In the Dark

I was thinking when I did Saturday’s update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics that I should convey some idea of the amount of money being saved by using Diamond Open Access.

So far this year we have published 181 articles in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. That’s a very small fraction – a few percent – of the output of the established journals in the area, Astrophysical Journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, MNRAS.

I will take MNRAS as an example for comparison. Last time I looked, the Article Processing Charge (APC) (i.e. publication fee) for a paper submitted there is £2356. Our 181 papers published this year would have cost their authors £426,436 had they had to pay the MNRAS APC. Some – especially in the UK – do not pay directly, but have an equivalent amount taken from their institution(s) via Read-and-Publish agreements. The charge therefore does not come directly from the authors’ funds but from their institution, but that is just splitting hairs. The point about OJAp is that neither authors nor their institutions have to pay.

For comparison, a year’s stipend for a PhD student outside London at UKRI rates is £20,780. That means that the total amount saved by publishing in OJAp rather than MNRAS (£426,436) would be more than the cost of 20 PhD students. It might even be enough (just) to pay your Vice-Chancellor’s salary…

You might well think that is a trivial amount of money compared to the total circulating in science funding, but the real point is that it represents only a tiny fraction of the money being siphoned off from astrophysics research into other activities. Taking all the APCs paid (or page charges or other words that mean “publication fee”) to all the journals, the total figure is probably at least 50 times the £426,436 obtained above. That would be a figure in excess of £20 million. That is not a trivial amount of money. Even for a Vice-Chancellor.

Wouldn’t you and your institution rather keep your grant funds to spend on research than hand it over – directly or indirectly – to publishers? I know I would!

This entry was posted on November 24, 2025 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Open Access with tags APC, Article Processing Charge, Diamond Open Access, MNRAS, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Open Journal of Astrophysics, scientific publishing, The Open Journal for Astrophysics. 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.