Market Share of the Largest Publishers in Journal Citation Reports Based on Journal Price and Article Processing Charge | Sang-Jun Kim and Kay Sook Park | Science Editing, July 14, 2020
This article has evaluated the market share of the largest publishers around the world based on Journal Citation Reports' evaluations, the journal subscription prices and article processing charges for the period between 2014 to 2018.
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This article suggests that, for the researched period, among the top 10 global journal publishers, the market is split largely evenly between the three leading publishing houses, which are Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, and the rest, which comprises lower-ranking publishers, e.g., Taylor & Francis and Sage, in terms of both the article-level impact and journal-level subscription prices. That this does not hold for article processing charges (APCs), as top 3 publishers capture only 45.1% of APC revenues, can be largely explained by the economies of scale of Elsevier, as the market leader, the subscription-driven revenues of which allow it to levy nearly-average APC prices for top-10 publishers also offset by significantly above average journal subscription prices without losing the world market share of 25.4%.