41 lines
5.9 KiB
Markdown
41 lines
5.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Article processing charge"
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chunk: 2/2
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source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_processing_charge"
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category: "reference"
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tags: "science, encyclopedia"
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date_saved: "2026-05-05T10:14:46.180705+00:00"
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instance: "kb-cron"
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---
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==== Cost to scientists and funding bodies ====
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Article processing charges shift the burden of payment from readers to authors (or their funders), which creates a new set of concerns. One concern is that if a publisher makes a profit from accepting papers, it has an incentive to accept anything submitted, rather than selecting and rejecting articles based on quality. This could be remedied, however, by charging for the peer-review rather than acceptance. Another concern is that institutional budgets may need to be adjusted in order to provide funding for the article processing charges required to publish in many open access journals (e.g. those published by BioMed Central). It has been argued that this may reduce the ability to publish research results due to lack of sufficient funds, leading to some research not becoming a part of the public record.
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Another concern is the redirection of money by major funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust from the direct support of research to the support of open access publication. Robert Terry, Senior Policy Advisor at the Wellcome Trust, has said that he feels that 1–2% of their research budget will change from the creation of knowledge to the dissemination of knowledge.
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Research institutions could cover the cost of open access by converting to an open access journal cost-recovery model, with the institutions' annual tool access subscription savings being available to cover annual open access publication costs. A 2017 study by the Max Planck Society estimates the annual turnovers of academic publishers amount to approximately €7.6 billion. It is argued that this money comes predominantly from publicly funded scientific libraries as they purchase subscriptions or licenses in order to provide access to scientific journals for their members. The study was presented by the Max Planck Digital Library and found that subscription budgets would be sufficient to fund the open access publication charges, but does not address how unaffiliated authors or authors from institutions without funds will contribute to the scholarly record.
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Five large commercial publishers (Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley) have raised concerns within research community. These concerns stem primarily from two factors: the publishers' substantial profit margins, which are often derived from works funded by public research grants, and the high costs associated with their open access publishing fees under gold and hybrid journal models. For example, a Guardian article informed that in 2010, Elsevier's scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724 million on just over £2 billion in revenue. The margin was 36%, which exceeded the margins reported by Apple, Google, and Amazon that same year.
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==== Unequal access to publishing ====
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Unless discounts are available to authors from countries with low incomes, or external funding is provided to cover the cost, article processing charges can exclude authors from developing countries or less-funded research fields from publishing. Publishers often explain this charge by citing the cost of producing print materials, but some digital-only publications continue to charge article processing fees, which has garnered criticism from academics. Under the traditional model, the prohibitive costs of some non-open access journal subscriptions already place a heavy burden on the research community. Many open access publishers do offer discounts or publishing fee waivers to authors from developing countries or those suffering financial hardship.
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For these reasons, some funding bodies simply will not pay the extra fees for open access publishing: the European Union scientific research initiative Horizon Europe does not cover the APCs for articles in hybrid open-access journals.
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=== Diamond open access model ===
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Diamond open access is a term used to describe journals that have no article processing charges, and make articles available to read without restrictions. In 2020, diamond OA journals comprised 69% of the journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals, but published only 35% of the articles. In 2021, it was estimated that 17,000 to 29,000 diamond OA journals published 8–9% of all scholarly journal articles and 45% of open access articles. Nearly all Latin American OA journals use the diamond model, whereas a little over half of African and Western European OA journals are diamond OA. However, the percentage of diamond OA articles covered in Scopus and Web of Science for the same year was below 1%, suggesting that "Scopus- or Web of Science-based (data) are skewed towards toll access and article processing charges-based publishing, as Diamond journals are underrepresented in (these databases)". The same study also found that diamond OA articles comprised 81% of all OA articles in Humanities, but only 30% in Medicine and Sciences.
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== See also ==
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Copyright transfer agreement
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Royalty-free
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Royalty payment
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Predatory publishing
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Academic journal publishing reform
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Plan S
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== References ==
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== Further reading ==
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University of California Libraries (2016) Pay It Forward: Investigating a Sustainable Model of Open Access Article Processing Charges for Large North American Research Institutions. Mellon Foundation. Archived 2019-04-08 at the Wayback Machine.
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Robert Kiley (2013). "Colour and page charges: results of a brief survey" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2015-07-17.
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Curb, L. A.; Abramson, C.I. (2012). "An examination of author-paid charges in science journals". Comprehensive Psychology. 1: 4. doi:10.2466/01.17.CP.1.4.
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Guy, M., Holl, A. (2015) Article Processing Charges. Briefing Paper, PASTEUR4OA project
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== External links ==
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OpenAPC: open database of APC |