Abstract
The Open Access (OA) publishing model that is based on article processing charges (APC) is often associated with the potential for more transparency regarding the expenditures for publications. However, the extent to which transparency can be achieved depends not least on the completeness of data in APC monitoring systems. This article investigates two blind spots of the largest collection of APC payment information, OpenAPC. It aims to identify likely APC-liable publications for German universities that contribute to this system and for those that do not provide data to it. The calculation combines data from Web of Science, the ISSN-Gold-OA-list and OpenAPC. The results show that for the group of universities contributing to the monitoring system, more than half of the APC payments are not covered by it and the average payments for non-covered APCs is higher than for APCs covered by the system. In addition, the group of universities that do not contribute to OpenAPC accounts for two thirds of the number of APC-liable publications recorded for contributing universities. Regarding the size of these blind spots, the value of the monitoring system is limited at present.
Highlights
Give the number of publications identified by the ISSN-Gold-Open Access (OA) list where no payments are recorded for the particular publication in OpenAPC but where payments for other publications published in the same journal are available
The result of this study illustrates that, at this stage, the incompleteness of data reported to OpenAPC restricts the value of the monitoring system
For German universities that contribute to OpenAPC, more than half of the estimated expenditures for article processing charges (APC) are not recorded in the system
Summary
A number of research institutions created central funds to cover publication fees for OA publications of their authors and established structures and workflows for the organization of payments. Data collections like OpenAPC [3] include data of actual APC-payments spent by publication funds of research institutions and funding organizations and allow us to deepen our understanding of the OA transformation. An ideal APC monitoring instrument would cover complete APC payments from all research organizations of a given domain. APC monitors are lacking in two respects: not all institutions in a given domain deliver data to APC monitors, mostly because of the fact that not all of them have a central publication fund that processes APC payments and collects the data of these transactions [4].
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