A Study of Open Access Journals Using Article Processing Charges

Article Processing Charges (APCs) are a central mechanism for funding Open
Access (OA) scholarly publishing. We studied the APCs charged and article
volumes of journals that were listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals as
charging APCs. These included 1,370 journals that published 100,697 articles in
2010. The average APC was 906 US Dollars (USD) calculated over journals and
904 US Dollars USD calculated over articles. The price range varied between 8
and 3,900 USD, with the lowest prices charged by journals published in
developing countries and the highest by journals with high impact factors from
major international publishers. Journals in Biomedicine represent 59% of the
sample and 58% of the total article volume. They also had the highest APCs of
any discipline. Professionally published journals, both for profit and nonprofit
had substantially higher APCs than society, university or scholar/researcher
published journals. These price estimates are lower than some previous studies
of OA publishing and much lower than is generally charged by subscription
publishers making individual articles open access in what are termed hybrid
journals.