Open Access Week: APCs

The focus of today's post is the APC, or "article processing charge." An APC is a fee that is charged to authors to make their articles open access in either a fully open access journal (Gold OA) or in a hybrid journal (i.e., a traditional subscription-based journal that will make an individual article OA upon payment of an APC). It is often referred to as the "author pays" model, but in reality, it is the author's employer or funding body that normally ends up paying the APC.

Rising costs

APCs have been increasing significantly for both OA types over the years, rising faster than the cost of inflation. This report cites a mean average increase of 16% from 2013 to 2016 for APCs paid in the UK. It also finds that the APCs for hybrid journals are typically higher than for Gold journals, although the gap is narrowing (p. 39).

This table lists the APCs for publishing a hybrid OA article in various forced migration-related journals. In 2016, most of the APCs for these journals hovered around $3000. Emerald and Brill were the exceptions, with APCs as low as $1595 and $1830, respectively. Three years later, most APCs have increased, with the four Oxford Journal titles assessing the highest fees. The 2019 range is $2350 to $3828.

Impacts

Ultimately, this upward trend in APCs has consequences, as summarized in this blog post:

"The APC model represents a lateral move in terms of access, greatly improving access for readers but shifting the inequity in the system onto authors. It allows everyone to read the work of others, but limits the ability to publish one’s own work to those with sufficient funds to cover the costs of doing so. This greatly disadvantages authors from less-wealthy regions of the world, along with unfunded researchers, and entire fields without the significant funding structures found in some of the sciences that are largely driving the move to APC models."

The proliferation of the APC business model has been particularly challenging for authors in the Global South. As this researcher notes, "The cost of a PlosOne article is 20% of the cost of a Masters student’s scholarship. So the choice is 'do I give a Masters student a scholarship, or publish more in open access journals?'" A study of publication in emergency medicine and critical care journals found that "[w]hen Purchasing Power Parity was considered, compared to United States authors, article process charges were shown to be 2.24 times more expensive for South African authors, 1.75 times more for Chinese authors, 2.28 times more for Turkish authors and 1.56 times more for Brazilian authors."

In addition, the APC model has spurred the rise of a slew of Gold OA journals with dubious reputations that promise quick peer review and provide misleading information on their web sites. In an attempt to raise awareness about the existence of these journals, various blacklists were compiled, the most well-known - and controversial - being "Beall's List of Predatory Journals and Publishers." Assessments of the list found that many of the criteria it used to designate a journal as predatory were general enough that they could be applied to any journal, even those known to be reputable. While this list has now been discontinued, its influence has unfortunately resulted in the demonization of many OA journals that are legitimate but have had quality issues for other reasons, including many in the Global South. Moreover, many of the articles published in so-called "predatory" journals have tended to be submitted by authors based in Africa and Asia. As this blog post notes, the negative fall-out that has resulted from Beall's list is that "has cast doubt on the authenticity of excellent research produced in the global south."

Strategies

These are complex challenges and coming up with a more equitable OA model is and has been the subject of much discussion.  Given that any new approaches will take time to implement, what can  forced migration authors can do right now?

Choose a diamond/platinum journal.

The good news is that most of the fully open access journals relevant to the forced migration research community do not levy APCs; these are often referred to as "Diamond" or "Platinum" journals. Rather, they use one of the many other business models available to journal publishers. This page lists 22 different titles and provides a table that indicates whether or not they undertake peer review, what OA license they provide, and, if relevant, the cost of their APC. Only three charge fees, which also happen to be lower than the hybrid APCs referenced in the other table.

Choose a journal that uses an alternative funding model.

Several journals on the list are new, including two that are supported by academic/NGO collaborations:
1) Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, brought to you by Save the Children UK, MSF's CRASH and the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the Univ. of Manchester;

2) Statelessness and Citizenship Review, launched by the Univ. of Melbourne & Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion;

And a third that is part of a pilot project:
3) Migration & Society, published by Berghahn. This latter journal will become OA in 2020, using a "subscribe-to-open" model which is "a form of subscription that allows libraries to direct funds through the same subscription channels routinely used to provide journal access to their own researcher community, while also supporting the journals’ readership across a wider community as an open access publication."

Choose a regional journal.

Also on the list is REMHU: Revista Interdisciplinar da Mobilidade Humana. It is one of many OA journals listed on SciELO, a Latin American endeavor that, along with Redalyc, has helped to promote a "highly successful system of free of charge publishing (for authors)...for more than two decades" (Tennant et al., 2019, p. 9).

African Journals Online (AJOL) is another collection of quality journals originating in Africa, many of which are OA.

To search for even more Gold journals of interest, check out the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). There are over 10,000 titles listed that do not charge publication fees! Use the "country of publisher" filter to identify other journals published in the Global South (e.g., there are over 1100 titles listed for Indonesia).

Choose the Green route to make your work OA.

See also yesterday's post on preprint servers.

Tagged Publications and Web Sites/Tools.