Drivers of Article Processing Charges in Open Access

Abstract

Large publishing companies have been dominating scientific publishing for long, which leads to high subscription fees and inhibited access to scientific knowledge. At digital era, the opportunity of an unrestricted access appears feasible, because the cost of publishing should be low. It is no longer the readers and libraries to pay subscription fees, but scientific organizations and authors themselves who pay for the cost of having their article published. As the data shows, there is a tremendous variance of article processing charges (APC) across journals, which obviously cannot be explained by the costs. One of the explanatory variables could be reputation, but it only contributes less than 5% to the variance in APC. This study is meant to shed light on the various determinants of APC. Based on data from the OpenAPC Initiative, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Journal Impact Factor and the Essential Science Indicators of Web of Science, we employ ANOVA and multivariate regressions. The results show that market power plays an important role to explain APCs, inter alia, through market concentration, market position of individual publishers (publisher size), and the choice of hybrid publishing model.

Open Access Publications with Article Processing Charge (APC) Payment: a Brazilian Scenario Analysis

“…Consequently, their OA pricing strategies can be altered toward making this option unattractive to authors, delaying this change to prolong a perception of inevitability. These data were corroborated by Budzinski et al (Budzinski et al 2020), who found that large publishers and hybrid journals have greater APCs.…”

“…This drift was confirmed by our data from non-profit national publishers to international high impact commercial publishers. In addition to reputation, the quality and speed of the review process or publication time of the mega journals can also be considered (Budzinski et al 2020) as one of the reasons for the increase in Brazilian articles at these larger periodicals. This work sought to analyze APC spending in Brazil in the 2012-2019 period and its possible implications for Brazilian research.…”

“…The hybrid model was a response from commercial publishers which published journals consolidated in the market to the increase of OA journals. In both these models, APCs are imposed (Budzinski et al 2020) for publishing articles. According to Pavan and Barbosa (Pavan & Barbosa 2018), the idea behind this hybrid system is to maintain the subscription model while attracting publications by authors from countries requiring OA.…”

“…This would presumably entail lower APC costs for OA publications; however, this has not yet been observed. In fact, hybrid journals may even possibly increase them, which vary substantially between different types of OA with a quite obscure pricing structure (Budzinski et al 2020).…”

“…Although the publishing process has become less complicated and more efficient, subscription prices have not dropped; indeed, the exact opposite has occurred in recent years (Budzinski et al 2020). Collins (Collins 2005) indicates that publishers are particularly reluctant to adopt new models as OA on their traditional publications and prefer to perpetuate the status quo, adopting such models only for novel journals.…”