Authors Stefanie Haustein School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Scholarly Communications Lab
Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie (CIRST)
Eric Schares Scholarly Communications Lab
University Library, Iowa State University
Juan Pablo Alperin Scholarly Communications Lab Simon Fraser University
Madelaine Hare School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Scholarly Communications Lab
Leigh-Ann Butler Scholarly Communications Lab
University of Ottawa Library
Nina Schönfelder Bielefeld University Library
Source
via arXiv arXiv:2407.16551 July 23, 2024
Abstract
This study presents estimates of the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. APCs are fees charged for publishing in some fully open access journals (gold) and in subscription journals to make individual articles open access (hybrid). There is currently no way to systematically track institutional, national or global expenses for open access publishing due to a lack of transparency in APC prices, what articles they are paid for, or who pays them. We therefore curated and used an open dataset of annual APC list prices from Elsevier, Frontiers, MDPI, PLOS, Springer Nature, and Wiley in combination with the number of open access articles from these publishers indexed by OpenAlex to estimate that, globally, a total of $8.349 billion ($8.968 billion in 2023 US dollars) were spent on APCs between 2019 and 2023. We estimate that in 2023 MDPI ($681.6 million), Elsevier ($582.8 million) and Springer Nature ($546.6) generated the most revenue with APCs. After adjusting for inflation, we also show that annual spending almost tripled from $910.3 million in 2019 to $2.538 billion in 2023, that hybrid exceed gold fees, and that the median APCs paid are higher than the median listed fees for both gold and hybrid. Our approach addresses major limitations in previous efforts to estimate APCs paid and offers much needed insight into an otherwise opaque aspect of the business of scholarly publishing. We call upon publishers to be more transparent about OA fees.
Estimate of annual APC revenue (in millions USD) by publisher adjusted for inflation to 2023 USD using CPI Advanced Economies. Source: arXiv:2407.16551
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.
