Global OA APCs (APC) 2010–2017: Major Trends

Sustainable OA (OA) scholarly journal publishing requires a shift from demand to supply side economics. There are many approaches to supply-side funding, including sponsorship, library journal hosting, cooperatives, and transitioning library subscriptions funds to OA support (offsetting in interim phase). The APC model is used by a minority of fully OA journals. APC is important to study as a model that is working well for some journals, as a model some advocate as the basis for systemic change, and as one surrogate for necessary average cost per article, useful to assess the cost-efficiency of diverse approaches.

This is the 2017 edition of a longitudinal study (Morrison et al., 2014–, 2015, 2017) to observe trends in OA journal publishing over time with a focus on APCs and fully-OA journals, to provide evidence on which to base decisions on support for supply-side economics. Will the APC market continue existing market trends in subscriptions of consolidation and price rises beyond inflation? If so, this would be a reason to consider other models. Or perhaps APCs will introduce competition into the marketplace by making the cost of publication transparent to authors and payers. If so, this would be a reason to support APCs