Guest Post - Transparency: What Can One Learn from a Trove of Invoices? - The Scholarly Kitchen
peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-11-07
Summary:
"The dataset Ashley [Farley] provided us [from the Gates Foundation] (covering the period from August 1, 2016, to March 31, 2019) includes:
- 3,268 invoices for articles in peer-reviewed journals
- 720 journals
- 90 publishers
In total the Foundation paid $9,002,225 to these publishers to ensure results of all Foundation research was disseminated with a CC BY license with no embargos — an average cost for “open” of $2,755 per article.
We think we’ve uncovered some interesting trends in this data, but our main objective is to share the research dataset we have developed, along with the Foundation’s original invoicing data. That way anyone can use these for further research....
In 2016, only 22% of authors were choosing to publish in fully-OA journals; in 2019, 50% have done so....
Traditional publishers charge significantly more for APCs than OA-only publishers....
Researchers choosing to publish in a fully OA Journal show a strong preference for OA-only publishers’ titles....
There are no significant differences in for-profit vs. non-profit publishers’ APCs for fully OA journals...."