Retrospective and prospective study of the evolution of APC costs and electronic subscriptions for French institutions

Abstract

A journal article dataset has been developed with metadata of articles by France-based authors in the period 2013-2020. The purpose of this dataset was to form a basis for the retrospective and prospective analyses of the total costs of APCs paid by French institutions. APCs are the article processing charges (APCs) that researchers must pay to have their articles published in some open access journals. The main results of the retrospective analysis of the dataset regarding the numbers of APC-paid articles with a France-based corresponding author: - the total cost of APCs has tripled in the period 2013-2020. The major driver is the growth of articles in Gold OA journals, i.e. fully open access journals with APCs (without this growth, the APC cost would have been multiplied by 1,69 instead of 3) - the journal publishers and dissemination platforms have been categorised in four tiers, each publishing between 20% and 32% of all articles with a French co-author in 2020: tier 1 with the top publisher (Elsevier), tier 2 with three publishers, tier 3 with 16 publishers and tier 4 with the long tail of publishers (n=1995). The highest growth rate of APC-paid articles by France-based corresponding authors is seen in journals published by tier 2 publishers (Springer Nature, Wiley and MDPI) - more than three quarters of the APC-paid articles by France-based corresponding authors are in the fields of biology and medical research. The main observation regarding the price evolution of the APCs is that the APC-level for HybridOA articles started in 2013 at a high level (2 453 € in average) but have been stable over the years with 2 488 € in average in 2020. The APC-level for articles in Gold journals started considerably lower with an average APC in 2013 of 1 395 €. However, a rapid increase in the level of APCs for Gold OA articles has been observed, with an average APC of 1 745 € in 2020. This has led to a calculation of the total cost of APCs paid by French institutions between 2013 and 2020. In addition to the above-mentioned article dataset, 2019 and 2020 data from the ERE survey by Couperin (the national consortium of research performing organizations that negotiates with publishers the prices and conditions of access to research publications for the benefit of its members) were analysed in order to assess the total subscription costs of journal packages for French institutions. This data was compiled in Microsoft Power BI with additional information about the categories of the products, the publisher tiers, and the respondents to both surveys. This resulted in an estimate of ca. 87,5 M€ for the total expenditure on journal packages by all Couperin members in 2020. An analysis by Couperin of the ERE surveys 2014-2021 showed that the price increases per year in this period varied between -1,95% and +7,22% with an average price increase of 1,76% per year. The evolution of the total journal subscription costs based on this average annual growth rate results in an estimated 97,5 M€ in 2030. Using known and trusted data from our dataset (i.e. excluding articles for which the country of the corresponding author could not be determined, or whose APC price could not be precisely estimated), we developed mixed-effects models of APC prices as a function of other articles’ features. These models were used to predict the evolution of the total cost of APCs for the period 2021-2030, in various situations,: - under the assumption of continuing and unchanged trends. The predicted cost of APCs in 2030 is 50,6 M€, whereas the total expenditure on journal subscriptions would be 97,5 M€ - for a scenario with an acceleration towards Gold OA, the predicted cost of APCs in 2030 is 68,7 M€; - and for a scenario with increase of Green OA and a transition from HybridOA towards Gold, the predicted cost of APCs in 2030 is 38,5 M€. Finally, a situation was simulated where 90% of all articles by France-based corresponding authors would be Gold OA (and 10% would be published in Diamond OA journals) in order to assess the cost ceiling of such a 100% open access situation. In this case the predicted cost of APCs in 2030 is 168,7 M€.