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#APCs

3 posts3 participants1 post today

"#Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of #AI that determines how much you personally will pay for a ticket."
fortune.com/2025/07/16/delta-m

PS: Lots to hate here. But suppose the model spreads to other industries. (Yes, this is sci-fi for now. But let your imagination run free.) Imagine that academic #publishers used this model to set #APCs. What would AI tools infer from your institutional affiliation (about available resources), first name (about gender), surname (about ethnicity), submitted manuscript (about guesstimated quality), and past publications (about specialization, reputation, impact)? What odd variables would it factor in, such as the number of Trump-banned words (for political protection) or the number of citations to that journal (for #JIF)? How would it use all this information? Would it lower the #APC for you, to bring you in, or raise it, to price you out?

For airlines or journals, would there be any reason to stick with the model if it didn't raise net revenues?

Fortune · Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI that determines how much you personally will pay for a ticketBy Irina Ivanova
Continued thread

And James Butcher, formerly vice president of Nature Research and BMC journals and, earlier, executive editor of The Lancet, explains on LinkedIn why #science #journal #article #processing #charges are high: linkedin.com/posts/jwbutcher_s #APCs (2/2)

www.linkedin.comLast week the NIH announced a price cap for open access charges, which will likely reduce authors' choice of where they can publish. | James ButcherLast week the NIH announced a price cap for open access charges, which will likely reduce authors' choice of where they can publish. We don’t know what the cap will be at this point; the implications will be much more significant if the price is capped at $3000 rather than $9000, for example. --- Academics often think that publishers charge a high APC simply because the journal has a high impact factor and is perceived by the community to be prestigious. That erroneous conclusion omits one important detail: high impact factors and prestigious venues are (often) created by low acceptance rates and in-house editorial teams. Indeed, APC prices are generally based on two things: the selectivity (i.e. acceptance rate) of the journal and the editorial costs (i.e. journal overhead) incurred. The maths are simple, but often overlooked. (1) A journal that accepts 10% of submitted articles needs its APC to be five times higher than a journal that accepts 50% of articles, in order to generate the same amount of revenue. (2) A journal that has 5 full-time, salaried, editorial staff — incurring overhead costs of $500k — is more expensive to run than a journal that has an editorial board of 20 volunteer academics, who receive $100k in editorial stipends between them. In other words, journals with high APCs tend to be selective and have high editorial overheads. --- Price caps, if they were adopted widely, would likely push up acceptance rates on selective journals and make publishers reduce editorial costs by: (1) replacing salaried in-house editors with (cheaper) academic editors. (2) asking editors to spend less time on each paper so that they can accept more articles each year (so that the revenue per editor stays the same, despite the lower APC). Some people would no doubt be pleased to see the end of selective journals with high production values. I’m not one of them. What do you make of the NIH announcement and what do you think the price cap will be? Please leave a comment below. #scholarlypublishing #academicpublishing #openaccess #academia | 18 comments on LinkedIn
Continued thread

Update. Here are two new bits on this story:
medpagetoday.com/washington-wa

* #NIH director Jay Bhattacharya has been railing against #APCs in conservative news outlets like Charlie Kirk and the Disinformation Chronicle. It looks like opposition to APCs is a warmly received #MAGA talking point. It's almost as if #Republicans supported equity and equitable access but didn't want to use those words.

* The NIH plans to set the APC cap by this by October, at the start of its 2026 fiscal year.

www.medpagetoday.comNIH to Cap How Much Journals Can Charge Authors for Open AccessExact amount still to be determined, agency says

Springer Nature makes clear that federally-funded authors who want to publish in SN journals will have to pay #APCs.
springernature.com/gp/open-sci

If you're a fed-funded author, then submitting your manuscript to one of SN's non-OA or subscription-based journals, to avoid the APC, is not an option for you. Those SN journals will desk-reject your submissions without regard to relevance or merit.

When you face a publisher demand for an APC, remember what the fee really buys. It buys entry to publish in that particular journal (assuming manuscript acceptance). It does not buy compliance with your funder policy. Compliance with your funder policy is free of charge and you can always take your submission to another journal or another publisher.

www.springernature.comUS federal agency public access policy compliance | Open science | Springer Nature

An editorial in _Microbial Biotechnology_ argues that journals aiming to maximize the number of papers published, in part to maximize #APCs, are "promoting an insidious degradation of rigour and quality standards of reviewing–editing practices. Such predatory practices result in the systematic degradation of research quality and its “truthfulness”. Moreover, they undermine the science ethos and threaten to create a new generation of scientists that lack this ethos. These trends will inevitably progressively erode public trust in scientists and the research ecosystem."
enviromicro-journals.onlinelib

Since the authors don't mention it, I'll mention that non-APC #OpenAccess (#DiamondOA) journals don't create this problem or even carry the risk.

The Royal Society of Chemistry (#RSC) just issued a vague and puzzling statement about its plans.
rsc.org/news/our-evolving-appr

It once planned to convert all its journals to #OpenAccess by 2028. By which it apparently meant #APC-based OA. But after talking with customers in different parts of the world, it learned that some regions "are not yet ready for fully OA." By which it means APC-based OA. "The resounding message we heard over and over is that one size cannot fit all." By which it means that not all can pay APCs.

"It became clear that we needed to adapt our vision for openness to account for a landscape that is increasing in complexity and no longer coalescing around a single direction for open research." As if the global landscape had ever coalesced around support for APCs.

