The Scholarly Kitchen – Angela Cochran: “Last week, David Crotty wrote about “Market Consolidation and the Demise of the Independently Publishing Research Society” in which he described the quickly converging landscape of society publishers. These societies are not merging together, per se, but rather merging with a very small group of commercial publishers. David argues that these partnerships have accelerated in the last few years over pressures felt by society publishers to comply with complicated requirements of Plan S and other funder policies. This was well predicted and really astounding given the underwhelming number of signatories to Plan S. Since Plan S was announced, there were predictions that it would embolden and make larger the biggest of commercial publishers. Whether this was a feature or a bug is still being debated…I have written before about the implications to a society publisher when your vendors are all owned by commercial publishers. But what happens to the industry in general when choices are slim and getting slimmer, particularly when this comes to platforms and peer review systems — all huge expenses for society and small publishers. One likely response is that innovation will suffer. In today’s landscape, would HighWire ever have been born? HighWire (now owned by MPS) was built in response to society publishers needing an online home for their journals. Unencumbered by the needs of a Wiley or an Elsevier, HighWire was an early partner with Google and had tight relationships with the library community. HighWire was exactly why many society publishers could stay independent during the tumultuous move to online journals…”