The European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) is taking the unusual step of making the finances of four of its journals public in order to highlight the challenges of transforming subscription or part-subscription journals into fully open access titles.
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The analysis covers four of EMBO’s five journals and reveals that, in 2017, their total revenue was almost €6 million [$6.67 million/USD].
Source: EMBO
Subscriptions generated nearly €4 million of this, with the remaining revenue consisting mainly of article processing charges (APCs), the fees paid by the author, the author’s institution, or their research funder.
The four journals published 706 articles in 2017, of which 495 were research papers and 29 were reviews. The remaining 182 articles were opinion pieces, editorials and news articles.
The cost per article amounted to €6,340, EMBO estimates. But “if the costs for the entire content at EMBO had to be financed only through the APCs for research papers, then the charge for each paper would have to be €9,040 [$10,060/USD],” the report says.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
