Article Processing Charges based publications: to which extent the price explains scientific impact?

TL;DR

This study investigates whether higher Article Processing Charges (APCs) for open access publications correlate with greater scientific impact, finding that higher costs do not necessarily lead to higher citation scores.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between APCs and scientific impact, revealing that higher APCs do not guarantee higher citation impact and emphasizing the importance of journal quality.

Findings

High-impact publishers are not the most expensive.

Highest APCs do not equate to higher impact.

Journal quality and international collaboration influence citations.

Abstract

The present study aims to analyze relationship between Citations Normalized Score (NCS) of scientific publications and Article Processing Charges (APCs) amounts of Gold Open access publications. To do so, we use APCs information provided by OpenAPC database and citations scores of publications in the Web of Science database (WoS). Database covers the period from 2006 to 2019 with 83,752 articles published in 4751 journals belonging to 267 distinct publishers. Results show that contrary to this belief, paying dearly does not necessarily increase the impact of publications. First, large publishers with high impact are not the most expensive. Second, publishers with the highest APCs are not necessarily the best in terms of impact. Correlation between APCs and impact is moderate. Otherwise, in the econometric analysis we have shown that publication quality is strongly determined by journal quality in which it is published. International collaboration also plays an important role in citations score.