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Abstract
Recent research has tried to calculate the “total cost of publication” in the British academic sector, bringing together the costs of journal subscriptions, the article processing charges (APCs) paid to publish open-access content, and the indirect costs of handling open-access mandates. This study adds an estimate for the other publication charges (predominantly page and colour charges) currently paid by research institutions, a significant element which has been neglected by recent studies. When these charges are included in the calculation, the total cost to institutions as of 2013/14 is around 18.5% over and above the cost of journal subscriptions—11% from APCs, 5.5% from indirect costs, and 2% from other publication charges. For the British academic sector as a whole, this represents a total cost of publication around £213 million against a conservatively estimated journal spend of £180 million, with non-APC publication charges representing around £3.6 million. A case study is presented to show that these costs may be unexpectedly high for individual institutions, depending on disciplinary focus. The feasibility of collecting this data on a widespread basis is discussed, along with the possibility of using it to inform future subscription negotiations with publishers.
Highlights
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in identifying the “total cost of publication”to the academic sector [1]
This study focused on the £11 million of article processing charges (APCs) funded through the Research Councils UK (RCUK) policy, and did not account for the organisational costs of handling any papers funded from other sources; a reasonable estimate would suggest at least another £1 million to cover these papers, giving an overall indirect cost of about £10 million, or 5.5% of overall subscription costs
The majority of the publication charge spending was due to page charges, with a smaller amount from colour charges; there were no reported submission charges or other fees in this sample [27].This is in sharp contrast to the provisional estimates above, where APCs were expected to be around five times as high as author charges
Summary
There has been a growing interest in identifying the “total cost of publication”. The government encouraged work to limit the growth in the “total cost of publication”, with models such as offsetting APCs against existing subscriptions [8] This term was later expanded to encompass the organisational costs to an institution from the increased workload in handling the open-access process [1]. This study focused on the £11 million of APCs funded through the RCUK policy, and did not account for the organisational costs of handling any papers funded from other sources; a reasonable estimate would suggest at least another £1 million to cover these papers, giving an overall indirect cost of about £10 million, or 5.5% of overall subscription costs These three elements—subscriptions, APCs, and indirect open access management costs—comprise the total cost of publication as it has so far been defined. To describe the source of these fees, it should be emphasised that, in the majority of cases, these costs are borne by institutional funds or by funding bodies, and while authors are responsible for ensuring they are paid, they do not usually pay them directly
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