Study assesses financing sources of open-access article processing charge | SciELO in Perspective

"A recent study1 on the effect of article processing charge (APC) on open access (OA) analyzed in this blog2assessed the financial burden of this investment by authors in India and its effect on dissemination of research results in publications from various countries. The research pointed out that, despite the availability of numerous APC free open access journals from India and other countries, Indian researchers invested about US$ 2.4 million per year between 2010 and 2014 in publication fees of higher impact journals aiming to increase the visibility and the chances of having their papers cited.

APC-funded open access publishing is the fastest growing form of scientific publishing in the world. It is estimated that the number of articles in this modality increases at a rate of 2% per year. However, for many researchers, fees can be a serious impediment to publication. Many funding agencies around the world include payment of publication fees in the research grants they provide; alternatively, research institutions can take responsibility for their payment. In the absence of these alternatives, the fees are personally funded by the authors.

An article by Ling Ling Wang and coworkers at Nanjing University, China3 assessed global funding sources of APC through research grants, institutions and the authors themselves. The study was conducted with articles on Health Science, Biology and Life Sciences indexed in the Web of Science between 2009 and 2013, in which the authors identified 255 OA journals which charge APC (APC OA) and 183 who do not charge fees (free OA). Hybrid journals have not been considered, however. The survey included 156,104 articles (only original articles and review articles were selected) from APC OA journals and 80,256 free OA articles. Moreover, the authors collected information on APC values charged by the journals (ranging from US$ 40 to US$ 5,000), and identified among the articles those funded by research grants and those without funding. Finally, they looked for a possible correlation between APC values and the journal Impact Factor (IF, Journal Citation Reports, 2012).

The study results showed that mean APC values increase with IF intervals, but with wide variation within each IF interval. For example, the IF range with the largest number of APC OA journals, between 1 and 2 and between 2 and 3 charge APC between US$ 105 and US$ 3,300 and between US$ 320 and US$ 3,975, respectively. The upper IF intervals as 7-8 and greater than 8, however, have minor variations, ranging from US$ 1,204 to US$ 3,900 and between US$ 2,250 and US$ 3,900, respectively. The authors draw attention to the fact that 80% of APC OA journals have IF equal to or less than 4, and that despite the tendency of higher IF observed in journals with higher APC, there are exceptions."