---
title: "Economics of open science"
chunk: 10/15
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_open_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:49:05.253185+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Commercial services and prestige ===
The overall price per article of commercial publishers is consistently higher than in the non-commercial sectors. This discrepancy has been partly accounted by the maintenance of several services necessary to run a business activity (pricing, transaction management, marketing...), that non-commercial structure can drop entirely with little impact. Leading commercial journals claim to be more selective in regard to article submissions, which has the effect of creating a more complex and time-consuming acceptation workflow: "The more effort a publisher invests in each paper, and the more articles a journal rejects after peer review, the more costly is each accepted article to publish [although] the key question is whether the extra effort adds useful value". Besides, "costs vary widely in this sector". Without any transformation of the editorial workflow or efficiency gain a standard well-established subscription journal could "charge about $3,700 per paper to cover costs". Yet, in a publisher like Nature, the costs would be "at £20,000–30,000 ($30,000–40,000) per paper". In the higher end of the commercial spectrum, cost per articles are more likely to embed services that are not directly related to publishing : "One possible reason for such variation between journals and publishers is that it is generally unclear whether proposed costs relate to those directly involved in article processing or those required in order for a publisher to 'break even' if they receive zero subscription income for an article made OA."
Early projections suggested that commercial models of open science would result in lower editorial costs than subscription journals. On the basis of the APC commonly practiced by leading open access publishers like PLOS, Houghton & Oppenheim identified a potential save of £800 per articles (£1525 instead of £2335 for subsciption publishing). Taken globally, this would result in "savings of around £500 million per annum nationally in the UK in a worldwide open access system". Critics at the time focused on the irrealism of a global conversion to open science: "many of the savings hypothesised would depend on the rest of the world adopting author-pays or self-archiving models." In 2012, David Lewis characterized commercial open access based on article-processing charges as a "disruptive innovation" that will radically "shift in the nature of scholarly journal publishing". New commercial publishers seemed able to lower significantly editorial expenses: by 2013, "some emerging players (...) say that their real internal costs are extremely low" with Hindawi publishing "22,000 articles at a cost of $290 per article".
Prestige continues to be a significant driver of price-making in the commercial open access market: "In the academic environment, prestige and reputation have a lot of staying power (...) So far, leading firms in the academic industry have been remarkably resistant to disruptive innovators." The evolution of the cost of article processing charge and the concentration of the commercial open access market has challenged this assumptions. Due to the prestige of some publishers or the integration of new editorial services (like fast-track peer review), the mean price of open access articles has consistently risen: "there is no standard price, and largely no regulation of APCs, which results in some publishers demanding very large amounts of money from authors for the privilege of publishing OA." In France, the mean price of APCs of open access journals has gone up significantly between 2013 (€1395) and 2020 (€1745). A range of scenarios include the total cost of APCs nearly getting comparable to the cost of subscriptions by 2030 (68.7M€ vs. 97,5M€), while a full journal flip from subscriptions to APCs would be much costlier (168.7M€).
High APCs price are less related to the measurable quality of the journal or of the editorial service than to the capacity of well-known actors to impose elevated prices: "several studies reported only very weak or no correlation between quality of journals (measured in journal impact factors) and the level of APC. Contrarily, the level of APCs for publishing an article is more related to the market power of specific academic publishing companies". The risk of uncontrolled growth of APCs had been clearly identified at the start of the Plan S initiative: its coordinator, Robert-Jan Smits, was "determined to introduce a limit on APCs of €2,000", but in the end, "the cap rejected, on account of too many members of the Plan S Coalition being against its enforcement."

== Benefits ==
The economic contribution of open science to scientific publishing, to non-academic economic sectors or to society remains little documented. In 2019, the economists Michael J. Fell underlined that while open science policies usually advanced the claim that opening research can bring "significant social and economic benefits", there have been "no systematic attempt has yet been made to identify and synthesize evidence relating to this claim and present a clear picture of the economic impacts that open science might have, how these comes about, and how benefits might be maximized." In his assessment of the state of the art, Fell identified 21 empirical studies that aimed to evaluate the "direct economic impacts in which open science has been a contributory factor", with a focus on Anglo-american countries (United Kingdom, United States and Canada) and Scandinavian countries (Denmark and Finland). Estimates are complicated by the fact that open science is both a scientific and a social movement: the specific scope of academic publishing is too limiting and yet it is more challenging to develop global macro-economic indicators like has been done on open data.