The just-released U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) report on OA financing is definitely interesting—it’s far more in-depth in its scope than the last year’s Nelson Memo. References to cOAlition S, diamond OA, subscribe-to-open, and other funding-landscape arcana, for example, litter the new report. And the report’s authors, among many other things, tried to estimate how much US taxpayers are forking over for APCs. Their guess is $375 million a year in 2021, a $100 million increase over five years.
Another fascinating (if unsurprising) detail on publisher concentration:
In the U.S., five publishers — Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, the American Chemical Society (ACS), and Oxford University Press (OUP) — account for 51.4 percent of the volume of federally funded publications from 2016 to 2021, according to data retrieved from Clarivate’s Web of Science. Similarly, five publishers — Elsevier, Spring [sic] Nature, Wiley, OUP, and MDPI — account for 51.4 percent of the volume of openly accessible federally funded articles from 2016 to 2021.
The report, for all its taxonomic detail, is a disappointment. That’s because the bottom-line conclusions haven’t changed: the report endorses the same non-committal APC-friendly stance as the Nelson Memo. This despite earnest paragraphs on “inequities in publishing” and due mention of the author-excluding implication of APCs.