Open Access Article Processing Charges - A Market Waiting to Happen | Dan Pollock

"Our latest survey of Article Processing Charges (APCs) shows a complex and immature market, with pricing set at random and not yet aligned with demand.

Over the last few years all the major publishers have added open access offerings to the bulk of their journals. Typically, existing journals are made hybrid by established publishers, in contrast with the fully OA portfolios of the newer publishers. The main money flow in open access boils down to levying APCs on individual accepted articles (self-archiving and sponsored models generate relatively little revenue). Whatever the nuance of payment flows (author or funder) and discounts, pricing patterns and drivers give a good read on how functional the marketplace is.

Impact Drives Author Decisions. A number of surveys have revealed that authors do not prioritize pricing when deciding to which journal they will submit their paper. Our survey and analysis of APCs confirms this, and reveals some interesting patterns – or lack thereof – behind pricing. The single strongest predictor of price is the journals’ business model: hybrid is more expensive, fully open access is least. However, there the patterns end.

There is little relationship between impact and price, with some of the most expensive APCs being levied for journals with relatively modest impact metrics. Figure 1 shows this in practice, comparing price with impact for 10,000 journals across all subject areas. We use the field-neutral Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) as a proxy for the Impact Factor and would expect the spread of dots to follow the blue diagonal shown if there was a strong relationship between the two measures...."