News & Views: The Impact of Inflation on APC Costs

"Overall, OA prices are increasing below inflation. The data suggest that authors continue to get (modestly) increasing value for money for their OA fees.

However, the headlines are skewed by the large number of hybrid journals. When looking only at fully OA (“gold”) journals, prices are rising slightly faster than inflation. Our market sizing data suggest that significantly more articles are published in fully OA journals than in hybrid, so the inflationary effects will be more prevalent than the real-terms cost savings for hybrid. Although it’s worth noting that fully OA prices are cheaper than those for hybrid, so they are growing from a lower base."