Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article Processing Charges

"This report was commissioned by a consortium of European research funding organizations led by the Wellcome Trust. The study was undertaken to stimulate thinking among research funders who have set up, or are considering setting up, mechanisms for direct “earmarked” funding of article processing charges (APCs) in open access (OA) journals. The report covers both full OA journals (referred to in the report as “full OA”, such as those published by Biomed Central and PLOS) and subscription journals which offer authors the possibility of making their individual articles OA by paying an APC. This latter category is known as “hybrid OA”....

The APC OA market is evolving rapidly and growing at about 30% a year.1 The overall APC revenue was estimated to be approximately 182 million USD in 2012 and growing at about 34% a year, though the rate of growth is expected to tail off to about 20% over the next 5 years.2 Among the established OA publishers with journals listed in Scopus, the average APC grew by about 5% a year over the last two years. This increase was, however, attributed to a relatively small proportion of journals: the price of most journals remained unchanged. The current APC averaged about 1,418 USD. This estimate is higher than many others (including our earlier work3 ) because in this study we focused on established journals (at least two years old) that were indexed in Scopus....

The primary goal of the project was to study how research funders, via their own policy choices, could encourage the development of a transparent, competitive and reasonably priced APC funded OA market. One of the key questions therefore, was how to create mechanisms where funders (and indirectly authors in some scenarios) have to factor in the APC price level against the service provided by the journal in question, thus putting competitive pressure on publishers to lower price. Thus far, we believe that for full OA journals, author sensitivity to the levels of APCs has been working effectively in creating pressure to moderate the price of APCs. The fact that APCs correlate significantly with journal impact factors is also an indication that not only price but also perceived quality matters....

Developing mechanisms by which funders can help to make the hybrid OA market less dysfunctional is a key aspect of this study...."