Article processing charge

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An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. [1] [2] [3] This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. [4] Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. [5] Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. [6] An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.

Contents

Background

Article processing fees for journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (2019). DOAJ APCs.png
Article processing fees for journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (2019).

Journals use a variety of ways to generate the income required to cover publishing costs (including editorial costs, any costs of administering the peer review system), such as subsidies from institutions [7] and subscriptions. A majority of open access journals do not charge article processing charges, [8] but a significant and growing number of them do. [9] They are the most common funding method for professionally published open access articles. [10]

APC fees applied to academic research are usually expensive, effectively limiting open access publishing to wealthier institutions, scholars, and students.

The APC model of open access, among other controversies, is part of the wider and increasingly global Open Access OA's ethics debate. [11]

Most journals do not charge APCs. The global average per-journal APC is US$ 1,626, its recent increase indicating "that authors choose to publish in more expensive journals". [12]

A 2019 analysis has shown 75% of European spending on scientific journals goes to "big five" publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and the American Chemical Society (ACS)). Together they accounted for 56% of articles published. [13]

Other publishing fees

Author fees or page charges have existed since at least the 1930s. [14] Different academic publishers have widely varying levels of fees, from under $100 to over $5000, and even sometimes as high as €9500 ($10851) for the journal Nature . [1] [15] [16] [17] Meanwhile, an independent study indicated that the actual costs of efficiently publishing a scholarly article should be in the region of €200–€1000. [18] High fees are sometimes charged by traditional publishers in order to publish in a hybrid open access journal, which make an individual article in a subscription journal open access. The average APC for hybrid journals has been calculated to be almost twice as high as APCs from full open access publishers. [19] Journals with high impact factors from major publishers tend to have the highest APCs. [1]

Open access articles often have a surcharge compared to closed-access or paywalled content; for example, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences charges $1590–$4215 per article (depending on length) for closed-access, with a surcharge of $1700–$2200 for open-access (depending on licence). [20] Similarly, AGU's Journal of Geophysical Research charges $1000 for closed-access and $3500 for open-access. [21]

Even when publishers do not charge standard fees, excess or overlength fees might still apply after a certain number of pages or publication units is exceeded; [21] [22] additional color fees might apply for figures, [20] primarily for print journals that are not online-only.

While publication charges occur upon article acceptance, article submission fees are charged prior to the start of peer review; they are common among journals in some fields, e.g., finance and economics. [23] Page charge may refer to either publication or submission fees.

Criticism

Cost of research articles

Cost to scientists and funding bodies

Article processing charges shift the burden of payment from readers to authors (or their funders), which creates a new set of concerns. [24] One concern is that if a publisher makes a profit from accepting papers, it has an incentive to accept anything submitted, rather than selecting and rejecting articles based on quality. This could be remedied, however, by charging for the peer-review rather than acceptance. [25] Another concern is that institutional budgets may need to be adjusted in order to provide funding for the article processing charges required to publish in many open access journals (e.g. those published by BioMed Central [26] ). It has been argued that this may reduce the ability to publish research results due to lack of sufficient funds, leading to some research not becoming a part of the public record. [27]

Another concern is the redirection of money by major funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust from the direct support of research to the support of open access publication. Robert Terry, Senior Policy Advisor at the Wellcome Trust, has said that he feels that 1–2% of their research budget will change from the creation of knowledge to the dissemination of knowledge. [28]

Research institutions could cover the cost of open access by converting to an open access journal cost-recovery model, with the institutions' annual tool access subscription savings being available to cover annual open access publication costs. [29] A 2017 study by the Max Planck Society estimates the annual turnovers of academic publishers amount to approximately €7.6 billion. It is argued that this money comes predominantly from publicly funded scientific libraries as they purchase subscriptions or licenses in order to provide access to scientific journals for their members. The study was presented by the Max Planck Digital Library and found that subscription budgets would be sufficient to fund the open access publication charges, but does not address how unaffiliated authors or authors from institutions without funds will contribute to the scholarly record. [30]

