The APA and publishing costs | Alex Holcombe's blog
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-06-15
Summary:
"This is a follow-up to my previous post, which was about the APA issuing take-down notices and how you can post preprints to keep your science open.
In a survey last year asking vision researchers’ priorities for journals, the top responses included:
'open access', 'Full academic or professional society control' ; 'Low cost' ; and 'transparent financial accounts'.
Notably, APA is one of the few publishers in the area of perception that has not provided a response to the concerns highlighted by the survey results. Most articles they publish are available only by subscription but APA makes select articles fully open access for a $3,000 fee typically charged to the authors or their funders. That is a relatively high fee.
From their annual report we know the APA receives $11 million/year in journal subscription revenue, and $67 million in other licensing revenue but the report does not break down the $17 million in 'publication production' costs, so it is difficult to evaluate how they are using the $3,000 open access fees."