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An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a
Creative Commons license A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...
.


Background

Journals use a variety of ways to generate the income required to cover publishing costs (including editorial costs, any costs of administering the peer review system), such as subsidies from institutions and subscriptions. A majority of open access journals do not charge article processing charges, but a significant and growing number of them do. They are the most common funding method for professionally published open access articles. APC fees applied to academic research are usually expensive, effectively limiting open access circulation among the less affluent institutions, scholars, and students. The APC model of open access, among other controversies, is part of the wider and increasingly global Open Access OA's ethics debate. Most journals do not charge APCs. The global average per-journal APC is , its recent increase indicating "that authors choose to publish in more expensive journals". A 2019 analysis has shown 75% of European spending on scientific journals goes to "big five" publishers (
Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...
, Springer Nature,
Wiley Wiley may refer to: Locations * Wiley, Colorado, a U.S. town * Wiley, Pleasants County, West Virginia, U.S. * Wiley-Kaserne, a district of the city of Neu-Ulm, Germany People * Wiley (musician), British grime MC, rapper, and producer * Wiley Mil ...
,
Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group is an international company originating in England that publishes books and academic journals. Its parts include Taylor & Francis, Routledge, F1000 (publisher), F1000 Research or Dovepress. It is a division of Informa ...
and the American Chemical Society (ACS)). Together they accounted for 56% of articles published.


Other publishing fees

Author fees or page charges have existed since at least the 1930s. Different academic publishers have widely varying levels of fees, from under $100 to over $5000, and even sometimes as high as €9500 for the journal
Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...
. Meanwhile, independent studies indicate that the actual costs of efficiently publishing a scholarly article should be in the region of €200–€1000. High fees are sometimes charged by traditional publishers in order to publish in a
hybrid open access journal A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee (also called an article processing charge or APC) to the publisher in order to p ...
, which make an individual article in a subscription journal open access. The average APC for hybrid journals has been calculated to be almost twice as high as APCs from full open access publishers. Journals with high impact factors from major publishers tend to have the highest APCs. Open access articles often have a surcharge compared to closed-access or paywalled content; for example, the ''
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Sci ...
'' charges $1590–$4215 per article (depending on length) for closed-access, with a surcharge of $1700–$2200 for open-access (depending on licence).PNAS
Publication Fees
/ref> Similarly, AGU's ''
Journal of Geophysical Research The ''Journal of Geophysical Research'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It is the flagship journal of the American Geophysical Union. It contains original research on the physical, chemical, and biological processes that contribute to the un ...
'' charges $1000 for closed-access and $3500 for open-access. Even when publishers do not charge standard fees, excess or ''overlength fees'' might still apply after a certain number of pages or publication units is exceeded; additional ''color fees'' might apply for figures, primarily for print journals that are not online-only. While publication charges occur upon article acceptance, article submission fees are charged prior to the start of
peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...
; they are common among journals in some fields, e.g., finance and economics. Page charge may refer to either publication or submission fees.


