Advertisement

Scientometrics

, Volume 103, Issue 2, pp 373–385 | Cite as

Article processing charges in OA journals: relationship between price and quality

  • Bo-Christer Björk
  • David Solomon
Article

Abstract

The subscription prices of peer-reviewed journals have in the past not been closely related to the scientific quality. This relationship has been further obscured by bundled e-licenses. The situation is different for Open Access (OA) journals that finance their operations via article processing charges (APCs). Due to competition and the fact that authors are often directly involved in making APC payments from their own or other limited funds, APC pricing has so far been sensitive to the quality and services offered by journals. We conducted a systematic survey of prices charged by OA journals indexed in Scopus and this revealed a moderate (0.40) correlation between the APCs and Source Normalized Impact per Paper values, a measure of citation rates. When weighted by article volumes the correlations between the quality and the price were significantly higher (0.67). This would seem to indicate that while publishers to some extent take the quality into account when pricing their journals, authors are even more sensitive to the relationship between price and quality in their choices of where to submit their manuscripts.

Keywords

Open Access Business model SNIP value 

Notes

Acknowledgments

The empiric data used in this study were collected in a project financed by a consortium of research funders including Jisc, Research Libraries UK, Research Councils UK, the Wellcome Trust, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics.

References

  1. Barschall, H. (1988). The Cost-effectiveness of physics journals. Physics Today, July 1988, 56–59. http://www.library.yale.edu/barschall/articles/pt8807.pdf
  2. Bergstrom, T. (2001). Free labour for costly journals? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 15(4), 183–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  3. Björk, B.-C. (2012). The hybrid model for Open Access publication of scholarly articles—A failed experiment? Journal of the American Society of Information Sciences and Technology, 63(8), 1496–1504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  4. Björk, B.-C., & Solomon, D. (2012). Pricing principles used by scholarly Open Access publishers. Learned Publishing, 25(3), 132–137.Google Scholar
  5. Björk, B-C., & Solomon, D. (2014). Developing an effective market for Open Access article processing charges, report. Wellcome Trust, UK, http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Spotlight-issues/Open-access/Guides/WTP054773.htm
  6. Butler, D. (2013). Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing. Nature, 495(7442), 433–435.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  7. Crawford, W. (2013). The big deal and the damage done. Cites & Insights, 13(7), 1–5. http://citesandinsights.info/civ13i7.pdf
  8. Dallmeier-Thiessen, S., et al. (2011). The SOAP symposiumIII Open Access publishing today: What scientist do and why, presentation at the SOAP symposium, January 13th, 2011, Berlin. http://www.slideshare.net/ProjectSoap/soap-symposiumtalkiii
  9. Dewatripont, M. et al. (2006) Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication markets in Europe, Final Report, European Commission, Directorate General for Research. http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publication-study_en.pdf
  10. Efron, B. (1981). Nonparametric estimates of standard error: The jackknife, the bootstrap and other methods. Biometrika, 68(3), 589–599. doi: 10.1093/biomet/68.3.589.CrossRefzbMATHMathSciNetGoogle Scholar
  11. Finch J. (2012) Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: How to expand access to research publications. Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to PublishedResearch Findings. http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/
  12. FinELib. (2012) Katsaus FinELib-konsortion vuoden 2011 toimintaan (in Finnish), yearly report 2011 of the FinELib-konsortium. http://www.kansalliskirjasto.fi/attachments/5l4xoyz0b/67VJr66W5/Files/CurrentFile/FinELib_raportti_2011_final.pdf
  13. Gillingham, E. (2013). Meet Ann Okerson—on licensing, the big deal, OA, and so much more. Exchanges Our Ideas, Research and Discussion, Blog item, 7.11.2013, Wiley. http://exchanges.wiley.com/blog/2013/11/07/meet-ann-okerson-the-brain-behind-liblicense-and-so-much-more/
  14. Kaufman R. (2014). Shifting revenues from post-publication to pre-publication: The impact of Open Access. ALPSP Blog. http://blog.alpsp.org/2014/03/roy-kaufman-shifting-revenues-from-post.html
  15. Laakso, M., & Björk, B.-C. (2012). Anatomy of Open Access publishing—A study of longitudinal development and internal structure. BMC Medicine, 10, 124. doi: 10.1186/1741-7015-10-124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. Li, C. (2013). UC Libraries discontinue taylor & francis systemwide journals license. News item, California Digital Libraries. http://www.cdlib.org/services/collections/current/TF/index.html
  17. Moed, H. (2010). Measuring contextual citation impact of scientific journals. Journal of Informetrics, 4(3), 265–277.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  18. Pinfield, S., & Middleton, C. (2012). Open Access central funds in UK universities. Learned Publishing, 25(2), 107–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  19. Poynder, R. (2013). Open Access in Serbia, Interview with Biljana Kosanović, Open and Shut? Newsletter, 13.9.2013. http://poynder.blogspot.fi/2013/09/open-access-in-serbia-interview-with.html
  20. Solomon, D., & Björk, B.-C. (2012a). Publication fees in Open Access publishing: Sources of funding and factors influencing choice of journal. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(1), 98–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  21. Solomon, D., & Björk, B.-C. (2012b). A study of Open Access journals using article processing charges. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(8), 1485–1495.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  22. Tenopir, C., & King, D. W. (2000). Towards electronic journals: Realities for scientists, librarians and publishers. Washington, DC: SLA Publishing.Google Scholar
  23. West, J., Bergstrom, T., & Bergstrom, C. (2010). The eigenfactor MetricsTM: A network approach to assessing scholarly journals. College and Research Libraries, 71(3), 236–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  24. West, J., Bergstrom, T., & Bergstrom, C. (2014). Cost-effectiveness of Open Access publications. Economic Inquiry, 52, 1315–1321.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  25. Wiley (2013). Wiley Open Access author survey 2013, Presentation material. http://www.slideshare.net/WileyScienceNewsroom/wileys-2013-open-access-author-survey
  26. Wilson, J., & Li, C. (2012). Calculating scholarly journal value through objective metrics, CDLINFO News, 13.2.2012, California Digital Libraries. http://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2012/02/13/calculating-scholarly-journal-value-through-objective-metrics/

Copyright information

© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Hanken School of EconomicsHelsinkiFinland
  2. 2.Michigan State UniversityEast LansingUSA

Personalised recommendations
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-015-1556-z
link.springer.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-47
85040
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:SXKD3Z6F4B6D3YGOUH6SJ3DRVACMAUPG
<urn:uuid:8c2693b3-b0d5-4e0a-a414-f9361b465796>
2018-11-20T05:44:01Z
151.101.248.95
text/html
sha1:FO5UMIRR2YTTVPODCUM336YIV35LCA2B
<urn:uuid:b1d170a1-6794-44db-bacc-622d07c6991e>
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-015-1556-z
response
<urn:uuid:2edaa924-d2f6-4fa7-96a3-c0b3924bc8a5>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-47
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-171-47-161.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/