APC pricing
For those publishers that charge APCs for open access articles the prices vary
widely, ranging from less than £100 up to £5,000. Pricing information is available on
publisher websites but this is subject to change making it difficult to know whether
prices are consistent over time or across different publishers. Some publishers offer
prepayment accounts, membership schemes or discounts (Pricing principles used by
Scholarly Open Access Publishers, Björk and Solomon 2012). This report is an
attempt to survey previous analyses of the price of APCs and determine whether
there are any discernible trends.
The Finch report (2012) provided estimates based on a 2011 report Heading for the
Open Road (itself based on Outsell data: ‘This figure is the weighted average APC of
$2,185 (at an exchange rate of £1:$1.5) calculated by Outsell and used for
modelling purposes in their report Open Access Primer (Public Version) (Outsell
2009)’ (p.31)) and Wellcome Trust data:
‘A report in 2011 estimated that universities in the UK spent £112m on
subscriptions to journals, a further £52m on managing and providing access
to them, and £11m on article processing charges for open access journals
(Heading for the Open Road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly
communications. RIN, PRC, Wellcome Trust, RLUK and JISC, 2011) (p.38) ...
Reports also suggest that the costs for open access journals average
between £1.5k and £2k (Heading for the Open Road), which is broadly in line
with the average level of APCs paid by the Wellcome Trust in 2010, at just
under £1.5k.’ (p.62)
It seems strange that the Finch Report used only two sources of data to calculate its
estimated average APCs, Wellcome Trust and Outsell. Wellcome Trust almost
entirely fund only scientific research, and Outsell’s data was produced in 2009 and
thus three years old at the time of the Finch Report. The report does acknowledge
(hidden away in a footnote) that the estimate is open to question: ‘See also Solomon,
D, and Björk, B-Christer, A study of Open Access Journals using article processing
charges, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,
which suggests an average level of APCs for open access journals (including those
published at very low cost in developing countries) of just over $900. It is difficult to
judge – opinions differ – whether costs for open access journals are on average
likely to rise as higher status journals join the open access ranks; or to fall as new
entrants come into the market.’
It is not clear why the Finch group chose to ignore Solomon and Björk’s study A
Study of Open Access Journals Using Article Processing Charges (2012), which was
the most comprehensive available at the time and based on more recent data (2010)
than the Outsell report. It calculated an average APC price of 900 USD (£540 at
2010 exchange rates) which is almost one third of the estimate used by the Finch
group. Even the average APC calculated by Solomon and Björk for commercial
publishers was 1,100 USD (£660), and for commercial publishers who published 10
or more open access journals it was 1,345 USD (£800). If the Finch Group had used
these estimates, then the subsequent prices set by publishers may have been
significantly lower.
‘Among the large open access publishers, APCs for journals published by
PLoS for 2011-12 range from $2,900 for PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology to
$1,350 for the ‘repository’ journal PLoS One; and APCs for journals published
by BioMed Central range from $630 to $2,620. For the Hindawi Publishing
Corporation, APCs range from $300 to $1500. The high-status journals
published in hybrid format by Cell Press, on the other hand, charge an APC of
$5,000 for articles published on open access terms.
The average level of APCs paid by the Wellcome Trust under its open access
policy in the first three months of 2011 was £1,422; and the University of
Nottingham paid on average £1,216 in the academic year 2010-11. How
sustainable such averages would be if open access were to become more
widespread among journals with high rejection rates, as well as in the
humanities and social sciences, is not clear.’ (Finch report, p.69)
The Wellcome Trust have published their APC expenditure for 2010-11, 2011-12,
and 2012-13, as have the Austrian Science Fund and University of Cambridge for
2012-13. One problem with basing estimates on Wellcome data (or any other
science-focused body) is that scientific publishing tends to be much more expensive
than in the humanities and social sciences. Some publishers (e.g. Elsevier) have
gone so far as to halve their APC costs for HSS journals. Open access articles in the
humanities are more likely to be published in small, independent journals that charge
no or low APCs. So a true average APC price across all disciplines is likely to be
significantly lower than the £1,450 estimate used in the Finch report.
Stephen Pinfield and Christine Middleton’s Open access central funds in UK
universities (2012) was a case study investigating the University of Nottingham’s
central open access fund. It found that ‘The average APC for Nottingham in 2010–11
was £1,216 and in 2009–10 was £1,317’ (p.115).