But RSC is still committed to some kind of transition to OA. "We are now shaping our future OA approach to support authors in ways that suit them best in a local context."

If it plans to support no-APC forms of OA, it carefully avoids saying so. It never mentions #GreenOA and never endorses #DiamondOA. (It mentions one diamond OA initiative in Africa, but it's not an RSC initiative.)

I'm guessing that it plans to rely on locally customized #ReadAndPublish agreements. (I've argued that all such agreements use APCs in disguise.) But if so, why not say so? If it has other models in mind for regions "not ready" for APC-based OA, why not say what they are?

Continued thread

Update. Here's a published article making a cluster of false claims about #OpenAccess journals: "In the OA model…costs are…covered by Article Processing Charges (#APCs) paid by the authors (#GoldOA); in relatively rare cases, some funders cover the full costs of a journal (#DiamondOA) to make it free for readers and authors alike."
ssph-journal.org/journals/inte

1. It claims that most OA journals charge APCs and that diamond OA journals are rare. But most OA journals do NOT charge APCs and diamond OA journals predominate.

Today the #DOAJ (@DOAJ) lists 21,597 OA journals, of which 13,735 or 63.5% are diamond.
doaj.org/

2. It claims that at APC-based OA journals, APCs are (always) paid by authors. But while this tends to be true in the global south, even there it's only a tendency, not a universal truth. In the north, APCs are usually NOT paid by authors but by their funders or employers.
suber.pubpub.org/pub/j1jk6hu9

3. There are many ways to fund a diamond or non-APC OA journals, not just by having funders cover their costs.

BTW, this piece is called a "commentary" and might not have been peer-reviewed.

In the rest of the piece, the authors complain about misunderstandings of their journal.

SSPH+SSPH+ | Conspiracies in Academia? Stand Up Against Defamations of Open Access Journals!through subscriptions while also charging APCs to authors who opted to publish OA. This hybrid model is routinely criticized for using an unfair "double...

DOAJ and EZB: Working together for more visibility of information on publishing.

A new collaboration will see DOAJ and EZB contribute to greater transparency in scholarly publishing, empowering authors with the information they need to make informed publishing decisions

#DOAJ #metadata #APCs #transparency #ScholComm #OpenAccess

All details at blog.doaj.org/2025/04/10/doaj-

blog.doaj.orgDOAJ and EZB: Working together for more visibility of information on publishing – DOAJ Blog
Replied in thread

@obibJournal @bmittermaier Danke für den Artikel! In den Bibliotheken sind wir wahrscheinlich überzeugt von den drei Schlussfolgerungen. Für die Kommunikation in die Hochschulen eine Herausforderung. Zu schnell wird die Diskussion auf #APCs reduziert. „Meine“ @tub hat sich deshalb schon länger dafür entschieden, unter #OpenAccess finanzieren unsere drei Säulen im Sinne des #informationsbudget sichtbar zu machen: #Publikationsfonds #Transformationsverträge & #diamondoa tub.tuhh.de/publizieren/openac

Universitätsbibliothek TU HamburgOpen Access finanzieren - Universitätsbibliothek TU HamburgDie Auswahl einer Übersicht der Verlagsvereinbarungen zum Open-Access-Publizieren oder Informationen zur Publikationsförderung über den Publikationsfonds können ausgewählt werden.

Today is the 23d birthday of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
budapestopenaccessinitiative.o

BOAI is still active and issued its 20th anniversary recommendations in 2022.
budapestopenaccessinitiative.o

Unlike previous BOAI statements, which made many recommendations, the 20th anniversary statement deliberately focused on just a small number of top priorities:

1. Adopting #OpenInfrastructure
2. Reforming #ResearchAssessment
3. Moving away from #APCs
4. Moving away from #ReadAndPublish agreements.

I'm proud of my association with the #BOAI, #BOAI10, and #BOAI20.

Happy #ValentinesDay to all who are working for #OpenAccess worldwide.

www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.orgRead the Declaration – Budapest Open Access Initiative
Replied in thread

@neuralreckoning @internetarchive
Sorry if you already know this. The #NelsonMemo described #GreenOA policies. It required deposit in OA #repositories, not submission to OA #journals. Some publishers told authors that they'd have to pay #APCs to comply with the policy. But that was deception and spin. Compliance with the policy was always free of charge. When journals charge APCs to publish fed-funded research, it was to publish in those journals, not to comply with federal policy.

New study: "Current levels of implementation of #transformative agreements is insufficient to bring about a large-scale transition to full #OpenAccess."
doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00348

Reminder from the Budapest Open Access Initiative 20th anniversary statement, section 4.6: "Paying #APCs at hybrid journals [through these agreements] pays the journals to stay hybrid. It pays them to resist the conversion to full #OA that many institutions intend and predict when they enter the agreements."
budapestopenaccessinitiative.o

New study: "Our analysis demonstrates that research institutions seem to be ‘trapped’ in #transformative agreements [aka #ReadAndPublish agreements]. Instead of being a bridge towards a fully #OpenAccess world, academia is stuck in the #hybrid system."
cwts.nl/seminars/announcements

Reminder from the Budapest Open Access Initiative 20th anniversary statement, section 4.6: "Journals covered by [transformative or read-and-publish] agreements are…hybrid journals…Paying #APCs at hybrid journals [through these agreements] pays the journals to stay hybrid. It pays them to resist the conversion to full #OA that many institutions intend and predict when they enter the agreements."
budapestopenaccessinitiative.o