DE GRUYTER – Traditional Scholarly Publisher’s Shift Towards Open Access. The Facts Behind the Numbers
October 23, 2015
journals in 2014. 11,276 articles were published under De Gruyter’s
brand in hybrid journals (of which a small part was also open access).
In 2015, the company will probably publish 12,898 papers in fully open
access journals and 12,673 in hybrid venues. So it is very likely that
the group will publish more open access than conventional articles this
year.
There is a growing discussion about the protracted “transition to
open” period for which research institutions have to pay for both
subscription to traditional venues and publication fees for publishing
in open access journals. The people participating in the discussion
about this phenomenon stress the fact that academic publishers benefit
from keeping revenues from these two sources, and therefore will
never be keen to transform all their journals to open access. They also
use the “double dipping” notion to address the fact that some publishers
may be paid twice for the same content, by charging publication fees
for keeping some particular journal article open, but still selling
subscription to the whole journal, which is partially toll access (this
is the called ‘hybrid open access’).
Open access is a growing trend
For the Open Access Week 2015 I’ve decided to approach these problems with the example of De Gruyter and
its open access imprint De Gruyter Open. The transition process from
toll to open access in the case of the De Gruyter group is tangible and
evident, and there is no doubt that the company sees open access as an
increasingly important part of its portfolio.
DG Group has currently 544 fully open access journals (DG Open) and
290 hybrid journals (DG). I say ‘hybrid’ because all of these 290
journals are subscription based, and offer an open access option to
authors. An author with funding covering an Article Processing Charge
can publish an open access article in any of the group’s journals and
doesn’t have to pay more for publishing in hybrid journals[1], that are
in most cases older and more established.
Double dipping? Not here.
Is De Gruyter paid twice for publications in hybrid journals? No, and it
probably never has been. At the moment, not as many authors use the
hybrid open access option at De Gruyter. Recently the company has introduced an anti-double dipping policy,
which assumes that the price of the subscription of the journal will be
lowered proportionally to the number of open access articles published
in this venue. The policy applies to every journal that has at least 5%
of its articles published in open access. But this policy is introduced
‘just in case’ to prevent possible future ‘double dipping’, since there
are just a few hybrid journals at De Gruyter with more than 2-3% of
their articles in open access.
And fully open access venues at De Gruyter Open are doing very well,
indeed. The company published 11,115 papers in fully open access
journals in 2014 versus 11,276 published under De Gruyter’s brand in
hybrid journals (of which a small part was also open access). In 2015
the company will probably publish even more articles in fully open
access journals. According to the current estimates, 12,898 papers will
be published in De Gruyter Open this year, compared to 12,673 in hybrid
journals at De Gruyter. So it is very likely that the group will publish
more open access than conventional articles in 2015.
Large volumes of published content make De Gruyter Open one of the
top publisher of Open Access globally. According to the data reblogged
this week by DOAJ: “traditional publisher De Gruyter has gone from no titles in DOAJ in 2014 to 3rd largest DOAJ publisher” leaving Elsevier and Springer behind.
Interestingly, a large number of DG Open’s journals are free of
publication fees. Some of them are co-published by academic societies,
which cover the costs of publishing with membership fees or public
donations.
[1] – Article Processing Charges at De Gruyter vary from 500 euro to
1500 euro depending on the discipline, but there is no differences
between fully open access and hybrid journals. Some journals waive APCs
at all. Information about Article Processing Charge is available on the
website of every journal published by De Gruyter.
This entry was posted on October 23, 2015 by Witold Kieńć and tagged De Gruyter, De Gruyter Open, news
DE GRUYTER – Traditional Scholarly Publisher’s Shift Towards Open Access. The Facts Behind the Numbers | Open Science
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