[BOAI] A Study of Open Access Journals Using Article Processing Charges

[David Solomon]

On the 10th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative I would like
to share a manuscript Bo-Christer Björk and I just had accepted in the
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. It
demonstrates how far we have come at least in one form of OA dissemination.

In interesting side note: We found a little over 100,000 articles were
published and made available to the global scientific community at an
estimated cost of 91 million USD via article processing fee funded OA. This
can be contrasted an estimated 1.5 million English language articles in STM
journals published for an estimated 8 billion USD in 2008 (
http://www.stm-assoc.org/2009_10_13_MWC_STM_Report.pdf).


A Study of Open Access Journals Using Article Processing Charges

David J Solomon
College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University, E. Lansing, MI USA
Email dsolomon at msu.edu

Bo‐Christer Björk
Management and Organization, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland
Email bo‐christer.bjork at hanken.fi

Abstract

Article Processing Charges (APCs) are a central mechanism for funding Open
Access (OA) scholarly publishing. We studied the APCs charged and article
volumes of journals that were listed in the Directory of Open Access
Journals as charging APCs. These included 1,370 journals that published
100,697 articles in 2010. The average APC was 906 US Dollars (USD)
calculated over journals and 904 US Dollars USD calculated over articles.
The price range varied between 8 and 3,900 USD, with the lowest prices
charged by journals published in developing countries and the highest by
journals with high impact factors from major international publishers.
Journals in Biomedicine represent 59% of the sample and 58% of the total
article volume. They also had the highest APCs of any discipline.
Professionally published journals, both for profit and nonprofit had
substantially higher APCs than society, university or scholar/researcher
published journals. These price estimates are lower than some previous
studies of OA publishing and much lower than is generally charged by
subscription publishers making individual articles open access in what are
termed hybrid journals.

You can access a copy of the accepted version at:

http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc2/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/boai-forum/attachments/20120214/4c8f20e3/attachment-0001.html