Business as Usual with Article Processing Charges in the Transition towards OA Publishing: A Case Study Based on Elsevier

Sergio Copiello

doi:10.3390/publications8010003

Abstract

This paper addresses the topic of the article processing charges (APCs) that are paid when publishing articles using the open access (OA) option. Building on the Elsevier OA price list, company balance sheet figures, and ScienceDirect data, tentative answers to three questions are outlined using a Monte Carlo approach to deal with the uncertainty inherent in the inputs. The first question refers to the level of APCs from the market perspective, under the hypothesis that all the articles published in Elsevier journals exploit the OA model so that the subscription to ScienceDirect becomes worthless. The second question is how much Elsevier should charge for publishing all the articles under the OA model, assuming the profit margin reduces and adheres to the market benchmark. The third issue is how many articles would have to be accepted, in an OA-only publishing landscape, so that the publisher benefits from the same revenue and profit margin as in the recent past. The results point to high APCs, nearly twice the current level, being required to preserve the publisher’s profit margin. Otherwise, by relaxing that constraint, a downward shift of APCs can be expected so they would tend to get close to current values. Accordingly, the article acceptance rate could be likely to grow from 26–27% to about 35–55%.

Highlights

The academic publishing industry has recently seen the conclusion of a dispute between Elsevier management and the editorial board members of the Journal of Informetrics (JOI) [1,2], which led those members to resign from their positions in early January 2019
This study focuses on three issues of the transition towards a fully open access (OA) publishing landscape and analyzes them from the perspective of a big commercial publisher, namely Elsevier
The second issue is how much should the publisher charge to publish all the articles under the OA umbrella, assuming it benefits from an ordinary profit margin

Summary

Introduction

The academic publishing industry has recently seen the conclusion of a dispute between Elsevier management and the editorial board members of the Journal of Informetrics (JOI) [1,2], which led those members to resign from their positions in early January 2019. That dispute resembled the 2006 case of Topology [3]— run by Elsevier—which resulted in the death of the journal. Among other things, such as journal property rights and the refusal to join the Initiative for Open Citation (I4OC) [4,5], the editors disputed Elsevier’s “restrictive open access policies and prohibitive subscription costs” to publish with the journal using the open access (OA) option [6]. The publisher replied “that the current [Article Publishing Charge] is set at an appropriate rate . The scenario might change over the few years because, are the subscriptions becoming increasingly unaffordable, but OA publishing costs face the problem of hyperinflation [9]

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Results

Conclusion