Abstract
Large publishing companies have been dominating scientific publishing for long, which leads to high subscription fees and inhibited access to scientific knowledge. At digital era, the opportunity of an unrestricted access appears feasible, because the cost of publishing should be low. It is no longer the readers and libraries to pay subscription fees, but scientific organizations and authors themselves who pay for the cost of having their article published. As the data shows, there is a tremendous variance of article processing charges (APC) across journals, which obviously cannot be explained by the costs. One of the explanatory variables could be reputation, but it only contributes less than 5\% to the variance in APC. This study is meant to shed light on the various determinants of APC. Based on data from the OpenAPC Initiative, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Journal Impact Factor and the Essential Science Indicators of Web of Science, we employ ANOVA and multivariate regressions. The results show that market power plays an important role to explain APCs, inter alia, through market concentration, market position of individual publishers (publisher size), and the choice of hybrid publishing model.
Highlights
With nearly 40% of profit margins of the most successful publishers, academic publishing is one of the most lucrative businesses (Delamothe and Smith 2004; Smith 2018), their services are rather restricted to technical support in turning a scientific paper into a published article such as printing, binding and distributing the paper (Delamothe and Smith 2004)
Scientometrics (2020) 124:2185–2206 manuscript usually undergoes a thorough quality control process involving research com‐ munity members in three different roles: (1) as authors they document their research work in papers which they submit to an editor of an academic journal, (2) as editors they screen the submitted article deciding on its eligibility to peer-review, and (3) as review‐ ers, i. e. members of the research community who provide a quality judgement about the paper on which footing editors decide whether to reject, to publish, or to let authors revise and resubmit their research work
Ceteris paribus, jour‐ nal reputation, the market power of publishers, and the market concentration of disciplines show significantly positive correlations with APC
Summary
With nearly 40% of profit margins of the most successful publishers, academic publishing is one of the most lucrative businesses (Delamothe and Smith 2004; Smith 2018), their services are rather restricted to technical support in turning a scientific paper into a published article such as printing, binding and distributing the paper (Delamothe and Smith 2004). E. members of the research community who provide a quality judgement about the paper on which footing editors decide whether to reject, to publish, or to let authors revise and resubmit their research work. Researchers may not even be aware of the total amount of subscription fees paid by their local library They tend to be more interested in the reputation of respective academic jour‐ nals than actual costs involved in publishing. Despite that there is little doubt that reputation is a common denomina‐ tor, the design of the academic publishing market give reasons to believe that publishers set prices above the marginal returns in reputation to researchers One indication corroborating this hypothesis is the situation at university libraries. They indicate that 50% of their budget is con‐ sumed by 10% of the journal titles they have in their inventory (Bensman 2011)
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