[GOAL] Taylor and Francis article publishing charge finder: useful tool or barrier to transparency?

[Heather Morrison]

A year ago, it was possible to view all of Taylor & Francis’ OA APCs in a spreadsheet including fully open and open select journals, with pricing in several currencies where applicable.

As of today, to find T&F APCs, one must use their article publishing charge finder service. Before seeing pricing, you must select a journal, type of article, and country. This may be designed to help authors and/or payers of APCs to quickly ascertain their price; if so, this seems like a useful tool. 

However, this also makes research on APCs more complicated, and could be a barrier to transparency in APC pricing. For example, to know whether every country for which pricing is posted under a particular currency is being charged the same amount, one would have to conduct a large number of searches by journal, article type, and country (from a long list of countries). If this practice discourages research on APCs, it becomes more difficult to assess pricing trends over time, e.g. if pricing were to rise above inflation rates it would be a lot more work to document this.

This and a bit more detail are published on the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons blog here:
https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2018/02/08/taylor-and-francis-article-publishing-charge-finder/

Comments and/or clarifications of practice would be welcome. 

best,

-- 
Dr. Heather Morrison
Associate Professor | Professeure agrégé
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca