Is it True that Most Open Access Journals Do Not Charge an APC? Sort of. It Depends.
Charge! French soldiers, image from “The Story of the Great War, Volume III”, 1916.
(OA) business models is that the majority of OA journals do not charge
authors an article processing charge (APC). This has been a standard
talking point supported by multiple studies (most now a few years out of
date), and by the continuing work of Walt Crawford. It’s a statement on hears over and over (a quick Google search provides mentions here, here, here, here, here, here, and here — if Wikipedia says it’s true,
it must be, right?). It’s a factoid I myself have used in arguments.
But is it really an accurate representation of the OA publishing market?
A closer look suggests that by strictly limiting the definition of what
qualifies as an “OA journal”, we may be missing out on what’s actually
happening.
Crawford recently released his latest set of preliminary numbers
(his work continues to be tremendously valuable in helping track and
understand OA growth). Taking his strictest criteria, and limiting the
analysis just to journals that have actually published an article in the
last year, he gets the following results: for 2014, there were 8,760 OA
journals, and publishing in 73% (6,395) of them was free for authors
(no APC charged). The percentage of total OA articles in those journals
was 43%.
This immediately offers up a caveat to the notion that most OA is
published without author charges. Most journals in the study do not
charge authors, but the majority of authors are choosing to publish in
journals that do charge. 27% (2,365) of the journals studied required an
APC and were responsible for 57% of the articles.
The journals in the study, however, do not represent the entire spectrum of OA journal publishing. As Crawford noted in a recent comment thread on this site, the pool of journals examined is limited to fully gold OA journals listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). That means no hybrid journals or articles published OA in hybrid journals were counted.
The reason for this limitation is a practical one
— there’s no easy way to measure the numbers of hybrid journals and
articles, and there’s no easy way to track journals and articles not
listed in the DOAJ. But this practical limitation also creates
limitations on the conclusions that can be drawn.
Precise language is key to scientific understanding.
As a former journal editor, the most common problem I had to correct
from authors was a tendency toward language that overstated their
conclusions — calling a cellular factor “necessary” for some action,
rather than “sufficient” is a common example. Some of this was
deliberate fuzziness borne out of wishful thinking in hopes of
supporting a preconceived model, while the majority was unintentional
and just poor choices of words.
To be precise then, stating that the majority of OA journals do not
charge an APC is going beyond what the data tells us. What we can safely
say is that the majority of fully gold OA journals listed by the DOAJ
do not charge APCs, though they do not produce the majority of articles
from that pool.
What about those hybrid journals and articles? Can they be summarily dismissed from the discussion, or are they worth a look?
To get a quick sense of the numbers I spent 20 minutes or so digging around some of the bigger publisher websites:
- Elsevier: 1,676 journals listed as having a hybrid OA option
- Wiley: 1,300 journals listed as having OA available, 33 listed in DOAJ so 1,277 titles can be counted
- Springer: “the majority of our 2000+ journals” offer an OA option, so at minimum 1,001 titles
- Taylor & Francis: hybrid OA available for over 1,600 journals
- Sage: 630 journals listed as having a hybrid option
- Oxford University Press: 250+ hybrid journals
- Cambridge University Press: “over 200” hybrid journals
from just a quick sampling, leaving out many large publishers and a
huge number of smaller university presses and independents. Add that to
Crawford’s earlier totals and the conclusion is reversed: at least 58%
(8,999) of journals that offer OA publishing do indeed charge an APC.*
If you spend much time in the world of altmetrics and DORA,
it may be more forward-thinking to look at the world on an article
level. We live in an article-level economy, and an individual article
should be judged for its own merits, not averaged in with its neighbors.
Add in then the number of articles published by authors taking up the
hybrid option and the total number of OA articles published with an APC
increases even further into the majority. These numbers are hard to
come by, but for OUP, they’ve been pretty steady for the last few years,
ranging from 4% to 6% of total articles (5.01% for 2014). Our total
numbers have increased due to the increasing number of journals and
articles published each year.
So to more clearly state things:
- The majority of fully gold OA journals listed by the DOAJ do not charge authors an APC.
- The majority of journals offering OA publication to authors charge APCs.
- The majority of OA papers are published via paying an APC.
setting policies, it is crucial to have an accurate picture of current
publishing practices, and the clear picture here is that most OA
publishing is done for a fee.
*My numbers still exclude fully gold OA journals not included in
the DOAJ so the conclusions must include this caveat, but given the
enormous number of questionable/predatory/deceptive journals that fall
into this category and that certainly charge APCs, their inclusion would
likely only push things further in the direction of APC required OA.
Is it True that Most Open Access Journals Do Not Charge an APC? Sort of. It Depends. | The Scholarly Kitchen
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