In the Dark

There’s an article on arXiv with the title Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023 and the following 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 million) 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.

Haustein et al., arXiv:2407.16551

I must have missed when it was submitted last July, but it has recently been doing the rounds on BlueSky which is how I noticed it. Here is the salient figure:

The paper estimates that over $8 billion has been wasted on “Article Processing Charges” (APCs) in the 5-year period covered. I put “Article Processing Charges” in inverted commas because, as I have said on many occasions, these fees have nothing to do with the cost of processing an article. They are simply charges levied by publishers to increase their profits.

The last sentence of the abstract “We call upon publishers to be more transparent about OA fees” is nowhere near as forceful as it should be. These charges are a scam and academia should not be feeding these parasites. A tiny fraction of that $8 billion would be enough to set up repositories similar to arXiv for all academic disciplines which would make OA publishing free to authors.

This entry was posted on January 27, 2025 at 11:12 am and is filed under Open Access with tags Article Processing Charge, arXiv:2407.16551, Open Access. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.