From: OpenCafe-l <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Margaret Winker <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Margaret Winker <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thursday, January 9, 2025 at 6:47 PM
To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [OPENCAFE-L] Typos corrected (Re: [OPENCAFE-L] On the continued dominance of the APC model)

Since many Diamond access journals are funded via institutional support, and APC refers to article processing charge, it is confusing to refer to APC as including institutional charges that permit their authors to publish without direct payment. A taxonomy of publishing charges would be helpful. 

Margaret Winker, MD

eLearning Program Director and Trustee, World Association of Medical Editors

***

wame.org

WAME eLearning Program 

@WAME_editors

www.facebook.com/WAMEmembers

It's probably most accurate to say "articles published in a journal that charges APCs" ... Whether an APC was actually paid (as an individual payment,  through a bundled deal e.g. a transformative or pure publish agreement, through a collective model e.g. PLOS Global Equity) or it was waived is mostly unknown except to the publisher. Lisa

 

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe 

Professor, University Library

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

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From: OpenCafe-l <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2025 1:57:24 AM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [OPENCAFE-L] Typos corrected (Re: [OPENCAFE-L] On the continued dominance of the APC model)

 

> If our library is paying an extra 1% for a publisher Big Deal in exchange for getting a 100%

> waiver on APCs for our faculty on their hybrid journals, would that count as APCs that

> are paid or not?

 

To my knowledge, Walt’s analysis doesn’t account for the source of APC funding. He’s counting articles that are published in what he calls “serious OA journals” (by which he means “journals indexed in DOAJ,” which would exclude all hybrid and [most] predatory journals), and then distinguishing between articles that are APC-funded (from whatever source) and those that are not.

 

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Rick Anderson

University Librarian

Brigham Young University

(801) 422-4301

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From: Melissa Belvadi <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thursday, January 9, 2025 at 10:52 AM
To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>, Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [OPENCAFE-L] Typos corrected (Re: [OPENCAFE-L] On the continued dominance of the APC model)

 

As we see more and more "transformative" (aka read and publish) agreements by consortia, I wonder how these would get counted in this kind of study? If our library is paying an extra 1% for a publisher Big Deal in exchange for getting a 100% waiver on APCs for our faculty on their hybrid journals, would that count as APCs that are paid or not?

We should be careful to make sure that library budgets that are providing hidden subsidies for faculty APCs are counted as APC funding even if no one is calculating as a "hard cost" the expenditure per published article.

 

 

Melissa Belvadi

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Make an appointment: https://mbelvadi.youcanbook.me/

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From: OpenCafe-l <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2025 11:44 AM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [OPENCAFE-L] Typos corrected (Re: [OPENCAFE-L] On the continued dominance of the APC model)

 

 

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(It just goes to show that no matter how many times you proofread a listserv post, you’ll still find errors after you hit <send>. Corrected version below.)

 

Happy new year, fellow Café denizens!

 

Yesterday I was reading the current issue of Clarke & Esposito’s always-essential _The Brief_ newsletter (https://www.ce-strategy.com/the-brief/), and was hipped to a recent article in _Science_ examining the model and success level of SciELO (https://tinyurl.com/ms4ns5j4). The article included, almost in passing, a graphical representation of the findings of a 2024 study by Walt Crawford that shows the degree of market dominance currently enjoyed by the APC funding model. This prompted a few thoughts, including:

 

·         Ten years ago, Crawford’s data indicated that between 2011 and 2014, APCs funded roughly 57% of published OA articles (http://walt.lishost.org/2015/08/72-and-41-a-gold-oa-2011-2014-preview/). According to his current data, between 2019 and 2023 twice as many articles were published in Gold (APC-funded) OA journals as in Diamond (no APC) journals. This represents a massive shift – driven largely, I suspect, by the proliferation of OA megajournals, which are invariably APC-funded and which publish thousands (and in some cases tens of thousands) of articles per year.

·         By counting only articles published in DOAJ-listed journals, Crawford’s studies radically _undercount_ the number of APC-funded OA articles published – because DOAJ does not list hybrid journals, which always charge an APC for OA and which produce a lot of genuinely OA articles (though exactly how many, no one knows).

·         It’s been a longstanding talking point of the OA advocacy community that “most journals do not charge APCs.” While this is true, it is decreasingly meaningful as a reflection of what’s happening in scholarly publishing. For example: if three Diamond OA journals publish 50 articles each per year and an APC-Gold journal publishes 30,000, then it’s true that in that sample Diamond journals outnumber APC-Gold journals three to one – and that’s a data point worth knowing. But it’s also true that Diamond articles represent only half a percent of the published content. In my view, that’s the much more important data point to bear in mind if you want to understand the scholcomm landscape.

 

I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts on these data points (or others) and their possible implications.

 

 

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Rick Anderson

University Librarian

Brigham Young University

(801) 422-4301

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