On July 5, 2021, Mikael Laakso from Hanken School of Economics has published a research report on Nordic academic journals, which was funded by the Nordic publications Committee for Humanities and Social Science Periodicals (NOP-HS). According to the press release for this research report, it provides a comprehensive overview of the Nordic scholarly journals in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), while focusing on journals fulfilling its geographic sampling criteria, such as being based in Nordic countries. This research has derived its primary data from bibliometric information and a web survey conducted during the first half of 2021. This study has encompassed 353 Nordic journals. Representatives of 72 of these journals have provided responses for the the attendant web survey.  Among the more interesting findings of this research report are that 86% of the sampled Nordic journals are published in English (p. 19). Over 50% of Nordic scientific journals are published by professional bodies. 75% of these journals are published in Open Access. Thus, for this journal sample, whereas Open Access publishing cuts across publisher types, such as research universities, scholarly societies and professional publishers, closed access model deployment, e.g., for 75 journals from the sample, is predominantly concentrated (87%) in the hands of professional market players (p. 21). For Nordic journals, the more important funding sources are grant funding, third-party organization support, e.g., by home institutions, volunteer work and membership frameworks (p. 26).

A recent post discussing the expected impact of Open Access policies on the main players in the British publishing market has focused on the global implications of the growth in the Open Access sector for libraries and publishers: https://openresearch.community/posts/gold-open-access-mandates-may-be-associated-with-publisher-revenue-losses-and-library-cost-increases. In this respect, comparisons between absolute output levels in the Open Access sector and the closed access one also suggest that for multiple publishers Open Access has acted not only as the engine of their growth but also, at least partly, that of profitability. Similarly, the comments section elaborates on the game theoretical implications of the options that libraries and publishers are likely to be facing as they weigh their strategies. In this context, it is also notable that in its discussion of Open Access the report by by FTI Consulting (2021, p. 31) incidentally approximates the situation of some global players in the publishing market, such as Elsevier, less than 25% of the output of which can be published in Open Access, which in many cases trails significantly behind the extent of the country-level adoption of Open Access, such as in the United Kingdom: https://www.researchinformation.info/analysis-opinion/oa-should-be-default.

While a recent article by Serghio et al. (2021, p. 8) indicates that the growing adoption of Open Access in biomedical sciences has significantly contributed to increasing the degree of conflict-of-interest and funding disclosures with respect to scholarly article publication, this seems to be the case for open data to a significantly smaller extent. In contrast, research protocol registration and code sharing arrangements seem to have made minor inroads only in the publication of biomedical research results. These contrasting results, such as the growth in the share of articles that disclose conflict-of-interest and funding information, e.g., from around 52% and 63% respectively in 2010 to circa 88% and 85% in 2020, as opposed to an increase in data sharing from around 6% in 2010 to approximately 12% in 2020 (Serghio et al., 2021, p. 8), may be stemming from the need to manage the author-facing payments that Open Access models involve, which inherently promotes funding-related transparency. Reference Serghiou, S., Contopoulos-Ioannidis, D. G., Boyack, K. W., Riedel, N., Wallach, J. D., & Ioannidis, J. P. (2021). Assessment of transparency indicators across the biomedical literature: how open is open?. PLoS biology, 19(3), e3001107.