I talk about this a lot with my consulting hat on. The financial pressures on libraries to cover the costs of the ever-increasing article output, and the drivers of research misconduct, are driven in large part by the way we incentivise and measure researchers (1) - ThreadSky

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tashamc.bsky.social • 6 days ago

I talk about this a lot with my consulting hat on. The financial pressures on libraries to cover the costs of the ever-increasing article output, and the drivers of research misconduct, are driven in large part by the way we incentivise and measure researchers (1)

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tashamc.bsky.social•6 days ago

We can argue the toss about how publishers price subscriptions and OA until the cows come home, but annual article output more than doubled between 2009 and 2023. While most of the growth was OA, closed still grew by nearly 30%. (2)

tashamc.bsky.social•6 days ago

Over that time, publishers have had to add a raft of new services to detect and manage research misconduct, meet new technical standards, develop new OA business models ('transformative deals' were in response to library requests), and so on. (3)

tashamc.bsky.social•6 days ago

So that's a lot more content, with a lot of investment. Yes, prices have gone up. In some cases, they've gone up too much – but I would LOVE to do a project to assess how much libraries are now paying per article today compared with the rates 10 or 15 years ago. (4)

tashamc.bsky.social•6 days ago

Which takes me back to my first post: unless and until we collectively figure out a better way to measure and incentivise researcher output, more articles will be published each year, bad actors will behave badly, and headline prices will increase each year to cover both of those things. (5)

tashamc.bsky.social•6 days ago

Last thing! I wrote an article in 2021 about a transparent, article-linked pricing mechanism for closed (subscription) content. It's in @uksg.bsky.social Insights at https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.551

(6, fin)

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