‘The mean average cost per article in 2010–11 was £1,216. The average for
BMC articles was £1,077 and non-BMC articles £1,327. In 2010–11, the
highest payment made was £3,095 and the lowest £72 … The claimants of
the fund over the last five years have predominantly been from the medical
and life sciences. In 2010–11, 71% of claimants came from the Faculty of
Medicine and Health Sciences. 23% came from the Faculty of Science, but
from within that faculty, most claimants were from the Schools of Biology,
Biosciences, Psychology, Veterinary Medicine and Mathematics.’ (p.113)
The most recently published large study on APC pricing is Björk and Solomon’s
Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article Processing Charges (March
2014) in which they calculated that hybrid APCs from subscription publishers are
nearly twice as high as APCs from full open access publishers:
(Source: Björk and Solomon 2014, Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article
Processing Charges)
This article explains some of the differences in APC price between different kinds of
journals:
‘Among the established OA publishers with journals listed in Scopus, the
average APC grew by about 5% a year over the last two years. This increase
was, however, attributed to a relatively small proportion of journals: the price
of most journals remained unchanged. The current APC averaged about
1,418 USD. This estimate is higher than many others (including our earlier
work) because in this study we focused on established journals (at least two
years old) that were indexed in Scopus.
Mega journals are the fastest growing segment of the OA market. While
pricing varies, the more successful mega journals generally have followed
PLOS ONE’s lead with APCs in the range of 1,350 USD.
Subscription publishers have in the last couple of years rapidly expanded the
number of journals that offer the hybrid option, though uptake of this option
continues to remain low. Some subscription publishers are moving away from
a standard APC pricing of around 3,000 USD in order to make their hybrid
offerings more competitive. Overall though, the average APC for publication in
hybrid journals is 2,727 USD.’ (pp.3-4)
It also discusses the different estimates of average APCs provided by different
studies:
‘Outsell’s overall estimate for an average APC is as low as 660 USD for 2011.
They predict that this would increase to 950 USD by 2015, mainly due to the
increasing emergence of more highly priced offerings from traditional brand
publishers. Our own empirical study of the level of APCs in 2010 provides a
baseline for a study discussed later in this report. We believe the figures are
the most comprehensive currently available. The overall average is 906 USD,
calculated over more than 100,000 articles. The results are also broken down
by scientific discipline and other journal attributes showing the highest
averages in biomedicine and the lowest in arts and humanities. Figure 2
below shows the distribution of articles over different APC levels.’
‘Other studies, often when developing scenarios for the economics of gold
and green OA, have used much higher figures, for instance based on average
APCs paid by grantees from particular funders. It must be remembered that
such grant recipients (for instance from the Wellcome Trust) often tend to
publish a higher proportion of their work in more prestigious, and hence also
more highly priced journals in biomedicine.’ (p.11)
They show that Elsevier differentiate their pricing depending on the subject of the
journal (p.24):
The most recent APC data available is that collected by Information Power on behalf
of Jisc Collections. This contains the APC expenditure of 23 institutions over the
period 2010-2014 (the first two months of 2014 only, so 2014 prices are estimates).
This allows us to see the average APC price paid to specific publishers:
Average APC price
£2,500
£2,000
BMJ
American Chemical Society
Cambridge University Press
£1,500
Elsevier
Nature Publishing Group
£1,000
Oxford University Press
Springer
Taylor & Francis
£500
Wiley
£0
2010
2011
(Source: Jisc Collections/IPL)
2012
2013
2014
This graph shows convergence between the APC prices of different publishers. In
2010 and 2011 the average APC price ranged fairly evenly between £1,500–£2,500.
This is much higher than the average APC reported by Solomon and Björk for 2010;
one possible explanation for this is that biomedical journals tend to charge higher
APCs than other disciplines (Solomon and Björk 2012, A Study of Open Access
Journals Using Article Processing Charges) and in the UK prior to 2012 biomedical
research was more likely to receive funding to pay for APCs. From 2012, publishers
began to have much more similar prices, with the average APC for 2014 being
between £1,730–2,080.
Even the highest estimate given by a large-scale study of the average cost of an
APC in a hybrid journal from a commercial publisher was approximately £1,600
(2,727 USD – Björk and Solomon 2014, Developing an Effective Market for Open
Access Article Processing Charges). This is lower than the average APC paid by the
sample of UK universities, which once again can most likely be explained by a higher
proportion of biomedical articles.
Conclusion
APC pricing varies tremendously between different types of publishers, and there are
a very wide variety of APCs on the market, but the last couple of years have seen a
convergence on a narrower price range (£1,600-2,000) for hybrid journals from
subscription publishers. This stability has most likely been influenced by the
publication of the Finch Report in 2012 which stated an average APC price of
£1,500-2,000 – a figure which was false at the time but may have become a selffulfilling prophecy.
This shows how flexible APC prices are, depending on market conditions. The level
is set depending on what the market can bear rather than the actual cost of the work
involved in publishing an individual article, much as it is with subscription journals.
Therefore publishers have a lot of leeway to offer discounts and lower prices on
APCs.
Stuart Lawson
Version 2: 26 June 2014 (including additional graph)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.