B - Scholarly publishing like a bubble

Bariç H, Baždariç K, Glasnoviç A, et al. Why scholarly publishing might be a bubble. Croatian Medical Journal 2017;58(1):1-3
(doi: 10.3325/cmj.2017.58.1)

Scholarly publishing is expanding in all directions, like a bubble. The economy of publishing has many peculiarities: the number of publications, journals, and publishers is constantly on the rise; journals subscription prices have been growing faster than the consumer price index and the inflation rate. The major publishers act as an oligopoly and, occasionally, even monopoly. The number of publications and rising prices are the main but not the only problem. There is also high number of publishers, journals, journals per publisher, predatory journals, authorships per article and per unique author, number of references per paper, self-citated and self-citing rates, and so on. A plausible hypothesis is that the expansion is driven by a market bubble.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5346893/

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