[GOAL] MDPI: price increases, some hefty, more to come in July

Tue Feb 19 09:38:07 GMT 2019

Dear Heather,

As you noted the APC of several MDPI journals have increased in January 
2019, and the APC of several others will increase in July 2019. As 
Jeroen also noted many did not and will not increase.
We recently decided to increase the APCs as a matter of long term 
sustainability of MDPI, for the various reasons explained below.

As you may imagine the rejection rates across our journals vary, but are 
significantly higher for journals indexed in Web of Science's Science 
Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). To give just one example, /Cancers/ 
which was recently indexed in SCIE and received a first impact Factor 
ranking directly in Q1 of its category, has seen its submissions 
increased up by 500% in 2018 and 950% in January and February 2019 while 
the number of published papers and consequently the revenues is far from 
having increased proportionally. This is just one example. In 2017 and 
2018, 19 journals were accepted in SCIE (i.e. 35% more journals in SCIE) 
and we have seen the same trend of submission flood for all of them 
(e.g. /Journal of Clinical Medicine/: +1000% submissions in 2018 and in 
January and February 2019, /Cells/: +900% submissions in 2018 and +1000% 
in January and February 2019, /Mathematics/: +650% in 2018 and +450% in 
January and February 2019, /Electronics/: +500% in 2018 and +300% in 
January and February 2019).
Across all MDPI journals, the rejection rate has increased to around 61% 
in 2018, which means that 98,000 submitted manuscripts were processed 
but rejected at various stages, often after peer-review.
As you may know MDPI employs in-house staff to support scholars with the 
administrative aspects of the editorial process. This adds to the costs 
on our side, but also means that journal Editors, Guest Editors and 
Editorial Board Members do not need to take up on their precious time to 
follow up by themselves with authors and reviewers, or perform 
administrative duties that take away from their primary academic job. We 
see this as a service to the research community and is a key to 
maintaining fast publication times. However, we have to take the cost of 
processing these rejected papers into account.
 From 2016 to 2018, the average APC for an article finally published in 
an MDPI journal was around 1000 CHF/USD. This is among the lowest across 
commercial open access publishers, e.g. see 
https://treemaps.intact-project.org/apcdata/openapc/#publisher/period=2018.
We definitely do not (and do not want to) compete with the profit 
margins of the biggest players in the field, but we need to cover our 
increasing costs with a sufficient surplus to reinvest in our many new 
projects (Scilit.net, Sciforum.net, Preprints.org, Encyclopedia.pub, 
journalsadvisor.com, etc.) for which IT development costs are also quite 
significant.

Other aspects that need to be considered are that MDPI cross-subsidizes 
publication costs in certain fields, like Humanities and Social 
Sciences, where APC funding  is very low or non-existent. Although we 
joined the Knowledge Unlatched scheme earlier last year, the level of 
funding was and is still insufficient to fully cover costs for the 
participating journals, and MDPI had to cover/cross-subsidize the 
majority of the costs for these journals. Other journals like /Arts/, 
/Publications/ or several others have remained with no APC for a number 
of years.

We also apply waivers for a large number of papers. In 2017 and 2018, 
over 20% of papers have been published free of charge , either because 
they were published in a journal with no APC, were invited papers, or 
were waived when the authors were not able to find funds to pay the APC.

On another note, I must add that since 2016 MDPI rewards reviewers for 
the work done on peer-review with vouchers entitling for APC reduction, 
even when they review for journals with no APC, or for articles which 
are finally not published.

As you highlighted in our earlier discussion on APCs, and as Jeroen 
mentioned today, MDPI has not charged an APC for the first few years of 
publication and gradually introduced an APC when the journal became more 
established. We also understand that this could send the wrong signal to 
the scientific community. Publishing has a cost and potential authors 
must be aware of this cost when the journal is launched. This is why we 
decided that as of July 2019 all new MDPI journals (excluding society 
journals that cover part of these costs) will display an introductory 
APC of 1000 CHF/USD, which represents nearly the actual costs for 
publishing a paper (keeping in mind that costs increase when rejection 
rates increase). Waivers and APC reductions will still be granted for 
these journals, but we believe that authors will have a better 
understanding of the publishing costs entailed.

Let me close by adding that MDPI APCs are still on the lower end of 
commercial publishers. Our highest APC is currently 2000 CHF/USD, which 
applies to only two of our journals.
Moreover, MDPI has endorsed and signed the Jussieu Call for Open Science 
and Bibliodiversity, which commits us to look at a variety of business 
models outside of APCs. We would be happy to cooperate on new 
initiatives (like Knowledge Unlatched) that reduce or remove the direct 
costs to authors, provided they enable us to cover costs and to operate 
at scale.

I hope this helps,
Best wishes,
Franck

Franck Vazquez, Ph.D
Chief Executive Officer, MDPI
St. Alban-Anlage 66, 4052 Basel, Switzerland
Tel. +41 61 683 77 34
http://www.mdpi.com
--
https://sciprofiles.com/profile/66220
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7967-3798
https://www.linkedin.com/in/franck-vazquez-932a96a8/

On 13.02.19 22:40, Heather Morrison wrote:
> In brief: MDPI has increased prices, in many cases quite substantially 
> (some prices have more than tripled). Even more price increases are 
> anticipated in July 2019, which will have the effect of doubling the 
> average APC and tripling the most common APC. Unlike other publishers’ 
> practices, there are no price decreases.
> 
> Comment and recommendation: open access advocates, along with policy 
> makers and research funders, and keen to support a transition to open 
> access. In my opinion, the enthusiasm of payers to support APC journals 
> is causing an unhealthy and unsustainable distortion in the market. My 
> advice: stick with green OA policy. Require deposit of funded works in 
> an open access repository. This is a better means to ensure ongoing 
> preservation and open access, and exerts market pressure in a way that 
> is more suited to the development of an economically sustainable open 
> access system.
> 
> For details and data, see:
> 
> https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/02/13/mdpi-2019-price-increases-some-hefty-and-more-coming-in-july/ 
> 
> MDPI 2019: price increases, some hefty, and more coming in July 
> <https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/02/13/mdpi-2019-price-increases-some-hefty-and-more-coming-in-july/>
> sustainingknowledgecommons.org
> In brief: MDPI has increased prices, in many cases quite substantially 
> (some prices have more than tripled). Even more price increases are 
> anticipated in July 2019, which will have the effect of do…
> 
> 
> 
> Heather Morrison
> 
> Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa
> 
> Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa
> 
> Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca
> 
> https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706
> 
> 
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