The economics of open science describe the economic aspects of making a wide range of scientific outputs (e.g., publications, data, software) to all levels of society.
Open science involves a plurality of economic models and goods. Historically, academic journals and other academic institutions, such as learned societies, have favored a knowledge club or a toll access model: publications are managed as a community service for the selected benefit of academic readers and authors. During the second half of the 20th century, the "big 5" largest publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and the American Chemical Society) have partly absorbed or outcompeted non-profits structure and applied an industrial approach to scholarly publishing.
The development of the web shifted the focus of scholarly communication from publication to a large variety of outputs (data, software, metrics). It also challenged the values and the organization of existing actors with the development of an international initiatives in favor of open access and open science. While initially distanced by new competitors, the main commercial publishers have started to flip to author-pay models after 2000, funded through article processing charges and the negotiation of transformative deals. Actors like Elsevier or Wiley have diversified their activities from journal ownership to data analytics by developing a vertical integration of tools, database and metrics monitoring academic activities. The structuration of a global open science movement, the enlargement of scientific readership beyond professional researchers and increasing concerns for the sustainability of key infrastructures has enabled the development of open science commons. Journals, platforms, infrastructures and repositories have been increasingly structured around a shared ecosystem of services and self-governance principles.
The costs and benefits of open science are difficult to assess due to the coexistence of several economic models and the untraceability of open diffusion. Open publishing is less costly overall than subscription models, on account of reduced externalities and economies of scale. Yet the conversion of leading publishers to open science has entailed a significant increased in article processing charges, as the prestige of well-known journals make it possible to extract a high consent to pay. Open science brings significant efficiency gain to academic research, especially regarding bibliographic and data search, identification of previous findings and text and data mining projects. Theses benefits extend to non-academic research, as open access to data and publications eases the development of new commercial services and products. Although the overall economic and social impact of open science could be high, it has been hardly estimated.
The development of open science has created new forms of economic regulations of scientific publishing, as funders and institutions has come to acknowledged that this sector no longer operated in normal market conditions. International coordinations like the cOAlitionS attempt to set up global rules and norms on to manage the transition to open science.
Economic models Debates on the economic theory of open science have been largely influenced by the classic typology of economic goods between Private goods, Public goods, Club goods and Common-pool resources. According to a common definition matrix gradually developed by Paul Samuelson, Ricard Musgrave and Elinor Ostrom, private goods and club goods are exclusive (they cannot be freely shared and are exclusively used by owners or members), while private goods and common goods are rivalrous (they cannot be consumed simultaneously).
In theory, the outputs of open science could be defined as public goods: they are not exclusive (free-licensed publications, data or software can be shared without restriction) and they are not substractive (they can be indefinitely copied). In 2017 an OECD report underlined that research data "exhibit public good characteristics" as "it is not exhausted in consumption (i.e. it can be consumed many times without being diminished), and it may be inefficient to exclude potential users". For Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess this approach does not fit with the actual uses and constraints of knowledge online. Like shared natural resources, the outputs of open science can be polluted, exhausted or enclosed: "The parallel, yet contradictory trends, where, on the one hand, there is unprecedented access to information through the Internet but where, on the other, there are ever-greater restrictions on access (...) indicate the deep and perplexing characteristics of this resource". Additionally, in contrast to other forms of knowledge commons, open science actors continue to enforce exclusion rules for the creation, curation and administration of resources: "the scientific and scholarly commons furnishes information input into a scientific discovery but the Mertonian norms of priority award the property rights in the claim to whoever is first to publish."
The leading definitions of open access and open science are sufficiently ambiguous to allow for a plurality of allocation systems: "open access is a boundary object that does not refer to a common set of practices, assumptions or principles." Consequently, uses and models of open science can span the entire typology of economic goods:
Excludable Non-excludable Rivalrous Private goodsclosed infrastructure, commercial databases Common-pool resources open archive, open science infrastructure, open data portals, diamond open access journals Non-rivalrous Club goodsdiamond open access journals, scientific societies Public goodsbibliographic record, scientific language, open-source software
The coexistence of the differing economic models of open science remains an evolving process. Competing narratives of the future of open access involve all the potential axis of open science goods: they include the disruption of legacy scientific publisher by new competitors, the transformation of private scientific goods into public goods and the rehabilitation of community-led governance. Nikos Koutras has argued for a structural inflexion of the role of commercial publishers, which would act more as editorial service than gatekeeper, as "it is feasible for authors to not rely on [them]".
Models of open science are embedded into wider socio-economic structures. North-South inequalities remain a major structural factor, that affect not only the access and use of open science output, but also the way the discourses and representations on open science.
Open science club The economic theory of club goods was originally developed in the 1965 by James Buchanan to complement the distinction between private and public goods. While clubs are private organizations they also manage the allocation of the resources between the individual members, in a similar manner to a public service. Membership criteria are a fundamental feature of clubs and affect their efficiency: "The central question in a theory of clubs is that of determining the membership margin, so to speak, the size of the most desirable cost and consumption sharing arrangement."
Definitions of knowledge club
Before the Second World War, academic publishing was mostly characterized by a wide range of community-driven scholarly structures with little concerns for profitability. They relied on informal community norms rather than commercial regulations. Theses structures have been described as knowledge clubs: "until the second part of the twentieth century, most journals could be assimilated to a club model".
While managed by a community and publicly available, knowledge club are demic and mostly used to the benefit of their members. As a defining feature of the club model, scientific authors are not paid for their publications: "ever since the first scientific journals were founded in 1665 in London and Paris, journals have not paid authors for articles." Acknowledgment and recognition by the relevant community of peers is the main incentive: "intangible rewards (made nearly tangible in tenure and promotion) compensate scholars for relinquishing royalties on their journal articles".
Users and consumers of club goods are basically the same population as the core readers of scientific journals are also their core contributors: "the set of potential producers and the set of incumbent consumers are the same set". Determination of relevant membership and exclusion criteria plays a fundamental role in the management of the club. In contrast with other forms of clubs (such as Health clubs), membership criteria of knowledge clubs are not enforced strictly but stem from widespread conventions: it "happens quite naturally (i.e. culturally) in scholarly knowledge clubs by simple cost of access in time and language." As there are no formal process of adhesion, knowledge club can be joined by non-reliable members, so long as they are willing to devote the necessary time to demonstrate they adhere to common cultural values and customs: "Hostile pranks, such as the Sokal hoax/fraud, demonstrate that clubs may be hoodwinked by outsiders who apparently 'speak their language' but are in fact using it to challenge their knowledge."
The concept of knowledge club has highlighted the continuities between scientific publications and other form of restrictive associations. Journals are strongly embedded in wider institutional networks and communities and cannot be dissociated from it: "More specialized journals appeared in the 18th and 19th centuries, most of which were published by learned societies. Only at the end of the 19th century did university presses gain importance as publishers of scholarly journals". While in their daily management knowledge clubs are not strictly separated from other economic actors, the interests of the community takes precedence over any other economic incentive: "we see a journal as a club in which access to these services is internalised as a membership benefit. While the services might still be outsourced, in practice it can be seen that such a shift potentially has substantial political and economic consequences as to how we see the relations among players." As adhesion to the club is not exclusionary, researchers are usually part of a complex network of clubs: "Membership of an academic institution with the relevant benefits, including access to subscription content, is another parallel club (...) Further work will be needed to define those situations which are better analysed as complex clubs, with differential membership contributions, and those situations where multiple clubs are interacting."