The Market Power of Global Scientific Publishing Companies in the Age of Globalization. An Analysis Based on the OCLC Worldcat

Abstract

This article evaluates tendencies and trends of the global academic publishing industry, vital for any reasonable long-term publication strategy planning in research. Such analyses are made possible today by the OCLC Worldcat. Our multivariate attempt, combining Worldcat global library circulation figures of publisher companies with results from earlier publisher ranking studies, is based on factor analysis of 32 variables, and our promax factor analytical model establishes that there are eight factors of global publisher impact, explaining almost 86% of total variance: 1. overall global standing of the company 2. company as a factor on the market 3. company impact on the global political and economic debate 4. successfully distributing best-sellers 5. impact on the scholarly community 6. successfully distributing production to more than 50 global Worldcat libraries 7. output during the last 5 years 8. outstanding academic quality Of the 51 companies with complete data under investigation here, the following companies are classified in the upper half: Oxford University Press; Springer; Cambridge University Press; Routledge; World Bank; Princeton University Press; Elsevier; CRC Press; University of Chicago Press; University of California Press; Palgrave Macmillan; MIT Press; Yale University Press; University of North Carolina Press; De Gruyter; Wiley-Blackwell; Kluwer Academic Publishers; University of Pennsylvania Press; Johns Hopkins University Press; Brill; Nova Science Publishers; University of Illinois Press; Duke University Press; University of Washington Press; and Edward Elgar. Scientists, wanting to get global audiences, are well advised to publish with those companies; and journal editors, wanting to get a global distribution for their journals, are equally well advised to cooperate with them.