Publishers' high operating profit margins, often on publicly funded research works, and their copyright practices have subjected them to criticism by researchers. For example, a Guardian article informed that in 2010, Elsevier's scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year. [31]

Unequal access to publishing

Unless discounts are available to authors from countries with low incomes, or external funding is provided to cover the cost, article processing charges can exclude authors from developing countries or less-funded research fields from publishing. [32] Some publishers justify part of the article processing charge by attributing it to the cost of producing print material when in reality they publish digital-only issues. [33] Under the traditional model, the prohibitive costs of some non-open access journal subscriptions already place a heavy burden on the research community. [34] Many open access publishers do offer discounts or publishing fee waivers to authors from developing countries or those suffering financial hardship. [35]

For these reasons, some funding bodies simply will not pay the extra fees for open access publishing: the European Union scientific research initiative Horizon Europe does not cover the APCs for articles in hybrid open-access journals. [36]

Diamond Open Access model

Diamond open access is a term used to describe journals that have no article processing charges, and make articles available to read without restrictions. In 2020, Diamond OA journals comprised 69% of the journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals, but published only 35% of the articles. [37] In 2021, it was estimated that 17,000 to 29,000 Diamond OA journals published 8-9% of all scholarly journal articles and 45% of Open Access articles. [38] Nearly all Latin American OA journals use the Diamond model, whereas a little over half of African and Western European OA journals are Diamond OA. [39] However, the percentage of Diamond OA articles covered in Scopus and Web of Science for the same year was below 1%, suggesting that "Scopus- or Web of Science-based (data) are skewed towards toll access and article processing charges-based publishing, as Diamond journals are underrepresented in (these databases)". [39] [ citation needed ] The same study also found that Diamond OA articles comprised 81% of all OA articles in Humanities, but only 30% in Medicine and Sciences.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic publishing</span> Subfield of publishing distributing academic research and scholarship

Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or thesis. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-archiving</span> Authorial deposit of documents to provide open access

Self-archiving is the act of depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as well as theses and book chapters, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact. The term green open access has become common in recent years, distinguishing this approach from gold open access, where the journal itself makes the articles publicly available without charge to the reader.

Citation impact or citation rate is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author is cited by other articles, books or authors. Citation counts are interpreted as measures of the impact or influence of academic work and have given rise to the field of bibliometrics or scientometrics, specializing in the study of patterns of academic impact through citation analysis. The importance of journals can be measured by the average citation rate, the ratio of number of citations to number articles published within a given time period and in a given index, such as the journal impact factor or the citescore. It is used by academic institutions in decisions about academic tenure, promotion and hiring, and hence also used by authors in deciding which journal to publish in. Citation-like measures are also used in other fields that do ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, software metrics, college and university rankings, and business performance indicators.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hindawi (publisher)</span> Scientific and medical journal publisher

Hindawi is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. It was founded in 1997 in Cairo, Egypt, and purchased in 2021 for $298 million by John Wiley & Sons, a large US-based publishing company. The publisher has been classified as a predatory publisher. After almost 10,000 article retractions in 2023, Wiley announced that it would cease using the Hindawi brand.

Dove Medical Press is an academic publisher of open access peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals, with offices in Macclesfield, London, Princeton, New Jersey, and Auckland. In September 2017, Dove Medical Press was acquired by the Taylor and Francis Group.

A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee to the publisher in order to publish an article open access, in addition to the continued payment of subscriptions to access all other content. Strictly speaking, the term "hybrid open-access journal" is incorrect, possibly misleading, as using the same logic such journals could also be called "hybrid subscription journals". Simply using the term "hybrid access journal" is accurate.

Delayed open-access journals are traditional subscription-based journals that provide free online access upon the expiry of an embargo period following the initial publication date.

An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open access (1) by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional repository or disciplinary repository or (2) by publishing them in an open-access journal or both.

