Is it True that Most Open Access Journals Do Not Charge an APC? Sort of. It Depends. | The Scholarly Kitchen

"One of the truisms that often comes up when discussing Open Access (OA) business models is that the majority of OA journals do not charge authors an article processing charge (APC). This has been a standard talking point supported by multiple studies (most now a few years out of date), and by the continuing work of Walt Crawford. It’s a statement on hears over and over (a quick Google search provides mentions here, here, here, here, here, here, and here — if Wikipedia says it’s true, it must be, right?). It’s a factoid I myself have used in arguments. But is it really an accurate representation of the OA publishing market? A closer look suggests that by strictly limiting the definition of what qualifies as an 'OA journal', we may be missing out on what’s actually happening. Crawford recently released his latest set of preliminary numbers (his work continues to be tremendously valuable in helping track and understand OA growth). Taking his strictest criteria, and limiting the analysis just to journals that have actually published an article in the last year, he gets the following results: for 2014, there were 8,760 OA journals, and publishing in 73% (6,395) of them was free for authors (no APC charged). The percentage of total OA articles in those journals was 43%. This immediately offers up a caveat to the notion that most OA is published without author charges. Most journals in the study do not charge authors, but the majority of authors are choosing to publish in journals that do charge. 27% (2,365) of the journals studied required an APC and were responsible for 57% of the articles. The journals in the study, however, do not represent the entire spectrum of OA journal publishing. As Crawford noted in a recent comment thread on this site, the pool of journals examined is limited to fully gold OA journals listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). That means no hybrid journals or articles published OA in hybrid journals were counted ..."