Criticism


Cost of research articles


Cost to scientists and funding bodies

Article processing charges shift the burden of payment from readers to authors (or their funders), which creates a new set of concerns. One concern is that if a publisher makes a profit from accepting papers, it has an incentive to accept anything submitted, rather than selecting and rejecting articles based on quality. This could be remedied, however, by charging for the peer-review rather than acceptance. Another concern is that institutional budgets may need to be adjusted in order to provide funding for the article processing charges required to publish in many open access journals (e.g. those published by
BioMed Central BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open ...
). It has been argued that this may reduce the ability to publish research results due to lack of sufficient funds, leading to some research not becoming a part of the public record. Another concern is the redirection of money by major funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the
Wellcome Trust The Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation focused on health research based in London, in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome (founder of one of the predecessors of Glaxo ...
from the direct support of research to the support of open access publication. Robert Terry, Senior Policy Advisor at the Wellcome Trust, has said that he feels that 1–2% of their research budget will change from the creation of knowledge to the dissemination of knowledge. Research institutions could cover the cost of open access by converting to an open access journal cost-recovery model, with the institutions' annual tool access subscription savings being available to cover annual open access publication costs. A 2017 study by the Max Planck Society estimates the annual turnovers of academic publishers amount to approximately €7.6 billion. It is argued that this money comes predominantly from publicly funded scientific libraries as they purchase subscriptions or licenses in order to provide access to scientific journals for their members. The study was presented by the Max Planck Digital Library and found that subscription budgets would be sufficient to fund the open access publication charges, but does not address how unaffiliated authors or authors from institutions without funds will contribute to the scholarly record. Publishers' high operating profit margins, often on publicly funded research works, and their copyright practices have subjected them to criticism by researchers. For example, a Guardian article informed that in 2010, Elsevier's scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.


Unequal access to publishing

Unless discounts are available to authors from countries with low incomes or external funding is provided to cover the cost, article processing charges could exclude authors from developing countries or less well-funded research fields from publishing in open access journals. However, under the traditional model, the prohibitive costs of some non-open access journal subscriptions already place a heavy burden on the research community; and if green open access
self-archiving Self-archiving is the act of (the author's) depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as ...
eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable, the cancelled subscription savings can pay the
gold open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or Gratis v ...
publishing costs without the need to divert extra money from research. Moreover, many open access publishers offer discounts or publishing fee waivers to authors from developing countries or those suffering financial hardship. Self-archiving of non-open access publications provides a low cost alternative model. A 2021 study has concluded APC may be a barrier to publishing, especially for "less affluent institutions, scholars, and students." European Union scientific research initiative
Horizon Europe Horizon Europe is a 7-year European Union scientific research initiative, successor of the Horizon 2020 programme and the earlier Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development. The European Commission drafted and approved a plan ...
does not cover the APCs for articles in hybrid open-access journals.


Diamond Open Access model

Diamond open access is a term used to describe journals that have no article processing charges, and make articles available to read without restrictions. In 2020, Diamond OA journals comprised 69% of the journals in the
Directory of Open Access Journals The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. The proje ...
, but published only 35% of the articles. In 2021, it was estimated that 17,000 to 29,000 Diamond OA journals published 8-9% of all scholarly journal articles and 45% of Open Access articles.Ancion, Z., Borrell-Damián, L., Mounier, P. et al., ACTION PLAN FOR DIAMOND OPEN ACCESS MARCH 2022, (2022). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6282402 Nearly all Latin American OA journals use the Diamond model, whereas a little over half of African and Western European OA journals are Diamond OA.Frantsvåg, J.E., Diamond Open Access in Norway 2017–2020, ''Publications'' 10 (2022), no. 1. However, the percentage of Diamond OA articles covered in
Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...
and Web of Science for the same year was below 1%, suggesting that "Scopus- or Web of Science-based (data) are skewed towards toll access and article processing charges-based publishing, as Diamond journals are underrepresented in (these databases)". The same study also found that Diamond OA articles comprised 81% of all OA articles in Humanities, but only 30% in Medicine and Sciences.


See also

*
Copyright transfer agreement A copyright transfer agreement or copyright assignment agreement is an agreement that transfers the copyright for a work from the copyright owner to another party. This is one legal option for publishers and authors of books, magazines, movies, te ...
* Royalty-free *
Royalty payment A royalty payment is a payment made by one party to another that owns a particular asset, for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset o ...


References


Further reading

* University of California Libraries (2016
Pay It Forward: Investigating a Sustainable Model of Open Access Article Processing Charges for Large North American Research Institutions
Mellon Foundation. . * * * Guy, M., Holl, A. (2015
Article Processing Charges
''Briefing Paper, PASTEUR4OA project''


External links


OpenAPC: open database of APC
{{Open access navbox Open access (publishing) Academic publishing Publishing