Economics of scholarly publication - number of journals over time

We have seen that most for-profit journals are substantially more expensive per page than are their non-profit competitors. Over the past decades, both the absolute number of for-profit journals published, and the relative contribution of these journals to the whole of the ecology literature, has increased dramatically.

[ Number of ecology journals, by year and publisher type ]

This figure suggests that while the volume of the ecology literature being published has increased at ever-accelerating rates, the non-profit literature has experienced only moderate increases. Thus not only have subscription prices soared over the past two decades, but also library collections have become increasingly weighted toward more-expensive for-profit journals.

Why has this happened? We will address this question in a later section. First, however, we will compare the trends observed in ecology to those observed in several other fields.

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