Contents
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From the 2020 UPDATE report —
The Effect of the Failed Cengage/McGraw-Hill Education Merger
The decision to abandon their merger because of the divestitures required by the Department of Justice (DOJ) has left the companies with a more complicated future.
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From the 2020 UPDATE report —
Update to The Landscape Analysis
The uncertainty surrounding COVID-19’s impact on research funding may well affect open access publishing specifically.
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The Dutch Consortia/Elsevier Contract: The Real Risks
This agreement raises significant issues both in terms of some of the novel problems it poses. We hope that institutions exercise caution before entering similar deals.
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From the ROADMAP FOR ACTION report —
Risk Mitigation: Conduct A Data Inventory
A common-sense response to the increasing volumes of data collected across campuses and the rising deployment of data analytics tools.
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Potential Institutional Responses to Elsevier’s Acquisition of Interfolio
As the pace of market concentration continues to accelerate across the research enterprise, the academic community will be best served by adopting a proactive approach that considers, in advance, the potential for future consolidation and begins to build the case for regulatory intervention before the next merger or acquisition is announced.
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Possible Negative Impacts From Elsevier’s Increased Market Power
Possible negative effects from this acquisition could include less consumer choice, higher prices, and decreased product quality across the markets in which Interfolio and Elsevier operate.
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Elsevier’s Dominance in the FIS Market Could Threaten Competition in Related Markets
Elsevier is poised to leverage its leading position in the FIS market in ways that could extend its power in the academic publishing and research analytics markets.
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The Interfolio Acquisition Highly Concentrates the Nascent Market for Faculty Information Systems
Elsevier's acquisition of Interfolio puts the FIS market on the brink of a key regulatory threshold.
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Executive Summary
Elsevier recently completed its planned acquisition of Interfolio, the leader in a rapidly emerging category of products known as Faculty Information Systems (FIS). This deal exemplifies many of the worrying trends described in SPARC’s ongoing market analyses over the past four years.
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Working Paper: SPARC Principles for using Data Analytics and AI tools
The use of AI in academia is rising. We have identified principles for it's use by third parties and internally, and concrete steps to implement them.
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Appendix: The Industry Response
Most of the leading publishers strengthened their digital and data analytics offerings in 2019, and have continued to do so into 2020.
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Appendix: Courseware
Can digital revenues return the courseware business to growth or will they be insufficient to compensate the accelerated decline of print revenues?
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Appendix: Scholarly Journals
The scholarly journals business is still on a path to raising its profitability, but pricing pressures will intensify and we see substantial stagnation of subscription revenues.
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Appendix: Intro
Underlying market trends highlighted in 2019 continue unabated.
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A Time for Radical Change
Use this opportunity not just to reopen the current academic system but also to make substantive progress toward building a more equitable and open one.
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Update to the Roadmap for Action
Acting in conditions of high uncertainty is particularly difficult. These are actions that libraries, in particular, and academic institutions, in general, could take regardless of the current situation.
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Emerging Concerns: The Bigger Deal
Novel agreements like the Elsevier/Dutch Institution deal are highly problematic and concerning. Institutions and consortia should consider and robustly debate the ramifications of these decisions, before pursuing what may prove to be partial and short-lived benefits.
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Emerging Concerns: From Individual to Communal Research Distribution
The recently released GetFTR has several concerning disadvantages, both operational and strategic, for academic institutions and, in particular, for academic libraries.
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Emerging Concerns: A Shift from Research Publishing to Research Assessment
We're concerned by new initiatives with inherent conflicts of interest between assessing and evaluating research, on the one hand, and disseminating it, on the other.
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Three Subtle Trends Present Emerging Concerns: Intro
1. Aggressive expansion of scholarly publishers into research assessment 2. Publishers pooling research dissemination through collective distribution channels 3. Attempted bundling of data analytics tools with publishing tools into "bigger deals."
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The Effect of the Failed Cengage/McGraw-Hill Education Merger
The decision to abandon their merger because of the divestitures required by the Department of Justice (DOJ) has left the companies with a more complicated future.
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Publicly Listed Companies
The companies that are fully or partially owned by private equity (PE) companies (Springer Nature Group, McGraw-Hill Education and Cengage), all have significant debt.
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Update to The Landscape Analysis
The uncertainty surrounding COVID-19’s impact on research funding may well affect open access publishing specifically.
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Background
What does the landscape, and path to action, look like one year after our initial analysis?
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Executive Summary
In the year since our initial analysis major companies have shifted away from research publishing and towards research assessment; from individual research distribution to consolidated models and the emergence of a “Bigger Deal,” where institutional content licensing is directly linked to the purchase of data analytics services.
