Exploring Open Access Discounts - Delta Think

peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-04-08

Summary:

"Figure 1, below, analyzes average discount percentages off list prices, so we can see to what degree publishers are discounting. A few nuances come out of the chart.

  • There’s very little relationship between discount percentage and price (statistical analysis bears this out). Counterintuitively, this suggests a consistency: on average, more expensive journals are not discounted any more or less than less expensive ones.
  • In converting the OpenAPC data’s paid prices in Euros to equivalent list prices in USD, we see that around half the data points suggest payments that are higher than list, i.e. a “negative discount.” These data points appear to the left of the chart’s dotted line (0% discount). There are a few extreme outliers in the data (not shown) due to erroneous reporting, but it is likely that much of this is due to timings of payments, different methods of currency conversions, or inconsistent inclusion of sales tax. This highlights the challenges of gathering data consistently across our very fragmented ecosystem.
  • Controlling out these “negative discounts” makes very little difference to the statistics – so despite the challenges with the data, the patterns remain the same. We also know that list prices change slowly, so relative phasing between payment and list dates are not an issue....

Figure 2 below examines popular discount levels over time. The more orange the line, the more recent the year of payment, and the chart excludes the “negative discounts.”

  • The discounting bands appear to be staying consistent over time, with variations due to differences in sample sizes. (There are very few 2014 data points, and the volume of 2018 data is still catching up with the rest.)
  • Our OA Data & Analytics Tool allows deeper analysis, to tease out differences between fully OA and hybrid journals. Although not shown here, fully OA journals have seen their discount levels dip in 2016-2017 but start to rise again since, averaging around 20%. Hybrid sees the opposite pattern, with discount levels averaging 20-30%...."

Link:

https://deltathink.com/news-views-exploring-open-access-discounts/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.fees oa.waivers oa.economics_of oa.openapc oa.gold oa.journals

Date tagged:

04/08/2019, 12:07

Date published:

04/08/2019, 08:07