Larivière, Haustein and Mongeon demonstrate that scholarly publishing has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of commercial publishers. Using Web of Science data from 1973 to 2013, they show that major firms expanded their share of published output, especially after the digital turn of the mid-1990s. The iconic idea is academic oligopoly. The internet did not automatically democratize scholarly communication; it also allowed scale, bundling, brand power, platform dependency and market concentration to intensify. This matters because scholarly publishing depends on a paradoxical economy. Universities, public agencies and researchers produce articles, provide peer review and supply prestige, while commercial publishers often capture the rents generated by that collective labour. The article shows that infrastructure is power. Control over journals, indexing, prestige channels and access conditions shapes what becomes visible as knowledge. Open access cannot therefore be discussed only as a question of whether articles are online. It must be understood as a struggle over ownership, pricing, circulation, evaluation and dependency. The paper is important because it quantifies what is often felt culturally: the scholarly record is increasingly mediated by oligopolistic structures that extract value from academic labour and public funding.
