2023
- Annual papers in medicine: 1.2 million
- Engineering papers growth: 5% YoY
- Social sciences journals: 12,000 active
- DOAJ lists 20,000+ OA journals
- PubMed adds 1 million citations yearly
- Lens.org indexes 250 million scholarly records
- medRxiv preprints: 100,000+ since 2019
- Average acceptance rate: 30% across journals
- Women authors: 40% of corresponding authors in 2022
- Brazil published 100,000+ papers in 2022
- India: 200,000 papers annually
- Annual papers in physics: 250,000
- Biology papers: 500,000/year
- Economics papers growth: 2.5%
- Total active journals Scopus: 27,000
- Embase adds 1.4 million records/year
- SSRN preprints: 1.5 million
- Rejection rates top journals: 80-90%
- International collaboration papers: 25% of total
- Germany: 110,000 papers 2022
- UK: 180,000 papers annually
Publication Output Interpretation
Amidst an ocean of 3.3 million annual articles, where the machinery of 35,000 journals grinds with glacial speed and soaring rejection rates, we have achieved the miraculous feat of publishing more than ever before while making it feel harder than ever to be heard.
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