The past 20 years have brought substantial consolidation to our sector. Each of today’s major scholarly publishers is the product of progressive acquisitions. And, the past decade has seen a drumbeat of acquisitions in the platforms that support scholarship and scholarly communication — from Elsevier’s acquisitions of SSRN, bepress, Mendeley, Pure and Aries to the announcement this year that Clarivate will acquire ProQuest. Not surprisingly, there has been frequent, at times reflexive, customer opposition to acquisitions in these sectors, motivated by concerns about pricing.
Here are a few powerful examples. Despite these objections, we expect there to be further announcements of mergers, acquisitions, strategic alliances and other forms of consolidation in the days and years ahead. Which raises an important question: While consolidation is certainly in the interest of the consolidators, are there times when consolidation also works to the benefit of customers and users?
Before we get into instances of “beneficent” consolidation, we wish to declare that we do not take a romantic view of the workings and goals of commercial entities. Such organizations combine with others for any number of reasons, but they all come down to money in its many varieties: higher sales, greater pricing power, more profit, enhanced branding and the growth of the value of the underlying assets. Customers and end-users may benefit as well from such consolidation, but those benefits are epiphenomenal.
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