Academic journal publishing reform is the advocacy for changes in the way academic journals are created and distributed in the age of the Internet and the advent of electronic publishing. Since the rise of the Internet, people have organized campaigns to change the relationships among and between academic authors, their traditional distributors and their readership. Most of the discussion has centered on taking advantage of benefits offered by the Internet's capacity for widespread distribution of reading material.

<i>PeerJ</i> Academic journal

PeerJ is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences. It is published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by CEO Jason Hoyt and publisher Peter Binfield, with initial financial backing of US$950,000 from O'Reilly Media's O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and later funding from Sage Publishing.

This is a summary of the different copyright policies of academic publishers for books, book chapters, and journal articles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Predatory publishing</span> Fraudulent business model for scientific publications

Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors while only superficially checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. The rejection rate of predatory journals is low, but seldom zero. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship.

The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Offprint</span> Reproduction of a single article, chapter, or paper from a larger publication

An offprint is a separate printing of a work that originally appeared as part of a larger publication, usually one of composite authorship such as an academic journal, magazine, or edited book. Offprints are used by authors to promote their work and ensure a wider dissemination and longer life than might have been achieved through the original publication alone. They may be valued by collectors as akin to the first separate edition of a work and, as they are often given away, may bear an inscription from the author. Historically, the exchange of offprints has been a method of correspondence between scholars.

Project DEAL is a consortium-like structure spearheaded by the German Rectors' Conference, on behalf of its fellow members in the Alliance of Science Organizations in Germany and tasked with negotiating nationwide transformative open access agreements with the three largest commercial publishers of scholarly journals for the benefit of all German academic institutions, including universities, research institutes, and their libraries. Through each of these agreements, the consortium aims to secure immediate open access publication of all new research articles by authors from German institutions, permanent full-text access to the publisher's complete journal portfolio, and fair pricing for these services according to a simple cost model based on the number of articles published.

Plan S is an initiative for open-access science publishing launched in 2018 by "cOAlition S", a consortium of national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries. The plan requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state-funded research organisations and institutions to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all by 2021. The "S" stands for "shock".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diamond open access</span> Open access distributed with no fees to author and reader

Diamond open access refers to academic texts published/distributed/preserved with no fees to either reader or author. Alternative labels include platinum open access, non-commercial open access, cooperative open access or, more recently, open access commons. While these terms were first coined in the 2000s and the 2010s, they have been retroactively applied to a variety of structures and forms of publishing, from subsidized university publishers to volunteer-run cooperatives that existed in prior decades.

The economics of open science describe the economic aspects of making a wide range of scientific ouputs to all levels of society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Subscribe to Open</span> Open access academic publishing model

Subscribe to Open (S2O) is an economic model used by peer-reviewed scholarly journals to provide readers with open access (OA) to the journal’s content, without charging costs to authors. S2O converts journals that have a traditional subscription model to open access.

References

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  8. ↑ Kozak, Marcin; Hartley, James (December 2013). "Publication fees for open access journals: Different disciplines—different methods". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 64 (12): 2591–2594. doi:10.1002/asi.22972.
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  13. ↑ Mehta2019-11-06T15:03:00+00:00, Angeli. "75% of European spending on scientific journals goes to 'big five' publishers". Chemistry World. Retrieved 2022-03-07.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
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  20. 1 2 PNAS, Publication Fees
  21. 1 2 "American Geophysical Union publication fee table" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-08-04. Retrieved 2014-09-29.
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  33. ↑ Angler, Martin W. (2023-07-10). "Sarahanne Field Wants To Put the Open Back Into Open Science". Eurac Research Science Blogs. Retrieved 2023-07-11.
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  36. ↑ Masnou, Anna May (2018-06-28). "Horizon Europe will not reimburse publication fees for hybrid open-access". Institut de ciència de materials de Barcelona. Retrieved 2022-04-06.
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  39. 1 2 Frantsvåg, J.E., Diamond Open Access in Norway 2017–2020, Publications 10 (2022), no. 1. doi : 10.3390/publications10010013

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