Business as Usual with Article Processing Charges in the Transition towards OA Publishing: A Case Study Based on Elsevier

Abstract

This paper addresses the topic of the article processing charges (APCs) that are paid when publishing articles using the open access (OA) option. Building on the Elsevier OA price list, company balance sheet figures, and ScienceDirect data, tentative answers to three questions are outlined using a Monte Carlo approach to deal with the uncertainty inherent in the inputs. The first question refers to the level of APCs from the market perspective, under the hypothesis that all the articles published in Elsevier journals exploit the OA model so that the subscription to ScienceDirect becomes worthless. The second question is how much Elsevier should charge for publishing all the articles under the OA model, assuming the profit margin reduces and adheres to the market benchmark. The third issue is how many articles would have to be accepted, in an OA-only publishing landscape, so that the publisher benefits from the same revenue and profit margin as in the recent past. The results point to high APCs, nearly twice the current level, being required to preserve the publisher's profit margin. Otherwise, by relaxing that constraint, a downward shift of APCs can be expected so they would tend to get close to current values. Accordingly, the article acceptance rate could be likely to grow from 26-27% to about 35-55%.

Coste de la publicación en abierto de artículos de autoría española en cinco áreas de las ciencias sociales

“…Existe la preocupación de que el modelo APC lleve a una disminución de la calidad de las revistas de acceso abierto, ya que es probable que las editoriales con fines de lucro aumenten las tasas de aceptación de artículos, publicando artículos de menos calidad para aumentar sus beneficios con los APC pagados por el personal investigador (Björk y Solomon, 2015;Copiello, 2020).…”

“…Otro estudio que comparaba los precios del sistema tradicional, basado en la suscripción, y el basado en APC concluía que el sistema tradicional es más caro y que si finalmente resulta ser el dominante, la transformación al acceso abierto tendrá un costo mucho mayor que el esperado (Schonfelder, 2019). En la bibliografía se ha sostenido que con el sistema de suscripción de las revistas académicas, el costo unitario por artículo es de aproximadamente 3.800 a 5.000 €, lo que lo convierte en un sistema cada vez más inasequible (Copiello, 2020). Estos altos costes favorecerían la transición en gran escala hacia el acceso abierto mediante APC (Khoo, 2019).…”

Dynamics of Cumulative Advantage and Threats to Equity in Open Science - A Scoping Review

“…APC-based OA hence risks stratifications of publishing as well-resourced researchers can cover even the highest APCs while less well-resourced researchers cannot [90][91][92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100]. Even in well-resourced areas like the UK, rising costs [101] of APCs is recognised as an issue which will mitigate OA's net benefits [102]. Although many publishers offer fee-waivers and discounts to authors unable to pay, restrictive terms and administrative burden, as well as the extent to which they seemingly place authors in the position of asking for "charity", undermine their utility [103,104].…”

Some Issues on the Funding of the Scientific Publication in Open Access

“…This OA publication model, which, if correctly used, will not question the quality of what is published (Tennant et al, 2019), functions, in most cases, according to the paid-for model (Kortabarria, 2020). However, the APC is too often hyper-inflated vis-à-vis the service provided by the publishers, with profound variations according to each specific journal but also the scientific area in question (Tennant et al, 2019;Copiello, 2020;Ross-Hellauer, Schmidt, & Kramer, 2018). Table 2 offers an example of the six key stages throughout the lifecycle of an OA publication (Taylor, 2019).…”