End-to-End

End-to-End

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The worst-kept secret in the industry finally became public this week as Silverchair announced it will acquire ScholarOne from Clarivate. The deal, for an undisclosed price, includes both ScholarOne Manuscripts and ScholarOne Conferences. 

The deal makes great sense for both parties in our view. For Clarivate, this frees up capital to reinvest in core business lines. It also provides an exit for the company from publisher workflow products, a business line that (as Roger Schonfeld discusses) is both small (relative to the university market) and creates conflicts for Clarivate. The deal also gets Clarivate out of making substantive investments in the manuscript submission and review platform.

For Silverchair, the acquisition offers some structural efficiencies, combining functions such as marketing, sales, human resources, finance, cloud services contacts, tech-ops, and so on. Both companies are located in Charlottesville, Virginia, so combining office space is also presumably an opportunity for savings. This in and of itself might provide sufficient rationale (combining companies and taking out costs through scale efficiencies is a tried-and-true approach) for the acquisition, but there is considerably more opportunity than just cost savings for Silverchair in the combination.

By joining manuscript submission and platform hosting, Silverchair will be positioned for an “end-to-end” publishing future. Today, manuscripts exit a submission and review system and then travel into publisher or vendor systems where copyediting and production happen – functions that are becoming largely automated. A world where a manuscript is submitted via ScholarOne and published on the Silverchair platform without ever leaving Silverchair’s systems could be on the horizon. By controlling both the entry and exit points in that workflow, Silverchair insulates itself from disintermediation.

The biggest opportunity, however, is in new products and services. By moving “upstream” in the research workflow, Silverchair is in a better position to offer products and services related to research integrity, reviewer finding, payment (article processing charge; APC) and author services (among many other possibilities). As publishers pursue open access (OA) models and focus on author experience, Silverchair will be better positioned to add value.

ScholarOne clients are likely to be pleased with the result of the disposition; had it landed with a competitive publisher, there may have been some concern. Silverchair continues the publisher-independent ownership structure.

All that said, Silverchair has its work cut out for it. ScholarOne is by far the largest acquisition in the company’s history. Merging the two companies will be a significant management effort by itself. Harmonizing technologies is another daunting task, and likely one that is only partially feasible in the short term given the disparate platform code bases. And then there is the challenge of modernizing ScholarOne, which has not kept pace with the needs of customers and evolving use cases, particularly related to integrations (see our recent thoughts on this topic, “Peer Review Systems Could Benefit from Systems Thinking”).

Springer Nature IPOs!

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At long last, Springer Nature is a public company. After two abandoned efforts, the company debuted on the Frankfurt stock exchange on October 4. As of this writing, the stock was trading at just under EUR 24 a share, giving the company a market cap of EUR 4.78 billion.  

How does this compare with other scholarly and professional publishers? We pulled some public data from Yahoo Finance and assembled the following table organized by market cap normalized to US dollars using the exchange rates from Monday, October 28 (included in the table). Many commentators lump together the publishers in the table as the “Big Five,” although sometimes other publishers are included under that heading instead, often without a clear rationale. Here we include the largest public companies, as measured by both market cap and revenue, operating in the scholarly and professional publishing industry as primary publishers.

It is important to note that this is not an apples-to-apples comparison. These numbers include all business lines at each company, which in some cases include substantial business activities unrelated to scholarly and professional publishing. At RELX, for example, this includes not just Elsevier but its meetings and risk business lines. Informa also includes a substantial meetings business as well as its “markets” business lines. It would take some work to tease apart scholarly and professional publishing revenues (an analysis we will save for another day). However, the table is still illustrative.

The first thing to say (and while this is obvious it is not adequately captured in many industry analyses) is how much larger (by market cap) Elsevier (RELX) is than everyone else. To put things in perspective, with a market cap of nearly US $88 billion, Elsevier could theoretically acquire Wiley in an all-stock deal and only take a 3% dilution (meaning that it would use just 3% of its stock for the deal). When people talk about the “Big Five” (assuming they are talking about the five largest publishers by revenue or market cap), there is an implicit assumption they are all around the same size (i.e., “big”). But this is not the case – Elsevier’s market cap is huge compared with the others.

Our second observation (again, glaringly obvious – these are all public numbers) is that Wolters Kluwer is the second largest publisher by both revenues and market cap. Wolters Kluwer is often not even mentioned in lists of the “Big Five,” and yet it is definitively second (the third, Informa, is not even close). The reason that Wolters Kluwer is often overlooked is that it has a relatively small (albeit distinguished) journals and books publishing program. Its other activities, while nearly all “professional publishing” as broadly conceived (legal, tax and accounting, finance), are not “scholarly” and many industry conversations therefore don’t reflect how substantial it is as a company.

