This month we present the first part of some results of big data analysis of the scholarly publishing industry. We look at the latest data sources to tease out information about numbers of publishers and consolidation of the industry.
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How many publishers are there?
The data suggest that in total there were a little over 16,780 publishers in operation between 2000 and 2021, publishing around 121,700 journals. The numbers have grown over the years. There are just under 10x the number of publishers now than in 2000, compared with 4.4x the number of journals (and around 4.1x the number of articles).
With so many publishers in operation, the market has interesting dynamics, as shown below.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
