Costo de los cargos por procesamiento de artículo (APC) para Uruguay: el precio desmedido del acceso abierto

Abstract

Increasingly, scientific publications are made in journals that offer free access to their content. This open access can be funded in several ways. One of them involves demanding a payment from researchers for each published article. These Article Processing Charges (APCs) can climb to over $ 10,000 per article. Here, we set out to investigate the type of journals in which Uruguayan researchers publish. We corroborate that open access has grown strongly in the last decade, regardless of the area of knowledge. However, the tendency to pay or not for APCs varies enormously between disciplines and is strongly associated with the tendency to publish in English. Based on the number of publications in “gold” open access journals made by Uruguayan researchers and considering the proportion of journals that require APCs by discipline, we conclude that the costs for payment of APCs have multiplied by four between 2016 and 2019. These costs are currently around $ 200,000 per year, with an upward trend. Policies on the matter should be reconsidered.