Our third observation, bringing things back to Springer Nature’s IPO, is that Springer Nature’s market cap is substantially larger than that of Wiley, despite having roughly comparable revenues. Springer Nature is valued at $5.2 billion and reported just over $2 billion in revenues for 2023 (per reporting in the Financial Times). Yet Wiley, which reported comparable revenues ($1.83 billion) for the same period, has a market cap of only $2.7 billion. This is notable as both companies are the closest thing on this list to pure-play publishers. Wiley publishes a lot more than scholarly content and has some other business lines (e.g., publishing services, career solutions, professional development) but it is very much centered in traditional publishing; Springer Nature even more so.

A lot of things are factored into stock prices beyond revenues including (but not limited to) consideration of growth rates, profit, debt, dividends, company assets (including brands), and, of course, forward-looking guidance and expectations. We are not equity analysts (and were not privy to Springer Nature’s pre-IPO “book” for investors) so defer to others on why Springer Nature might be valued so much more than Wiley. However, we note that, by at least this yardstick (“here is another company in our industry that makes around the same revenue and does very similar things”), the IPO went well. This is not investment advice!

On Hold

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As noted above, the divestiture of ScholarOne removes a point of conflict for Clarivate, owners of the Web of Science (WoS) and the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). ScholarOne is sold to publishers and many of those same publishers are indexed by the WoS and issued a JIF via the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). If Clarivate believes there are research integrity issues with a given publisher, and that publisher is also a customer of ScholarOne, there is a conflict. Presumably the publisher could still be a customer of the WoS or the JCR, so not all conflicts have been eliminated.

Such research integrity issues seem to be more prevalent recently, with the delisting of 19 Hindawi journals being perhaps the most notable (and consequential) examples. Clarivate increasingly sees the protection of the integrity of the scholarly record (or at least the record as indexed by the WoS) as a priority. A particular focus now appears to be megajournals.

As reported last month, two of the three largest journals in the market, Cureus and Heliyon, have officially been placed “on hold” by Clarivate, with indexing paused as unspecified investigations are performed. No information has been provided as to what is being investigated, but presumably, the rapid growth at such a scale seen by both journals (Heliyon’s publication volume increased by 180% last year and is on pace to grow by 76% this year, while Cureus grew by 47% in 2022–2023 and is projected to add 38% this year) is likely to have raised cautionary flags. These investigations follow in the wake of delisting MDPI’s International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, which was the second largest journal in the world back in 2022 before it was delisted by Clarivate.

Scientific Reports, the world’s largest journal, is not, as far as we know, currently under investigation at Clarivate, but this month concerns were raised about its content, from both a group of concerned research fraud experts and a columnist at Science. Further questions were raised in an article in Nature that looked at data from the Scitility tool, which ranks papers for risk based on their authors’ publication records and whether any previously retracted papers are cited. Although the figures in Nature are incredibly poorly designed and difficult to parse, Scientific Reports is shown as the journal with the most “high risk” articles. This assessment of risk may be a bit unfair, however, as the 450 or so concerning articles amount to only 0.22% of the journal’s output over the period studied; other journals, such as Elsevier’s Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy have nearly five times as many articles per capita with red flags. Scientific Reports looks worse because it is bigger, not because it is performing worse on a per-article basis. Still, being the biggest polluter of the literature, even if at a lower rate, is a problem that must be reckoned with.

Elsewhere, eLife announced that they too have recently been informed that Clarivate has paused indexing of the journal’s versions of record. Although the root cause for concern is the same as seen for other journals (potential pollution of the scholarly record with inaccurate information), the circumstances around eLife’s potential delisting are quite different from the research integrity concerns at megajournals (eLife is multidisciplinary but not “mega”).

eLife famously declared itself no longer a journal and instead a “service that reviews preprints” as of 2022. Because eLife publishes the version of record of all articles it sends out for review, regardless of whether the manuscript is found to be unacceptable and inaccurate, the process of evaluation of the material is largely separated from its dissemination. Because eLife is essentially publishing rejected articles that its editors know to be problematic, it should not be surprising that Clarivate has chosen to reevaluate whether this no-longer-a-journal is appropriate for inclusion in its index of journals.

This leaves many prominent journals in difficult situations. Delisting from the WoS and having no JIF at all can be a death sentence for a journal. For the megajournals, keeping in Clarivate’s good graces may run contrary to the faster/cheaper model associated with some titles. We at The Brief have heard anecdotally from a client that their megajournal has vastly higher per-article research integrity monitoring costs than their more selective, hybrid titles. The “sound science” publication approach brings with it a lot of questionable submissions needing more evaluation, whereas the more selective titles just desk-reject anything with even a whiff of a problem. The efforts and costs of safeguarding the literature from fraud may make the lower APCs of the megajournal unsustainable.

