Who profits (and who loses) in the scholarly publishing market?

Thursday 15 January 2026, 14:30-15:30, Open Science Café with Claudio Aspesi and Elena Giglia

Agenda

14:30 – 14:40 Connection opens and welcome remarks by Elena Giglia
14:40 - 15:00 Presentation by Claudio Aspesi
15:00 – 15:30 Q&A and discussion

Summary:

How does the scholarly publishing market work? We will briefly look at publishers' economic models, profitability, and incentives, and then discuss possible alternatives as well as the barriers to replacing existing models.

Speakers

Elena Giglia (moderator): Head of the Open Access Project Unit at the University of Turin. She plays an active role in national and international working groups on Open Science and is a partner in several Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects. She was part of the Ministry of University and Research committee that drafted the National Plan for Open Science, which is soon to be published. She was also a member of the "Open Access and New Indicators" working group at ANVUR (2013-2014). She regularly participates in national and international conferences on various aspects of Open Science, including evaluation, and is highly active in training, raising awareness, and promoting these topics.

Claudio Aspesi (speaker): A market analyst with two decades of experience specifically in scholarly communication, where he has worked for international investors and other stakeholders. From 2004 to 2016, he was a Senior Research Analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, covering the European media equity market with a focus on Reed Elsevier and Pearson. Since 2017, he has been a consultant for non-profit associations such as SPARC, for MIT, and for Swiss universities, helping them understand the economics of scholarly communication and build better strategies for dealing with commercial publishers.
Previously, he was Global Senior Vice President of Strategy at EMI Music, where he was responsible for EMI's business model during the shift to digital. Before that, he was an executive committee member at Airclic, an Internet infrastructure company, and a partner at McKinsey, where he worked with leading media and entertainment companies.

Target audience

This webinar is created for the Italian community and is aimed at researchers, research support staff, technicians, and technologists interested in learning more about Open Science and FAIR principles.

Video