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The Dutch Consortia/Elsevier Contract: The Real Risks
This agreement raises significant issues both in terms of some of the novel problems it poses. We hope that institutions exercise caution before entering similar deals.
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In pursuit of open science open access is not enough
The healthy functioning of the academic community, including fair terms and conditions from commercial partners, requires that the global marketplace for data analytics and knowledge infrastructure be kept open to real competition.
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Cengage Mcgraw-hill Merger Called Off
Textbook publishing giants Cengage and McGraw-Hill have called off their planned merger amid widespread opposition and antitrust concerns.
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Q&A: Cengage/McGraw-Hill Merger, One Year and Counting
It's been a year since publishing giants Cengage and McGraw-Hill announced plans to merge. After facing mounting opposition, the merger is still pending regulatory approval. We provide an update on where things stand and what it means for higher education.
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Leaked Dutch Contract with Elsevier Raises Significant Alarm Bells
Elsevier is discussing a contract to provide Dutch universities with access to its journals at no extra cost. Institutions and consortia should pause to consider and robustly debate all the ramifications of these decisions, before pursuing what may prove apparent and short-lived benefits.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge that the development of this publication was generously supported by grants from the Open Society Foundations and Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
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Conclusion
The time to act is now.
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Community Actions: Realign Stakeholder Relationships
These community-based actions portend several possible realignments within the academic community and its stakeholder groups that should also be considered as efforts move forward.
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Community Actions: Leverage Policy to Support Community Control
Another avenue to expand community’s control over data infrastructure is to advocate for favorable federal and state policies.
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Community Actions: Establish Inclusive Governance Structures
It is vital for the governing bodies of infrastructure services to include representation from the communities they serve in order to ensure that management stays accountable to the community’s evolving needs.
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Community Actions: Build or Acquire Academic Community-Controlled Infrastructure
The most direct path to ensure community control over data infrastructure is to build or acquire it.
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Community Actions: Collectively Implement Strategic Practices
Broad adoption of common terms and conditions will have a market effect that favors products and services that are in the best interests of the academic community. This includes advantaging Open Source software over “black-box” algorithms and leveling the playing field for community-owned tools to compete with commercial options whenever available.
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Community Actions: Intro
A third category of actions for the community to consider focus on leveraging a strength in numbers approach, and targeting “big picture” actions institutions to regain and maintain control of their data infrastructure. This category includes a broad range of possible structural solutions to foster an open, competitive landscape for data and data analytics that is aligned with the interests of academic institutions and the communities they serve.
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Strategic Choices: IP Exploitation vs. Knowledge Sharing
The emergence of "big data" and text and data mining has opened up new possibilities for research universities to exploit their IP in profitable ways.
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Strategic Choices: Quantitative vs. Qualitative Metrics
While institutions may not be ready to abandon the usage of quantitative metrics to evaluate their faculty, they should consider engaging in a genuine debate on the relative weight that they place on quantitative vs. qualitative assessment.
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Strategic Choices: Algorithms vs. Humans
It is only a matter of time before artificial intelligence further pervades campus decision-making in ways that impact equity, privacy, and allocation of resources.
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Strategic Choices: Intro
The second category of actions is more complex, since it relates to decisions that will need to be made specifically based on each individual institution’s mission, culture and values. It also involves the establishment of an explicit process to determine the position that each institution wants to take in regards to specific issues posed by the collection of data and the deployment of data analytics tools.
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Risk Mitigation: Engage in Open Procurement Practices
An important area when institutions can assert control of data is through purchasing and procurement processes. These processes should be revisited and revised to ensure that they are transparent, competitive, and fully coordinated across the institution.
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Risk Mitigation: Revise Privacy Policies
The development of strong privacy policies is critical, and must extend beyond legal compliance.
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Risk Mitigation: Revise Data Policies
It is critical for data policies to be revised to address the myriad strategic questions raised by the proliferation of data and data analytics.
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Risk Mitigation: Establish Campus Coordination Mechanisms
Coordination mechanisms to adjudicate conflicts among departments and offices will become key as increasing volumes of data are collected across campuses and data analytics tools are deployed.
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Risk Mitigation: Conduct A Data Inventory
A common-sense response to the increasing volumes of data collected across campuses and the rising deployment of data analytics tools.
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Risk Mitigation: Intro
These actions are designed to be concrete, practical steps that any institution can begin taking immediately.
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Three Categories Of Action
The purpose of this document is to build on the Landscape Analysis by offering a roadmap of potential actions that stakeholders can use to chart both individual and collective responses.