For eLife, one might think that delisting from the WoS will be welcomed, given the journal’s long-running ideological anti-JIF stance. But there is clearly some recognition that, whether they like it or not, having a JIF is probably essential to the success of eLife’s ongoing experimentation seeking to change the nature of research communication.

We will be watching the ruling on eLife – as well as on Cureus and Heliyon – closely.

Plan S: Epilogue

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A study commissioned by cOAlition S looks at the impact Plan S has had on the world of scholarly communication. There is perhaps something telling in the study’s title: “Galvanising the Open Access Community,” although it is unclear what is meant by “the Open Access Community” and how that differs from the research community at large. This delineation, however, fits well with one of the report’s main conclusions, “that researchers are largely unaware of this initiative and a sense that Plan S is too top-down.”
 
While we at The Brief have no doubt that Plan S was a driving force in shifting business models further toward OA (particularly via transformative agreements), the fact that the other key conclusion of the report – that “the most statistically significant effect of Plan S seems to have been the increase in the rates of Hybrid OA” (and the concurrent increase in market consolidation) – suggests that cOAlition S misfired on achieving its goal of restructuring the scholarly publishing industry. Indeed, the biggest beneficiaries of Plan S appear to be BCG Partners (the private equity firm that owned 48% of Springer Nature prior to the IPO) and the shareholders of Elsevier.
 
Policy is a blunt instrument, and very often goal-focused rather than process-focused. It is not surprising that a top-down approach that largely sidelined many stakeholders in the community led to unintended, but entirely expected and publicly predicted, consequences. The key lesson here, as stated in the report, is that any functional effort to exert change “will require the collaboration of all actors involved in this ecosystem.”

Wiley: The Conversations

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Wiley recently launched a new video series called The Conversations. Two aspects make this initiative particularly noteworthy. First, its exceptional production quality mirrors that of a professional television talk show. Second, it represents a notable example of branded entertainment in the academic publishing industry.
 
Branded entertainment represents content created by companies that prioritize audience engagement and entertainment and/or educational value over direct product promotion. Rather than overtly advertising products or services, this approach builds brand awareness and goodwill by delivering valuable content that audiences actively choose to watch. This strategy aims to create positive brand associations while maintaining an authentic entertainment experience.
 
If you’ve seen the LEGO or Barbie movies, you’ve experienced some of the most ambitious examples of branded entertainment. But this approach is rapidly expanding across diverse industries, from journal-sponsored podcasts to more ambitious productions. Healthcare provider Northwell Health launched its own production studio to create original content. US dairy farmers, processors, and importers have backed “Dairy Diaries,” a new educational comedy series streaming on Roku featuring Vanessa Bayer. In a notable B2B example, digital transformation consultancy Publicis Sapient partnered with Academy Award-winning director Ben Proudfoot to launch Impact Films, creating documentary content. And now, Wiley joins this trend with The Conversations.
 
That said, while we have enjoyed the conversations so far on The Conversations, it seems like Wiley has missed an opportunity to launch the series on the right trajectory by interviewing the team here at The Brief. We will assume they are just making sure they get all the wrinkles ironed out before issuing our invitation.

Briefly Noted

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Accucoms’ owner has sold the company for the second time (a great feature in a business, we must say!). As readers of The Brief may recall, the first time Accucoms sold itself was to Swets back in 2011. Swets subsequently went bankrupt, and Accucoms’ original founder and CEO, Pinar Erzin, purchased it out of bankruptcy court. This time, Erzin has sold the company to Knowlegeworks Global LTD (KGL). This is a good fit for KGL, given it has a growing portfolio of publisher services. KGL can sell institutional sales representation to many of the same publishers to which they sell editorial or production services. For existing customers of Accucoms, KGL represents a neutral acquirer – another services company that offers the same service, for now. KGL is likely to keep the service largely intact as opposed to rolling into an existing service offering (as another agent or a publisher might have done). This is particularly good news for customers of Accucoms, as there are surprisingly few other options available in the market for sales representation outside of niche agents in specific regions.

Last month’s issue of The Brief looked at some of the cracks in the Subscribe to Open (S2O) business model – namely, that it is not always the best solution for a flip to OA. It is also worth considering the programs where the S2O model continues to be used successfully. The Biochemical Society announced, for example, that all its journals will successfully transform to OA in 2025 via the S2O model. Particularly interesting are the experiments in which S2O is being tested in bulk, such as at De Gruyter (nearly 60 journals in 2025) and BioOne (71 journals from 54 member organizations). Like every other OA business model, we expect S2O to see varying traction in different fields of research, different types of journals, and in different geographies.

