[GOAL] BMC update: 66% of journals increased APC from 2018 - 2019, 61% far above inflationary rates

[Heather Morrison]

We thank Springer Nature's Christopher Pym for his opinion on the GOAL list regarding of analysis of BMC price increases from 2018 - 2019:

http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2019-May/005123.html

Errors are always possible with this type of work, and so I conducted a second analysis, this time limited to 260 BMC journals for which we have APC data for both 2018 and 2019, using GBP (for historical reasons, we use this as the main currency for BMC).

Findings in brief:

This re-analysis confirms our original finding of a sharp increase in APCs. 66% of BMC journals for which we have APC data in GBP for both 2018 and 2019 have increased their APCs; 61% have increased their APCs at far beyond inflationary levels, causing the overall average (including journals that did not change APCs or lowered APCs) to increase by 15%, a rate far beyond inflationary levels. We thank Christopher Pym for his interest in our research.

Please note that slight changes in method (sampling limited to journals for which we have APCs for both years, currency selection), result in some differences in results, while both approaches support the conclusion of "sharp increases in APCs".

Details and a table showing the BMC journals price changes in decreasing order by % change are posted here:
https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/04/30/biomed-central-in-2019-sharp-increase-in-article-processing-charge/

Further inquiries are welcome and helpful. This is a form of open peer review. Having publishers check our findings is a type of rigorous critique that typical academic peer review could easily miss.

<https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/04/30/biomed-central-in-2019-sharp-increase-in-article-processing-charge/>best,


Dr. Heather Morrison

Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa

Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa

Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project

sustainingknowledgecommons.org

Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca

https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20190501/cdcdab37/attachment.html