Archive for Article Processing Charges

Our Million-Dollar Journal!

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on August 25, 2025 by telescoper

The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publishing a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) is now £2356. Converting that to dollars at current rates gives about $3150 per paper.

As of today, 25th August 2025, the Open Journal of Astrophysics has published 359 articles.

Using the dollar cost of an MNRAS APC as a benchmark – many journals charge more – this means that we have now saved the global astrophysics community about $1.1M (for an outlay of around $10K).

Yes, we are still a small journal but the size of that figure should help you understand how much money is being wasted globally on publishing fees that could instead be spent on actual research.

It’s good to see that more and more researchers are seeing the light and switching to Diamond Open Access. Today we published the 124th article in Volume 8 (2025) of the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This means that we have so far in 2025 published more papers than we published in the whole of 2024. At the end of August we will be about two-thirds of the way through the year so I expect we will publish more than 180 articles this year.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in running this journal: the Editors, staff at Maynooth University Library who help us, the host of volunteer referees, and of course our authors. I’m confident that, together, we can change the publishing landscape in astrophysics, and put the power (and money) back in the hands of researchers instead of greedy publishers.

This is a slightly-edited version of a post I made last week for the Open Journal of Astrophysics blog.

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Counting the Cost of Gold Open Access

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , , , on July 10, 2024 by telescoper

If you’re interested in how Article Processing Charges (APCs) have changed over the past five years, the data from six major publishers are now available accompanied by a paper on the arXiv with the abstract:

This paper introduces a dataset of article processing charges (APCs) produced from the price lists of six large scholarly publishers – Elsevier, Frontiers, PLOS, MDPI, Springer Nature and Wiley – between 2019 and 2023. APC price lists were downloaded from publisher websites each year as well as via Wayback Machine snapshots to retrieve fees per journal per year. The dataset includes journal metadata, APC collection method, and annual APC price list information in several currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, CHF, JPY, CAD) for 8,712 unique journals and 36,618 journal-year combinations. The dataset was generated to allow for more precise analysis of APCs and can support library collection development and scientometric analysis estimating APCs paid in gold and hybrid OA journals.

There’s even an interactive data explorer here, at which link you can also find this very informative summary graphic:

Surprise, surprise: the vast majority have gone up!

These figures apply to Gold and Hybrid Open Access publications, but not to Diamond Open Access journals which are free to both authors and readers and avoid these rip-off charges. In my opinion research institutions would be much better off investing in Diamond Open Access publishing than sending their hard-earned cash to profiteering outfits such as Elsevier.

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Don’t call me FRAS

Posted in Biographical, Open Access with tags , , , , on March 22, 2024 by telescoper

Some time ago I mentioned on this blog that I was resigning my Fellowship of the Institute of Physics as a consequence of the IOP’s blatant dishonesty over its publication policy. In a subsequent post giving further details of my fundamental disagreements with IOP Publishing’s profiteering, I stated that

I will decide in the next few days whether or not to resign also from the Royal Astronomical Society for the same reason.

After giving the matter a lot of thought, I have indeed now decided to resign my Fellowship of the Royal Astronomical Society, of which I have been a Fellow since 1990. The main reason for this decision is that I feel it would be inconsistent to remain FRAS after resigning as FInstP when I have the same problem with both institutions, i.e. the way they fund themselves through exploitative publishing practices.

Here is the email I sent to the Royal Astronomical Society earlier today.

Dear Membership Officer,

After much deliberation about the new policy of the Royal Astronomical Society to charge exorbitant fees for publishing in its journals (especially Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society), I have decided that I cannot in good conscience remain a member of a society that funds itself this way. I therefore resign my Fellowship of the Royal Astronomical Society with immediate effect. Kindly remove me from your membership list. I have cancelled the Direct Debit relating to my subscription.

Regards,

Peter Coles

Other, subsidiary, reasons for resignation include the expense, and the fact that Astronomy & Geophysics, the house magazine of the RAS, one of the few direct benefits of membership, even if it doesn’t have a crossword, only ever arrives in Ireland 6-8 weeks late (if it arrives at all). In any case, since I now live in Ireland, it is much more appropriate for me to participate in the activities of the Astronomical Society of Ireland than the Royal Astronomical Society, which is a UK institution.

As I am no longer a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, I am no longer eligible to remain a member of the RAS Dining Club, of which I have been a member for 15 years, so I have resigned from that too. It has been in any case difficult and expensive for me to attend the dinners since I moved to Ireland. No more dinners at the Athenaeum for me!

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On “Purpose-Led Publishing”

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , , , , on March 6, 2024 by telescoper

I was flabbergasted by the cheek of an article that recently appeared in Physics World by Michael Brooks announcing that:

I can’t speak about the American Institute of Physics or the American Physical Society but in the context of the Institute of Physics – of which I am a Fellow and in whose house magazine the article appears – I draw your attention to the last sentence of the above excerpt which contains a commitment to “invest funds generated from publishing back into research” (my emphasis).

Really? The IOP invests in research? That’s news to me. How do I apply for a grant? Will they fund my next PhD student?

The IOP invests its funds in many things – many of them worthy – but it does not spend a significant part of the vast income it generates from its publishing house on research. The claim that it does is just dishonest. There’s point in mincing words.