The tragic death of a young MDPI employee has brought to light significant concerns about the working conditions imposed on employees by the publisher. The circumstances of the employee’s death are disputed and still under investigation, but a Retraction Watch article brings to light several practices favoring publishing in quantity over research integrity, already a growing problem for the organization. According to Retraction Watch’s source, MDPI employees are subject to a points system toward receiving a monthly bonus. Staffers receive twice as much credit for accepting an article than for rejecting one. Further, editors are given a target of sending out 40–50 invitations to potential guest editors for special issues every week. With publication volume already in decline, this further view into MDPI’s editorial practices is likely to further damage its journals’ flagging reputations.

PLOS has announced an ambitious effort to redefine publishing. While PLOS is asking the right questions here, the surfaced problems have been prevalent in the open science conversation for decades, and it is unclear what progress can be achieved in the project’s planned 18-month timeline. Still, anything coming from PLOS, which has been a major driver of significant shifts in scholarly publishing, is worthy of attention.

EMarketer reported (and the Wall Street Journal cited) that Google’s market share of search advertising is expected to drop below 50% by 2025. This has led many to mistakenly believe that Google’s share of search traffic has also fallen to 50%. However, traditional methods of measuring search traffic, such as SimilarWeb, still show Google’s search traffic share at over 90%. But this is misleading too. The key issue is that a significant portion of search activity has shifted to closed ecosystems – including retailers (e.g., Amazon, Walmart, Instacart), entertainment platforms (e.g., Spotify, Hulu), and social media (e.g., Meta and TikTok) – where it’s difficult to accurately track total search share. As a result, marketers and advertisers have increasingly turned to search ad revenue share as a proxy for understanding trends in the overall search market. These trends indicate that Google is losing ad share to these closed ecosystem players, but it is unclear how that correlates with total search share. With large language models (LLMs) likely to claim a larger share of searches – and many of these systems also functioning as closed ecosystems – tracking search share will become even more complex. It seems safe to assume that Google is losing more share than traditional tracking methods reveal, and that’s before factoring in the potential impact of the ongoing antitrust lawsuit.

The Association of College and Research Libraries released their annual “The State of U.S. Academic Libraries” survey report. Key findings include that, adjusted for inflation, library expenditures in 2023 increased slightly from 2022, but remained below pre-pandemic levels, and that 34.9% of total library expenditures are devoted to “ongoing commitments to subscriptions” for digital materials.

The American Dental Association (ADA) announced the creation of ADA Corporate Ventures, meant to help the organization create new partnerships and new companies to pursue commercial applications of oral health research. While serving the ADA’s mission of accelerating the development of patient care solutions, the new infrastructure also provides an interesting route for research societies to consider diversifying their revenue sources.

Cambridge University Press has reached out to more than 20,000 of their authors asking for explicit permission for inclusion in licensing content for AI training deals. While good for author (and public) relations, these efforts come with a cost, and likely delay any potential deal-making in a market that may be short lived. Managing Director Mandy Hill states that only a small minority of authors have declined to have their content included. Meanwhile X (the former Twitter) is taking the opposite approach, and opting in all users by default for AI training purposes. For those following AI licensing in the scholarly sphere, Ithaka S+R has launched a Generative AI Licensing Agreement Tracker website.

Oxford University Press marked Open Access Week by announcing that its journals program would see more than 50% of articles published OA in 2024.

Things aren’t quite so rosy at the University of Cincinnati, which announced the closing of its university press as of June 30, 2025. Founded in 2017, the University of Cincinnati Press published over 40 books and seven academic journals but was declared to be financially unsustainable for the institution.

Rather than launching an AI-focused journal (as did the NEJM Group with NEJM AI), JAMA is taking a different approach, building an AI-focused hub for content from all of its journals. The fact that this launch was covered in The Washington Post should be indicative of the impact AI is expected to have on clinical care.

A study published in Scientometrics suggests that poor investment in search engine optimization (SEO) limits the visibility of research deposited in institutional repositories.

The Internet Archive is under an ongoing attack from hackers and has suffered a major data breach, exposing information on 31 million users. Despite efforts to correct the security problems, hackers appear to still have access to the site’s inner workings.

A new preprint from researchers at Apple clearly shows what should be obvious by now: LLMs (large language models) such as ChatGPT are predictive pattern matching machines, incapable of doing actual logical reasoning. By changing the names or numbers used in math word problems fed into the LLMs, answers varied, even though the underlying logic needed to solve the problem did not change. Even worse, when the researchers added in “seemingly relevant but ultimately inconsequential statements to their prompts” (e.g., a question about how many kiwi fruits a person picked on a number of days was changed to include details about a number of the fruits picked being smaller than average), the LLMs experienced “catastrophic performance drops.” The “illusion of understanding” created by the mimicry of current AI systems remains fragile.

In personnel news, Optica has named Elizabeth Nolan its new CEO, and Vikram Savkar, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Compliance Solutions at Wolters Kluwer, announced he is leaving the company for an unnamed position.

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It’s not in our remit to tell the publishers what to do. – Johan Rooryck, Executive Director of cOAlition S