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What Do We Mean By Data And Data Infrastructure
We talk about two types of data. The first is Research Data, which refers to the data academic institutions generate through their research activities. The second is Grey Data, which refers to the vast amount of data produced by universities outside of core research activities.
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Background
Until now, commercial publishers were – at worst – seen by institutions as an annoyance for selected communities within academia. Their move into the core research and teaching missions of colleges and universities, with tools aimed at evaluating productivity and performance, means that the academic community could lose control over vast areas of its core activities.
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Executive Summary
Academic publishing is undergoing a major transition as some of its leaders are moving from a content-provision to a data analytics business. This shift is still in its early days. There are actions and strategies that institutions can consider adopting, both individually and collectively, to mitigate the potential risks posed by this trend, and to leverage potential benefits.
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SPARC Urges Department of Justice to Block Merger Between Cengage and McGraw-Hill
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) submitted a detailed filing to the U.S. Department of Justice urging federal antitrust enforcers to block the proposed merger between college textbook publishing giants Cengage and McGraw-Hill Education. The merger would create the largest publisher of college course materials in the United States and the world’s second largest education publisher overall.
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Q&A: Cengage/McGraw-Hill Merger
As opposition mounts to the merger between two of the largest textbook publishers, SPARC has answers to common questions and an update on what we're doing to stop it.
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About the Report
Commissioned in response to the growing trend of commercial acquisition of critical infrastructure in our institutions this report provides a comprehensive look at the current players in this arena, their strategies and potential actions, and the implications of these on the operations of our libraries and home institutions.
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Preliminary Recommendations
Actively formulating and implementing solutions to these problems is complex but critically important, and something SPARC intends to work closely with the community on. It is worthwhile to recap of some of the options for action.
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Education Companies: The Products
Anecdotal evidence suggests that these systems built and maintained by publishers capture massive amounts of data about student and faculty behavior that go beyond what is necessary for accomplishing their core objectives (i.e. improving student outcomes). Institutions, faculty and students should think about the accumulation and use of data collected and retained by schools and commercial vendors.
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Education Companies: Other Publishers
Estimating market share among publishers has been difficult. However, there are other, smaller publishers in the Courseware business.
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Education Companies: Cengage
Cengage is a pioneer in inclusive access and Cengage Unlimited, its full catalog subscription, was the first full offering of this kind. Cengage was also the first major publisher to offer a product branded as open educational resources (OER), although the content is still purchased by students enrolled in a course.
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Education Companies: McGraw-Hill Education
McGraw-Hill is owned by Apollo, a private equity company. Apollo has hoped for a long time to IPO the business to exit the investment. The company exited the assessment business in 2015, effectively going in the opposite direction of Pearson.
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Education Companies: Pearson
Pearson is the only leading textbook publisher that is publicly listed. The company aims at education sectors that it expects to transition to full digital delivery, positioning itself to add data analytics products on top of content.
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Education Companies: Background
The continued decline of the higher education courseware business in the U.S. is driven by the interplay of three factors; student enrollment, pricing, and participation rates.
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Research Companies: The Products
Compiling a map of all the products and services that the three leading research data analytics vendors (Clarivate, Digital Science, Elsevier) market outside libraries is inherently a best effort exercise.
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Research Companies: Other publishers
We view any publisher below the size of Wiley as unlikely to have the financial resources to mount a major challenge to the research data analytics businesses of Elsevier and Clarivate.
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Research Companies: Clarivate
Clarivate is the name the new private equity owners gave to the assets previously owned by Thomson Reuters. The company’s strategy is to be a neutral data analytics supplier to researchers and librarians.
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Research Companies: Wiley
Wiley is the smaller of the three main journal publishers. It publishes about 2,300 journals, so – in terms of titles – it is very close in size to Elsevier.
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Research Companies: Springer Nature
Springer’s reluctance to enter the data analytics business may be driven by the $3.47 billion debt. The board and management team of are now in a tight spot.
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Research Companies: Elsevier
We see three major threats to Elsevier’s performance going forward.
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Research Companies: Background
The paradox of the STM publishing industry is that because of multi-year contracts there is very high visibility over its revenues for the next two to three years, but very little beyond this time frame.
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The Academic Publishing Industry In 2018
Elsevier, Pearson, and Cengage in particular are transforming themselves into data analytics companies built atop their content, effectively adding ways to monetize it.
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Executive Summary
Academic publishing is undergoing a major transition. Some of its leaders are moving from a content-provision to a data analytics business. This shift is still in its early days. There are actions and strategies that institutions can consider adopting to limit the potential harms, and leverage potential benefits.
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About SPARC
