A Study of Open Access Journals Using Article Processing Charges

Use the link above to access the full text of the article. The current article has been self-archived by the authors at www.openaccesspublishing.org. Three additional articles, including, “[1] Publication Fees in Open Access Publishing: Sources of Funding and Factors Influencing Choice of Journal [2] Pricing principles used by Scholarly Open Access Publishers [3] The Hybrid Model for Open Access Publication of Scholarly Articles – a Failed Experiment?” are also self-archived at the same site. Additionally, articles on various OA topics have been archived by Bo-Christer Bjork on his professional webpage at the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration, Helsinki, Finland at The abstract for the current article is as follows: “Article Processing Charges (APCs) are a central mechanism for funding Open Access (OA) scholarly publishing.  We studied the APCs charged and article volumes of journals that were listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals as charging APCs. These included 1,370 journals that published 100,697 articles in 2010. The average APC was 906 US Dollars (USD) calculated over journals and 904 US Dollars USD calculated over articles. The price range varied between 8 and 3,900 USD, with the lowest prices charged by journals published in developing countries and the highest by journals with high impact factors from major international publishers. Journals in Biomedicine represent 59% of the sample and 58% of the total article volume. They also had the highest APCs of any discipline. Professionally published journals, both for profit and nonprofit had substantially higher APCs than society, university or scholar/researcher published journals.  These price estimates are lower than some previous studies of OA publishing and much lower than is generally charged by subscription publishers making individual articles open access in what are termed hybrid journals.”