News & Views: Open Access Charges – When “On Trend” Still Means Higher Spend

"Going into 2026, we see APC prices increasing, but the percentage increases continue to fall back to track long-term trends.

• Fully OA APC list prices across our sample have risen by around 6.8% compared with 6.4% this time last year.
• Hybrid APC list prices have risen by an average of 5.3% compared with 3% this time last year.
• Maximum APCs for fully OA journals remain at $8,900.
• Maximum APCs for hybrid journals now top out at $12,850 (up $160 from last year).
• Average APC prices have increased more this year than last year. However, the increases remain lower than the highs of a couple of years ago.

Underlying trends continue.

• Average APC price increases are getting larger each year.
• There are approximately 2.4x more hybrid journals than fully OA ones, down from 2.6x last year, and 2.9x a year before that. The proportion of journals that are hybrid is slowly falling. However, because they are the majority, hybrid journals follow (or, rather, set) a similar pattern to the market overall.
• On average, fully OA prices are around 67% of those of hybrids – consistent with long-term trends.
• Around 24% of our sample of fully OA journals charge no APCs, compared with 22% last year. (We have separately analyzed the number of articles in OA journals.)
• Price increases vary significantly by discipline. Fully OA Arts and Humanities journals saw larger than average increases; Multidisciplinary journals saw lower than average increases...."