This is an important distinction, particularly so that publishing in most IOP journals now requires the payment of a hefty Article Processing Charge (APC; Artificial Profit Charge would be more apt) which often has to be paid for out of research grants. Previously the revenue of IOP Publishing was appropriated from library budgets through subscriptions, so physicists were less aware of just how much the IOP was raking in. Now that researchers are having to find the funds themselves from research grants it has become more obvious that the IOP is actually a drain on research funds, not a source of them. The APC is a levy on research, designed to generate funds for other things. I think this model is indefensible. What gives the IOP the right to impose charges that far exceed the cost of disseminating scientific results in order to appropriate funds for its other activities?

Moreover, even if the IOP did fund research, what benefit would that be to a researcher in Spain, South Korea or Singapore or indeed anywhere outside the UK and Ireland?

The slogan for the initiative described in the article is “Purpose-led Publishing”. That reminds me of an old saying from systems theory: the Purpose Of a System Is What it Does (POSIWID). What the system does in this case is to raise funds for the IOP. That’s its purpose. Everything else is just marketing spiel.

The claim that IOP Publishing does not make a profit is disingenuous too. It does make a substantial profit. The only difference between it and the likes of Elsevier is where the profits go. A true not-for-profit publisher would charge only at the level to cover the costs of publication. The Purpose that should be leading Publishing in physics is the dissemination of scientific results, not the generation of revenue for sundry other things.

I have avoided publishing in IOP journals for many years because I think the approach of IOP Publishing is unethical. Now I have decided that I no longer wish to be associated with the IOP in any way. I have paid the subscription for 2024 but when that lapses I won’t renew it. Enough is enough.

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Predatory Encounters

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on February 17, 2024 by telescoper

Yesterday I received two different emails from predatory publishers. The first invited me to submit a manuscript to the OSP Journal of Physics & Astronomy. I am informed that the journal is fully open access, with an Article Processing Charge of “only” $950. Of course $950 is $950 more than I’ll ever be prepared to pay for an APC, but did have a look at the website and found this:

A pretty good clue that OSP is a predatory publisher is that can spell neither “Scientific” nor “submit”…

Anyway, if you’re interested – and if I were you I wouldn’t be – you can find the OSP Journal of Physics & Astronomy here. I’ve skimmed the latest issue and the quality of articles is just as I expected.

The Second Encounter of the Predatory Kind was an email that begins thus:

I’ve never heard of the Auricle Global Society of Education and Research (AGSER) but the Open Journal of Astrophysics is not for sale to them (nor to anyone else, for that matter). Of course I don’t own OJAp anyway, but even if I did I wouldn’t sell it at any price. The only terms that I would agree to a takeover would be if the new owners committed to keep it as Diamond Open Access (i.e. free to authors and readers), and I can’t see any predators offering that!

I don’t know how AGSER arrived at a valuation of $70K but it got me thinking. We have so far published 128 articles at OJAp. Taking the APC for MNRAS of £2500 (approx $3000) as typical then we have saved the community about $384,000 in unnecessary publication charges.

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Article Processing Charges for Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , on January 19, 2024 by telescoper

As it was foretold, since January 1st 2024 the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) is now charging authors an Article Processing Charge (APC) at the (suitably astronomical) level of £2310 (approx €2700 at current rates) for each paper. There are exemptions in certain situations, such as if the author’s institution has signed up to a read-and-publish agreement via JISC (although that still involves a researcher’s institution paying unjustifiable amounts to the publisher).

The fundamental fact is that it just doesn’t cost £2310 to publish a paper online. That APC level is – for one paper – larger than the entire running costs of the Open Journal of Astrophysics for a year.

I did actually laugh out loud when I saw the spin the RAS tried to put on this decision:

The RAS is excited to be a key contributor to the open science movement, helping to drive discoverability and change.

Au contraire. Gold Open Access a serious hindrance to the open science movement, as it involves hugely inflated costs to the authors in attempt to protect revenue in the face of declining subscription income. This means that many potential authors just will not be able to pay. That’s not Open Access. Switching from a ‘fleece-the-libraries’ model to a ‘fleece-the-authors’ alternative can in no way be regarded as a progressive move.

It is true that some institutions will pay the APC on behalf of their authors, but that is hardly the point. If institutions have cash to pay for astronomy publications to be open access then they would do far more good to the research community by giving it to the arXiv rather than to the publishing industry. When authors themselves see how much they have to pay to publish their work, many will realize that it is simply not worth the money. I refuse to pay any APC on principle.

The question for the Royal Astronomical Society, and indeed the other learned societies that fund their activities in a similar way, is whether they can find a sustainable funding model that takes proper account of the digital publishing revolution. If their revenue from publishing does fall, can they replace it? And, if not, in what form can they survive? I’d like to think that future operating models for such organizations would involve serving their respective communities, rather than fleecing them. I’d advocate a institutional subscriptions as a fairer and more transparent alternative to syphoning funds from library budgets or research grants.

Meanwhile, the new regime at MNRAS (and possibly its acceptance on Scopus) have led to steadily increasing activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This morning I announced three more papers. I will post about them on here tomorrow. Diamond Open Access is the way forward. It’s just a question of time before everyone realizes it.

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