A study of open access journals using article processing charges

By David J. Solomon, Bo-Christer Björk. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2012

322 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 U.S. dollars (USD) calculated over journals and $904 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 journals published by societies, universities, or scholars/researchers. 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 OA in what are termed hybrid journals. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b937f58e02de88dc3945f557d6ba65dbff235c6

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In Information Systems and Management

  1. Bo-Christer Björk
  2. Cenyu Shen

In Statistics and Probability

  1. Cenyu Shen
  2. A. Townsend Peterson
  3. Bo-Christer Björk

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